Feminist Protest and Transmedia Activism in the Twenty-First Century

Osorio, Ever E.; Osorio, Ever E.

This panel examines how contemporary feminist movements in Latin America navigate, contest, and transform the media environments in which they operate. The panel is rooted in two interconnected developments: the growth of digital platforms as one of the primary infrastructure through which feminist activism circulates, and the proliferation of feminist cultural production across the region in the last two decades: from literary publishing to street protest with simultaneous social media use. While substantial scholarship exists on feminist activism (e.g., Harlow 1987; Sternbach et al. 1992; Alvarez 1998; Friedman 2003) and on Latin American cultural politics separately, comparably little work has examined how these fields converge in the transmedia landscapes of twenty-first century Latin America, for instance this panel aims to answer how feminist critique moves across platforms, genres, and surfaces, accumulating and losing force as it moves. Existing studies of digital feminism have tended to focus on the Global North, while scholarship on Latin American feminisms has been slower to engage platform theory and transmedia studies as analytical frameworks. This panel addresses this gap.

This session interrogates the conditions under which feminist politics are produced, circulated, and received in a media ecosystem of platform monopolies, literary prestige industries, and ongoing social protest. What happens to feminist critique when it is communicated through corporate digital infrastructure? What hermeneutical and material processes do feminist literary texts and archives go through before they reach their reader? And what rhetorical strategies allow feminist street protest to migrate from concrete walls to digital archives without losing its political force? Approaching these problems through the lens of platform theory and decolonial critique; the politics of archival method in contemporary Mexican literature; and the transmedia circulation of feminist graffiti and chant in Mexican public space, each paper offers a rigorous account of how feminist meaning-making operates formally and materially while attending to the specific cultural and political contexts in which individual texts and practices emerge.

The first paper takes stock of contemporary Latin American feminist theory in its encounters with what Tiziana Terranova calls the “Corporate Platform Complex.” Drawing on a wide range of digital culture artifacts—memes, reels, shorts, and social media posts—it maps how Latin American feminisms circulate in networked media environments and how feminists engage critically with those same environments. The paper traces how new feminist discourses hold the constitutive role of culture and meaning making in the reinvention of emancipatory projects of social transformation. These discourses offer imaginative forms of insubmission and solidarity, addressing the specific regional experience of what Rita Segato has called “the apocalyptic phase of capital”—the violent intensification of the deterioration of conditions for life unevenly affecting historically vulnerable groups.

The second paper examines what it identifies as a structurally underexamined problem in contemporary Mexican feminist writing: the phenomenon it terms "critical obsolescence." Taking as its focus the archival methods deployed by celebrated authors such as Cristina Rivera Garza, Sara Uribe, and Jazmina Barrera, it argues that these texts dramatically stage their own research process so as to script their own reception in advance—they are, in that sense, "born already read." In doing so, they risk neutralizing the activist potential they invoke: the archive becomes a resource to be extracted, aestheticized, and converted into cultural capital, reproducing the very gendered, racialized, and classed structures the texts ostensibly seek to expose.

The third paper offers a close analysis of the feminist "vandalization" of national monuments in Mexico City and the forms of writing and chanting that accompanied this wave of protest. It proposes that feminist protest in Mexico is organized around a fundamental rhetorical figure: the anaphora. The repetitive syntactic and visual structures inscribed on public surfaces—names of femicide victims, accusatory phrases, collective demands—accumulate political and affective force through reiteration, constituting a collective grammar of grief and resistance. Through photography, social media, and activist archiving, these inscriptions migrated across platforms, carrying their rhetorical structure into new media environments—what the paper calls "transmedia anaphoras."

The panel brings together Alejandra Vela (Harvard University), Paloma Duong (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Ever Osorio (University of Pittsburgh)—scholars working across distinct institutional and national contexts whose innovative methodological approaches, spanning critical theory, literary criticism, and ethnography; together these scholars engage with the question of how feminist politics in the twenty-first century cannot be separated from the question of media form.

Each presenter will deliver a talk of approximately fifteen minutes. A designated respondent will offer synthesizing remarks and an open discussion will follow.

187 Feminist Protest and Transmedia Activism in the Twenty-First Century: Calls for Papers