Social Movements: The Plaza De Mayo Mothers Movement

Evidently, there is much overlap between these movements. “Argentina’s economic crisis made the failures and limitations of the neoliberal capitalist system clear” (Mason-Deese, 2016: 83) and forced much of the resistance out of sheer necessity. The resistance movements discussed are forms of new autonomous social movements (Sitrin 2012: 61) they all display aspects of horizontalism. When the movements insist on horizontalidad they signify the lack of hierarchy evident in these alternatives. They show that “people making decisions together is an integral component of the day-to-day revolutions taking place” throughout Argentina (Sitrin, 2012: 61). Essentially, the people chose to put “the reproduction of life over the reproduction of capital” (Mason-Deese, 2016: 84).

The Plaza de Mayo Mothers movement demonstrates that women’s resistance movements are not only empowering for achieving their individual aims of political change, but for being the living example that women are not confined to stereotypes and norms surrounding the idealisation of women (Sutton, 2007: 153). They show women discovering their own power, and whose political participation as protagonists makes real change. They also, as discussed, opened the opportunity for many other women to

Through organising territorially in their own personal spheres of everyday life. This feminisation of resistance is evident here through the participation and leadership of women, but more so in the acknowledgement of care work as valuable and necessary. They demonstrate that through “women’s bodily presence in street demonstrations during strategic protests and other political events makes it more difficult to deny that politics is indeed a woman’s place” (Sutton, 2007: