Dimensions of Europe Lunch Lecture by Ana Cecilia Gaitán

We kindly invite you to join the lunch lecture on §Feminisms, Affects, and Young Poor Women in Buenos Aires: An Ethnographic Account" by Visiting Fellow Ana Cecilia Gaitán on 28 October starting at 12:00 at Seminar room 67.01 (Elisabethstraße 27/ground floor).

This lecture presents findings from an ongoing political ethnography of affects carried out in youth social inclusion programs in Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina. It focuses on a population that has received little scholarly attention: young women from low-income urban sectors who are not feminist activists but who encounter feminism in their everyday lives through social policies, cultural consumption, and interactions with other social actors in the decade following the Ni Una Menos mobilization (2015).

Argentina offers a particularly productive vantage point for exploring these dynamics. The post-2015 period was marked by an unprecedented massification of feminist activism, the institutionalization of gender perspectives across state apparatuses, and the eventual legalization of abortion in 2020. These gains were simultaneously accompanied by the strengthening of neoconservative forces, culminating in the 2023 election of a government that immediately dismantled the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity and positioned feminism as a central target of its “cultural battle.” The Ni Una Menos mobilization and the green tide (Marea Verde) and the neoconservative assault are not separate phenomena: they are mutually constitutive, and that tension shapes the affective landscape in which these young women navigate their everyday lives.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2025 in state-run youth programs, this research talk explores how young poor women's engagement with feminism is selective, heterogeneous, and affectively mediated. Preliminary findings suggest that feminist categories linked to gender-based violence and relationship toxicity circulate more readily among these young women than those connected to sexual and reproductive rights. At the same time, neoliberal discourses of personal empowerment and individual self-care coexist, often without tension, alongside feminist sensibilities. Understanding this coexistence requires an affective lens: attending to which emotions circulate in institutional scenarios, which ones stick and which do not, and what that differential circulation produces in terms of political subjectivity.

The lecture also hopes to opens a comparative and transregional conversation, exploring connections between the affective atmospheres documented in Buenos Aires and those emerging in other contexts in Europe marked by the simultaneous advance of feminist demands and neoconservative counter-mobilization.