Paper short abstract:

The political dimension of friendship emerges in relation to feminist demands for change in Basque festivals (Spain). Personal relationships drive the bid for equal participation, serve as mutual support in the face of resistance, and provide pleasure that sustains and results from activism.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is part of a research project entitled "Dislocating the boundaries of knowledge, gender and kinship. Friendship as politics and redefinition of affection and reciprocity".

The interest of the present work is to focus on the political dimension of friendship in the sphere of feminist demands in festivities. It analyses the importance of the bonds between women as a driving force to promote the equal participation of all people in festivities, as mutual support to promote changes that provoke resistance in the community, and as a source of pleasure that in turn, is the sustenance and result of activism.

It draws on the author's autoethnographic experience in the demand for women's participation on equal terms with men in the Alardes of the Bidasoa region and on her ethnographic work in these and other festive settings. Specifically, she explores the management of friendship between groups of participants of different ages in the struggle for equality in Irun and Hondarribia (Gipuzkoa) and another group of female friends associated in Plazara dantzara ("Dancing in the square") in the Baztan Valley (Nafarroa).

The explicitation of the political dimension of affective relationships leads us to look at their importance in social movements, in this case in the festive sphere where the common struggle against inequalities is both a battleground and a source of pleasure, where friendship functions both as a bulwark to resist social disapproval and as a refuge to protect oneself and catch one's breath.