Feminist rebellions against the patriarchal affective arrangement. An account of agency

Abstract

The different women emancipatory movements that developed from the end of the 18th century challenged patriarchal ways of understanding, not only what rights consist of, but also what strategies to use when deploying activism. Many of the claims that were shaping the beginnings of these movements —the right to education, suffrage, equal pay— insisted, for example, on diluting the patriarchal affective arrangement, borne upon and with patriarchal oppression. It is pertinent, then, to investigate the way in which the different self-defined emancipatory women's movements altered what to understand as a political strategy based on their certainty that the patriarchal order is legitimized through a specific affective arrangement that was intended to be unalterable. The goal of this paper is twofold. On one hand, to argue that, since its inception, women's emancipatory movements understood that, to be successful and, above all, lasting, the path requires altering the patriarchal affective arrangement to generate other possible ones capable of challenging the oppression that is based on an affective order purportedly unchangeable. The second objective is to argue that this process sets in motion a specific affective agency where affects are not mere resources for action, but rather indicate a stressed, although productive, relationship in terms of capacity for action, between affects and emotions. It was a matter of underlining, through different strategies, the contingency and injustice of the patriarchal affective arrangement in order to establish another one ready for emancipation and, from there, intervene in the world under a new logic.