This paper examines how the Argentine Green Tide feminist movement mobilised the figure of the Witch and a language of a feminist, political spirituality to forge an alternative feminist episteme, one that sought to remake not only political demands but the very conditions of knowing and being in the world. Drawing on discourse analysis of feminist knowledge production, the paper argues that the Green Tide approached theorisation as a transformative practice: a feminist method for collectively reordering subjectivity, sociality, and political possibility. Spirituality, in this frame, was not an inner experience but a political ontology through which feminists attempted to enact a different relation to the order truth.
Through chants such as “we are the daughters of the witches you could not burn,” activists framed the Witch as the epistemic hinge between spiritual intuition and political critique, staging the feminist strike itself as a laboratory for a new mode of life. Two discursive strategies enabled this theoretical reorientation. First, genealogy located the movement within a Southern lineage that linked historical witches, Indigenous feminine figures, human-rights movements, and anti-neoliberal struggles. Second, embodied knowledge conceptualised the affective intensities of mass gatherings – what activists described as mystique – as a feminist mode of theorising through the collective body. In this sense, the Green Tide did not simply produce theory; it enacted theory as a lived, collective transformation.
Yet, the paper argues, this enactment reveals the limits of feminist theorisation when it remains entangled in unacknowledged colonial epistemes. The Southern feminist Witch depends on racial-colonial imaginaries that position indigeneity as a symbolic reservoir of subaltern wisdom while materially marginalising Indigenous and Afro-descendant struggles. By conflating southernness, precarity, and race, the Green Tide universalised its own standpoint as the locus of subaltern knowledge and reproduced the very colonial hierarchies it sought to transcend.
The ambivalence of this project reveals something crucial about feminist theory: its power to open new worlds and its vulnerability to reproducing inherited epistemic violences. The Green Tide’s political spirituality thus illuminates both the generative force of feminist theorisation and the necessity of attending to its racial-colonial conditions of possibility.
