Colonial legacies of knowledge production : the political spirituality of the green tide feminist movement

Abstract

The project undertakes a sociology of knowledge to contribute to the understanding of enduring colonial presents (Povinelli, 2006) by looking at the colonial conditions of possibility of knowledge production in the Argentine Green Tide feminist movement. I analyse how the Green Tide, widely credited by public opinion with reviving feminist activism and theorisation in Latin America and beyond, produced the discourse of a radical, decolonial feminist spirituality centred around the figure of the Witch as a figure able to mobilise imaginaries and activists against the modern episteme of Man (Wynter, 2003). Through Foucauldian (1972) discourse analysis of Green Tide feminist essays, newspaper articles, scholarly papers, collective manifestos, social media posting, and the timelines of Green Tide protest between 2015 and 2020, I look at the conditions of possibility of the Green Tide discourse and situates it within a global political economy of power and knowledge (Deleuze, 1999). Insofar as the Green Tide situates itself both nationally and internationally as a feminist, radical, and decolonial emancipatory project from the South, the thesis is attentive to the “convivial relations” (Puar, 2017a: xxii) of coexistence and mutual informing between the Green Tide discourse, Argentina’s ongoing colonial history, and contemporary mobilisations of Indigenous women. I trace the articulation of the Witch to the Green Tide framework of liberal sexual politics in combination with a popular democracy, and in alignment with race as not whiteness/Europeanness, seeming to rearticulate the sexual politics toward more radical political alternatives. Overall, I argue that by mobilising the Witch, the Green Tide makes a claim to decoloniality, Southerness, and racialised otherness vis-à-vis the Global North, especially so in relation to the country’s recent history of subjection to international financial institutions and national raise in neoliberal conservative politics. However, the thesis’ argument is that this is possible through a representational conflation (Spivak, 1988) of subalternity, indigeneity, non-whiteness, and popular democracy. Representations of an ‘otherwise’ to the episteme of Man are made especially feminist through the Witch as a figure of Southern feminine otherness akin to indigeneity. By producing the feminine difference of the Witch as a difference from modernity through the conflation of racial and classed categories, the Green Tide produces a feminist discourse from the South that elides its racial epistemic and structural conditions of possibility and subsumes difference from the episteme of Man to the primacy of the sexual subject.