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Article published In: The Political Economy of Linguistic Landscapes:
Edited by Johan Järlehed, Tommaso M. Milani and Tove Rosendal
[Linguistic Landscape 9:3] 2023
► pp. 286–305

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Scaling student feminisms

Between political possibility and capitalist capture

ORCiD logo with link | Universidad Autónoma de Madrid | Centre of Discourse Studies, Barcelona
Published online: 10 August 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.22042.elv
Abstract
Ethnographically informed, this article examines the recent transnational feminist uprising by focusing on the Spanish student movement. Drawing on the contributions of the sociolinguistics of globalization and the pragmatics of scale, it gives an account of how feminist demands acquire intelligibility in the political agenda of the student movement based on a Madrilenian university, vis-a-vis the institutionalization of gender equality policies at university. Thus, by tracking the (un)making of political alliances over time between various coexisting centring institutions – spanning from university official authorities to forms of student grassroots institutionality – the article delves into the valuation processes of feminist scales and their competing logics of value-production, paying attention to how these processes get inscribed in the semiotic landscape.
Resumen
Este artículo examina la reciente eclosión feminista transnacional desde una mirada etnográfica y centrada en el movimiento estudiantil español. Apoyándose en las aportaciones de la sociolingüística de la globalización y de la pragmática escalar, el artículo da cuenta de cómo las reivindicaciones feministas van adquiriendo inteligibilidad en la agenda política de los entramados políticos estudiantiles de una universidad madrileña al mismo tiempo que las políticas de igualdad de género van institucionalizándose en el ámbito universitario. De esta forma, al ir rastreando la (de)construcción de alianzas políticas a lo largo del tiempo entre diversos centros de poder coexistentes –desde la autoridad universitaria hasta formas de institucionalidad popular estudiantil–, el artículo indaga en los procesos de valorización de las escalas feministas y en sus lógicas de producción y competencia, prestando atención a cómo estos procesos se inscriben en el paisaje semiótico.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Transnational feminist strikes as a lens to read a political momentum
  • 3.Epistemological and theoretical framing
    • 3.1Characterizing the UAM SM case study and my positioning within it
    • 3.2Approaching the political economy of feminisms through the lens of (sociolinguistic) scales
  • 4.The UAM SM case study
    • 4.1‘La Universidad será feminista o no será’, or how to make feminism a collective problem
    • 4.2‘Feminism has screwed everything up’: Exploring the limits of the feminist uprising and the becoming of La Diana
    • 4.3From the erasure of women to the erasure of murals: Transfeminist organization in times of pandemic and postfascist advance
  • 5.Final remarks
  • Notes
  • References
References (39)
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Elvira, Paloma & Laura Menna
2025. Doing ethnography at the intersection of grassroots and research labour: new fieldwork imageries for critical sociolinguistic engagements. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2025:293 ► pp. 131 ff. DOI logo

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