The Political Aesthetics of Vulnerability and the Feminist Revolt

Abstract

Contemporary transnational times are characterized by renewed struggles over the meaning of democracy. In this postdemocratic moment, political and cultural practices and popular mobilizations and demands have exceeded, and ultimately questioned, some of representative democracy’s core conventions, from the mass feminist demonstrations and strikes, to the rise of populist politics both in Europe and the Americas. Importantly, these struggles attest to the tension between failing democratic institutions and the heightening of increasingly authoritarian and cruel forms of social precarization and exclusion. Against these murderous trends, which this article characterizes as marked by an aesthetics of cruelty, some of these struggles foreground the vulnerable character of life and the embodied dimension of politics and its affective domains. This article focuses on the social movement Ni Una Menos to examine the ways in which vulnerability has been mobilized by some contemporary feminist popular struggles, focusing on the current investment in cultural activism opposing the curtailment of bodily life along gendered, sexualized, and racialized lines. Ultimately, this intervention seeks to ponder the emancipatory potential of a political aesthetics that weaves vulnerability into the gendering of democratic claims.