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Abstract
This article explores the recent history of the Ni una menos movement in Argentina as well as investigating two specific methods of activism employed by the feminist collective. The collective, in seeking to cast feminicide as a human rights abuse, actively positions it as a public crime through the employment of escraches (public shaming of public officials) and memorialisation. The article investigates how using social media to archive feminicide produces a new public recognition and awareness of feminicide as a crime against women because they are women. Furthermore, it closely explores how the collective revises the tactics of memorialization and escrache employed by activists in Argentina's post-dictatorship period to create spaces for activism on social media and within public spaces.
"La víctima no necesita ser buena y pura para ser comprendida como víctima, sólo necesita ser persona. Entender la diferencia es dar el giro político que la Sociedad necesita para que este tipo de cosa no vuelva a nadie" (Rita Laura Segato, "El problema de la violencia sexual es político, no moral").
Key Words: feminicidio, activism, feminism, Ni una menos, Argentina
Introduction: Origins of Ni una menos
In 2020 Expresión Mole, a performance art collective in Buenos Aires, Argentina, set up various performances outside of the Argentine Congress, and other heavily populated areas of the city. They set out to protest the rising numbers of femicides, or murders of women, in the country. They titled these performances "Basta." Several women performers stripped naked and put their bodies into giant plastic bags with fake blood outlining their contours. These bags represented the victims of gender violence that the government was, and is still, ignoring. At first Expresión Mole started off with a few women, and few giant bags. People would walk by these performative protests on their way through the city, forced to encounter dozens of women in bloody body bags. During the first few months of 2021, the collective started pairing up with activist groups around Argentina, allowing the performance of women in bags to become a performance of women in protest. The rise of feminicidio in Argentina in the previous five years was declared a national emergency in March of 2021.
The collective came together along with thousands of women and supporters...