Interviews Videos

The Argentinian Laboratory. Interview with Verónica Gago – 1 April 2025

Verónica Gago is a feminist academic. What this means is that she does not separate her activism as a feminist from her work as an academic. She is not a “pure” academic, so to speak, and feminism has never been merely an academic career for her. Actually, she is more identified with feminism than with gender studies – even though her work is widely read in that field. Verónica Gago has long been very active in powerful social movements in Latin America, including against the neoliberalization of academia. More recently, she has been involved in Marea Verde (Green Tide, on abortion rights), Ni Una Menos (Not One Less, on sexual violence), and Huelga Feminista (Feminist Strike, which also involves a feminist critique of neoliberalism). She defends a vision of academic work that relies on “militant research”.

This dual nature of Gago’s work also explains why her starting point is always grounded in the context of Argentina where she lives, mobilizes, teaches, and conducts research. More than a background, this is a legacy – a tradition dating back to the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo) mobilized against the Argentinian dictatorship’s “Dirty War” in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The connection between activism and academia is a two-way street. Not only do academics such as Verónica Gago learn from their participation in social movements. There is also a strong desire for political theory among activists. One need only think of Las Tesis in Chile, a feminist choreography that has resonated throughout the world: while performed in the streets, these “theses” are a direct reference to the work of anthropologist Rita Segato, also from Argentina, on feminicide.

Today, the Argentinian context is of course embodied by Javier Milei, its libertarian president. Gago’s work helps us understand the genealogy of this new regime, from the 2001 collapse of the de la Rua government to the return of Peronism under the Kirchners and the presidency of Mauricio Macri. In the 1970s, Augusto Pinochet’s coup made Chile into a neoliberal laboratory, with the so-called Chicago Boys dictating the economic policy of the dictatorship. Milei’s election in 2023 makes Argentina the new Latin American laboratory, this time of neoliberalism’s latest avatar.

Indeed, the new president is not merely a national figure. As the havoc wreaked in the US by the “Department of Government Efficiency” clearly shows, Milei’s “chainsaw” economics represents a model for Donald Trump’s second term. This is how Argentina is a laboratory for the new guise of “neoliberalism from above”. Yet Verónica Gago’s work has also explored the other side of this reality, starting with her book Neoliberalism From Below, first published in Spanish in 2014. After all, contrary to what happened in Chile in 197 3, fifty years later, no coup was needed in Argentina. The electoral success of Milei and others reveals how their brand of neoliberalism affects subjectivities: new political subjects do embrace his call for “freedom, damnit!” (Libertad, Carajo!) as a promise of emancipation. This makes us rethink the articulations between neoliberalism “from above” and “from below”, and thus analyze politics both in terms of economic policies and of ordinary social practices.

What Verónica Gago demonstrates, as an activist as well as an academic, is that feminism is not apart from other forms of politics; it does not only deal with issues that are specific to women, such as reproductive rights. On the contrary, it is a perspective from which we understand a wide range of economic, social, political issues. The best proof of feminism’s heuristic power is the fact that feminists have become a target for political attacks, especially in Argentina, in reaction to their popular mobilizations. And the same is true elsewhere as well: for we have witnessed international campaigns, in Europe, in Latin America, and in the United States, against the so-called “ideology of gender.”

In A Feminist Reading of the Debt, a book she co-wrote with Luci Cavallero and which is now available in Spanish, English, and French, Verónica Gago shows how neoliberalism and its mutations can be examined through the feminist lens. Politics, like finance, begins at home. She further extends her analysis to the relationship between cryptocurrency and masculinity among Milei’s and Trump’s young male supporters, as well as to the danger of national effeminacy that the Argentinian president and his American counterpart associate with welfare programs, or even trade deficits in the case of Trump.

Verónica Gago’s feminist prism uniquely draws our attention to the affective makeup of neoliberalism’s descent into neofascism: she focuses on the sadistic side of Milei’s mutant regime – namely, its overt deployment of cruelty as a mobilizing tool – but also on its masochistic side – exemplified by his frequent appeal to sacrifice, for the good of the nation or even for the sake of freedom. Her work is grounded not just in theoretical readings but also in political practices, and in the resonances between these two dimensions. Of course, today, the picture is bleak. But feminist mobilizations in Argentina and more generally in Latin America have also won important battles in the last years. Verónica Gago’s analysis (and celebration) of La Potencia Feminista (Feminist Power), her 2019 book subtitled “a desire to change everything”, can truly serve as a remedy against militant depression.

Read more on the website of ‘Diagrammes‘.

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