Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores the potential of affective activist bonding within marginalised communities to address systemic oppression and create spaces for healing and resistance. This bonding affectivity offers alternative practices of reparation while at the same time exposing the systemic deficit.

Paper Abstract:

This paper explores the potential of affective bonding between members of marginalised and oppressed communities, including survivors of gender-based violence, disabled, and lgbtq+ people. Through a GBV survivor autoethnography and collaborative ethnography in transnational feminist activist communities in the UK, the Basque Country, and diasporic Latin American communities, I will discuss the affective strategies, mobilisations, activist claims and allied resistances that bring together experiences of intersectional oppression, social inequalities and of failed institutions/policies. How can collective, discomforting emotions and bonding affectivity generated in solidarity address the justice deficit and transphobic, misogynist and ableist oppression across cultural, political, and geographical contexts? How do intersectional struggles and affective bonding create topoi of alternative, nurturing spaces and communities of complaint (Ahmed 2021), and how can they be supported in order to enhance their restorative and transformative potential? How does such activist articulation and practice become a form of what Fredric Jameson (2016) refers to as ‘dual power’, a dynamic force addressing the systemic deficit and offering alternatives? This paper will focus on the reparative and healing praxes as well as the praxes of solidarity and resistance in both transnational feminist activism and feminist activist ethnographic practice co-articulating claims and advocacy for liveable lives in precarious contexts, hostile environments, and turbulent times.