From Finance to Bodies: We Want Ourselves Alive, Free, and Debt Free!

Since the organization of the first international feminist strikes, Argentina’s feminist movement has used the method of the assembly to produce analyses of the relationship and interconnection between sexist violence and economic violence. As part of that political process, in May 2017, the feminist movement convened a mobilization, with the slogan “We Want Ourselves Alive, Free, and Debt Free” in the doorways of the Central Bank to denounce the process of massive indebtedness of domestic economies that occurred in parallel to the taking out of debt by the state. From that moment on, a form of fighting back against financialization and the invasion of finance into increasingly more areas of the reproduction of life emerged. Today the feminist movement is questioning access to rights through debt in the struggle against the end of social security extensions (which provided important benefits to housewives and other informally employed women) and in the processes of compulsory urbanization in the peripheries of Buenos Aires. This article seeks to account for the fabric of this political process and its innovative forms of weaving together resistance against the government of finance.