EMPOWER investigated how, in the face of a democratic system and an institutional fabric that fail them, women in post-COVID-19, post-#NiUnaMenos Argentina seek to empower themselves through communicative practices. Results show how women communicate in daily life about the problems that affect them, the obstacles they meet and the changes they would like to see. The project led to the conceptualization of everyday communicative activism as an element of women’s agency that is significant but insufficient per se to solve gender injustice as a macrostructural issue. Results show that women consider their communicative activism as potentially powerful but recognize that their agency is limited by structural factors.
Everyday communicative activism allows women to fulfil various strategic purposes, including e.g. giving visibility to injustices, showing solidarity to other women, sharing actionable information for solving concrete problems, and tackling gender discrimination in their workplaces. Its usefulness, however, is limited in the context of democratic shortcomings such as precarity, political polarization, an information infrastructure disconnected from their needs and realities, and the persistent lack of progress towards gender justice.
By looking into the communicative experiences of ordinary women as the often-invisible counterpart of feminist organized activism and providing a rich analysis of how they communicate for their rights in daily life, EMPOWER clarified the possibilities and limits of voicing claims as a strategy for gender justice: it identified the various ways in which ordinary women make efforts to speak up about the problems they face and the instances in which, in the absence of concrete solutions to their claims, end up pushing themselves to try to fix at the micro- and meso-level societal issues that require state action. Crucially, the project concluded that, without a politics of listening (Bassel, 2017) such that the state and other relevant institutional actors are accountable for listening to and resolving women’s needs and claims, their empowerment will remain limited.
Through the conceptualization of everyday communicative activism within the framework of gender justice (Goetz, 2007, 2008; Htun & Weldon, 2018) and communicative justice (Kay, 2020), EMPOWER offers researchers, activists and policymakers a theoretico-practical framework that connects the dots between women’s agentic efforts and the persistent absence of actual gender justice, calling attention to the fact that the success of women’s activism depends on the combined possibility and efforts to raise claims, and on claims being listened to and addressed accordingly by the institutions accountable for guaranteeing their rights.
