The political labor and affective temporalities of project application in Colombian NGO feminism

Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research with Colombian feminist organizations and their transnational funding alliances, this paper explores the nature of the political labor conducted by “professional” feminists in the NGO setting, focusing on the temporality of project application. On the one hand, the NGOization literature has explored the transformation of feminist activism into professional work based on expert knowledge and focused on bureaucratic endeavors since the 1990s, with important contributions from Latin America since the pioneer publication of Alvarez (1990). Despite contextualized attempts to unpack complex processes, this literature has been profoundly shaped by a narrative of teleological decline from a pure and radical feminist past (Hodžić 2014). On the other hand, collective action across many fields (development, humanitarianism, academia, activism) has been shaped by the neoliberal format of the “project” that fragments collective action into linear outcome-oriented time-bound interventions. But neither the NGOization nor the project literature has engaged in a sustained conversation with feminist theorizations of care and affective labor. Considering feminism as a field of work/labor shaped by gendered dynamics, the paper asks: through what kind of work do feminist subjects negotiate the contradictions between neoliberalism and feminism? It explores ethnographic data on the hard work (“trabajazo”) of bridging the temporality clashes between the neoliberal project format and feminism as a political project through long working hours within project cycle constraints, immeasurable affective and ethical labor, and bearing the emotional costs of neoliberal constraints amidst political solidarity aspirations.