Beyond the unhappy marriage between workers’ and feminist struggles: frames and alliances in pandemic Italy

On November, 25 2020 activists from the Italian feminist movement Non Una di Meno (NUDM) symbolically submitted receipts (printed on billboards) detailing the costs of the pandemic to the government. The care work performed freely or precariously by women and other essential workers during the first year of the crisis figured prominently among the expenditure items. The present paper explores this engagement with care and social reproduction and does so by grappling with a dilemma that has long haunted social movement studies, related to the relationship between structure and agency. Critical events – and thus, the present conjuncture – represent good empirical tests for any theory addressing this dilemma. Because critical events alone cannot univocally explain outcomes, much of the scholarly debate is focused on factors that mediate and explain movement agency. The role of movement opportunities, organization and grievances, are often explored in this sense. In contrast, this paper uses frame analysis to investigate pandemic discontinuities within the discourses and alliance practices of feminist contentious politics. By reflecting on 27 movements’ documents, 46 social media posts (posted between March, 2020 and December, 2020) and four in-depth interviews with movements’ activists, this work explores how the increased salience of care prompted the movement to expand its own frames in intersectional ways, making the struggles of ‘essential workers’ their own. On the one hand, the movement maintained its classic approach and denounced the exploitation of domestic-bound and feminized care work; on the other, it also began to question more radically the private/public boundary implied in this interpretation, showing how the work of social reproduction is performed by essential (and in most cases, underpaid, precarious and racialized) workers as well. These discursive innovations, prompted by the pandemic crisis, make NUDM’s diagnosis of an oppressive link between care and economic, patriarchal, capitalist violence all the more clear. Most importantly, however, this creative force shaped NUDM contentious politics and its alliances in the following two years. The movement’s ties with Yoox, GKN and multi-services sector workers as well as its participation to the central and eastern European collective E.A.S.T (Essential Autonomous Collective Struggles Transnational) all represent instances of intersectional, marginal feminist solidarity. NUDM alliance politics will be qualitatively assessed by retrieving movement documents and social media posts, as well as by analyzing transnational online movement assemblies as well. The expectation is to find a link between the aforementioned expanded movement frame and the direction of movement alliances. In unveiling the reciprocal influences of ideology and alliance practices in social movements and tracking how they have mediated the impact of the pandemic crisis, this paper tries to further complicate a picture which may otherwise appear too deterministic.