Paula VARELA

2020-2021

François Chevalier fellow

Universidad de Buenos Aires/CONICET

Women's social and political participation in trade unions in the context of the New Feminist Wave. Comparison of the International Women's Strike 2018 in Argentina and Spain.

With a degree in Political Science and a PhD in Social Sciences, Paula Varela is a Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Buenos Aires and CONICET in Argentina in the areas of working class studies and gender studies. She undertook a postdoctoral stage at UNICAMP (Brazil) where she deepened her studies on the crisis of trade unions and the new morphology of the working class in Latin America. In 2017 she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship with the project "Union revitalization and the gendered worlds of Latin American women workers: Household, Factory and Political Identity in Argentina during the last Peronist Government (2003-2015)", at Indiana University, United States. She is currently directing two research projects focused on analyzing the impact of the New Feminist Wave on trade union organizations and workers' struggles and she is part of the LATWORK project, co-funded by the European Union's Erasmus+ program.

Spain and Argentina have become an epicenter of the New Feminist Wave in recent years. In Spain, in the heat of the 15M, the women's movement has been making itself visible up to the building of the International Women's Strike in 2018. In Argentina, from the massive #Niunamenos in 2015 to the massive mobilization for the legalization of abortion in 2018, women are part of the national political agenda. How does this rise of the women's movement have an impact on the social and political participation of women workers in the unions? This is the research question that Paula Varela will address based on a comparative analysis of the building of the International Women's Strike in 2018 in both countries. We know that the economic and social crisis produced by the neoliberal model is at the heart of the New Feminist Wave, making gender and class demands articulate. The study of the concrete forms taken by this articulation is a central research question for the Social Sciences.

- “Te trataban de puta’. Género, clase y una huelga por acoso sexual” [‘They treat you as a Bitch’: Gender, Class and Sexual Harassment Strike”] in Dossier "Trabajo, género, raza, etnicidad" de la Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios del Trabajo N°38. ISSN 1405-1331 (print) ISSN 1856-8378 (web), 2020.

- “La reproducción social en disputa: un debate entre autonomistas y marxistas” [Social Reproduction in dispute: a debate between pos-operaists and marxists] Archivos De Historia Del Movimiento Obrero Y La Izquierda, Año IX, N°16, septiembre 2018. Buenos Aires. ISSN: 2313-9749 (impreso), ISSN en línea: 2683-9601, 2020.

- Varela, P., Lazcano Simoniello, J., Pandolfo Greco, L. (2020) “Género y militancia: participación político-sindical de mujeres trabajadoras de una fábrica de Buenos Aires”, [Gender and Militancy: Women Workers`Political Participation in a Factory of Buenos Aires] Revista de Estudios Marítimos y Sociales, REMS. Año 13, Número 16, Enero. ISSN: 2545-6237 (web), 2020.

- Arruzza, C. y Varela, P., “Long Life the Women’s Committee”, Jacobin, April: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/04/argentina-worker-run-factory-feminism, 2019.

- Varela, P., “Gender and class: An interview with Tithi Bhattacharya” Journal of Labor and Society 2019; 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1111/lands.12399, 2019.