The Feminization of Resistance: The Narratives of #NiUnaMenos as Social Transformative Action

What changes when opposing violence becomes a way of organizing life with others? Maria Clara Medina approaches this question through narratives from three founding members of Argentina’s Ni Una Menos. Her 2023 article treats the feminization of resistance as a political reorientation, not simply an increase in women at demonstrations. The central issue is how people connect the possibility of living with struggles over protection, resources and collective power.

Three voices, not a representative movement sample

The methodological section describes semi-structured interviews conducted in Spanish between December 2020 and February 2021. The three women were selected for their length of participation and role in the movement; respondents are anonymized. Ni Una Menos’s open assemblies are distinguished from formal leadership, so being a founding member should not be equated with holding an official office. The interviews explore formation, aims, challenges and future possibilities rather than measuring public opinion.

That design offers detailed accounts of how participants understand their actions. It cannot establish the distribution of those views across all participants or demonstrate that mobilization caused a particular policy outcome. A founder’s retrospective explanation is also not identical to a contemporaneous collective statement. Asking who narrates the movement is therefore part of reading its politics, not a reason to dismiss testimony as unimportant.

Making vulnerability a collective question

The first narrative concerns social transformation through protest and the production of political meaning. One respondent describes becoming more focused on shared political work rather than personal belligerence; accounts of memory connect experiences of violence to relationships with others. The significant movement is from isolated injury toward an interpretation that can be shared and acted upon. These narratives do not establish clinical recovery or show that every survivor must join activism to regain agency.

The second narrative links gender and class through the precarization of life. Limited collective protection changes what resisting violence costs: insecurity is not only an individual feeling but a relation to resources and institutions. A feminist response consequently cannot stop at praising resilience. It has to ask who provides the conditions that permit someone to persist, and who is expected to absorb continuing insecurity privately.

Medina’s argument also makes room for solidarity across non-heteronormative identities. A respondent’s inclusive account challenges the idea that a movement against violence must have a uniform subject. Yet articulating inclusion is different from demonstrating equal influence within an organization. The questions of who speaks, whose priorities travel and which differences remain difficult do not disappear when a plural political language is adopted.

This is the productive tension in the word feminization. It can identify practices that politicize dependence and protection, but it should not make care, cooperation or nonviolence a natural property of women. Nor does vulnerability create power automatically. Collective action requires relationships and organizational work; precarious conditions may obstruct that work as well as motivate it. A method attentive to participants’ meanings is especially useful when these possibilities remain distinct.

Read the 3 June 2015 manifesto alongside the article. Its demands for budgets, housing, coordinated justice and monitoring give a contemporaneous public formulation of institutional responsibility. The interviews ask how founding participants later narrate transformative practice. Comparing these sources allows a concrete question without confusing their dates or authority: how do publicly stated demands become relationships and structures that can sustain a livable life?