Performing activism: How female activists develop dialogical organising practices to fight precarity

Abstract

Activism entails provoking, opening and/or maintaining ongoing dialogues to enable those in unstable, unequal or precarious conditions to become visible and have a voice. However, a generative engagement with activism requires not only the ability to speak, occupy, and perform in public spaces but also to open them up to allow for alternative perspectives and conditions to emerge. We look at female activism through the lenses of liminality and performativity to understand how a group of Spanish female activists develop dialogic organising practices when fighting against precarity. We use a qualitative study, conducted over nine years, focusing on the experiences of participants of two activist collectives in Seville, southern Spain, that emerged as a consequence of the Great Recession. Our female activists experienced a journey —from becoming part of anti-precarity collectives and performing activism to disengaging from it, reminiscent of the liminal stages of separation, limen and aggregation. The analysis of observations, ethnographic accounts, videos, and interviews illustrates how, to perform in liminal spaces, the activists crafted ‘backstage’ and ‘frontstage’ spaces during their fight against precarity. On the one hand, activists built safe spaces in which they could (re)imagine their subjectivities and develop resistances to hegemonic voices. On the other hand, they staged and enacted those contestation scripts by appropriating and opening up private, public, and institutional spaces. Our results expand current understanding of dialogical organising, especially among female activists, by looking at the spatial and dialogical practices whereby precarious actors, who do not have a ‘place’ within the symbolic distribution of places, create spaces for themselves and for the possible.