Sound feminist narratives in a pandemic: activisms, journalistic practices and theoretical-critical interventions

Abstract

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted everyday life. In the heat of urgency, two themes emerged early in feminist narratives: violence and care tasks. In this work, however, we deal with another side derived from those days: listening to the sound feminist narratives that erupted during isolation. In the form of what we have called extended conversation, the urgent issues on the agenda found a format to accommodate voices, exchanges and the tone of the emergency. In this framework, the podcast, due to its characteristics, became a militant feminist tool, facilitating the exit of the ghetto towards a broader audience. Our corpus is made up of communication products in podcast format born in 2020 in Argentina and that managed to establish themselves lasting beyond the emergency based on two common strategies: the autobiographical story as a genealogical resource tied to the notion of experience and the construction of a feminist archive (of voices, stories, ideas, themes, narratives, etc.). The sound narratives that give shape to this expanded conversation where activism, journalistic practices and theoretical-critical interventions account for some of the urgent issues that entered the agenda in the pandemic show how it was dealt with not only the journalistic incidence of the agenda feminist, but space was opening up for the treatment of issues related to new forms of bonding, affectivities and exchanges that put care at the center in an unforeseen way. At a time when care became urgent, for feminisms to rethink ties in their many forms, slipped in those days of isolation, in an arc that went from affective power to political power.