Comments on the Expressive Forms of the New Rights: The Subjectivities of the Majorities in Dispute

Abstract

The landscape of the new rights can be read, we think, against the backdrop of that paradoxical knotting, that unresolved tension, between that capacity for mobilization and expansion that give rise to a subjectivity trained in decades of neoliberalism and its capture in devices of expression –paradigmatically, digital platforms–, that often redirect those capacities toward deepening existing property relations and even intensifying their violence (the everyday war to “protect” one’s own and the little that one has). It is in relation to that type of dispute over the determination of a freedom, counterpoised to the accumulation of neoliberal violences, that feminisms, in their modes of constructing political alliances, have the capacity to be a driving force. This means giving credit to feminisms and movements of sexual dissidence in their migrant, slum, union, student, rural, Indigenous, popular, etc. compositions and in their mass, radical, and transnational character as crucial dynamics of destabilizing the sexual, gender-based, order and, therefore, the neoliberal political order, which are materialized in the dispute over the directions of the crisis that has continued to deepen since 2008.