Feminisms and the Republican Revival

Republicanism has existed for over 2,500 years, but in the nineteenth century, its presence in the public discussion was obscured, displaced, and eclipsed¹ by other philosophical and political traditions (liberal, conservative, etc.). It was not until after the middle of the twentieth century that a sort of revival took place, mainly in the academy. That process began with the Cambridge School from the late 1960s and onwards.² The 1997 publication of Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, by Philip Pettit, consolidated what is today a dense research agenda on republicanism, which encompasses intellectual debates and bidding for political achievements³ in Latin America as well (Guanche 2017). However, the republican imprint in the form of modern states is a constant. For example, the republican agenda – and its implicit or explicit intersections with plebeian struggles for rights – is responsible for the persistence of the social function of property regulated in most countries’ constitutions and the constant defence of the people's sovereignty against their rulers.

Republicanism has been carried out in institutionally and politically different ways – oligarchic and democratic. Its democratic bent produces a critique of capitalism and a commitment to reciprocal equality and freedom. Democratic republicanism contests the existence of economic and political monopolies. It disputes the possibilities for a robust, institutionally verified democracy and the ‘citizenisation’ of politics. It is committed to the democratic control of markets, the expansion of the public sphere, and the guarantee of the ‘right to exist’. Democratic republicanism challenges the oligarchic idea that one must first have economic independence to have a political voice, although it recognises that property and freedom have a constitutive relationship. This democratisation agenda also affirms that the law is not a shackle but constructed collectively; it is the condition for the possibility of rights and supports political rulers’ duties to the people.

In the same years that the republican revival began, feminist theorising and politics gained traction. Marxist feminisms questioned the role of wages in social organisation. Within that framework, intellectuals and feminist militants reflected on notions of work, the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy, production and reproduction, public and private. Black and lesbian feminisms added further complexity to the struggle for democracy and revealed impoverished and racialised women's differentiated and more precarious situations. They noted how Black women already participated in the labour markets and remained in the homes, but this did not free them from exploitation within or outside domestic spaces. Overall, feminist practice politicised all areas of life and advanced in a radical critique of the order of things. In this way, feminisms participated and proposed debates on equality, freedom, domination, and exploitation. However, there were no fluid dialogues with the republican revival.

This article begins with that analytical disconnect and enquires about the possibilities and potentialities of an academic and political conversation between republicanism and feminisms to think about the contemporary world. To begin with, I briefly comment on some aspects of republican thought (especially from history and philosophy) on ‘the women question’, and I mention some of the tradition's issues to process the discussion on gender differences and inequalities. At the same time, I draw attention to recent contributions that denote a renewed interest in the dialogue between feminism and republicanism. Then, I focused on analysing the specific fields where feminist politics has de facto metabolised the republican calls for freedom and against dispossession. In parallel, I affirm that feminist debates on care and interdependence could strain the republican emphasis on autonomy.

Republicanism, ‘Women's Issues’, and Feminist Analyses

A portion of the contemporary republican tradition has recognised differences (racial, gender, religious, etc.), but that has had little consequence on its agenda (Torres 2017). Likewise, according to feminisms, republicanism has not offered powerful answers or analyses about the inequalities that stem from different albeit convergent patterns of class. However, these dialogues have begun to occur in recent decades, although without many audiences.

Throughout history, republican analyses of the place and struggles of women have expanded. Examples that have received critical attention are the organised groups of women during the republican French Revolution that clamoured for ‘Rights for women and citizens’ (Pisarello 2012) and women who voted in communal democracy assemblies (Gauthier 2014). The influence of elite women in the public sphere of the French Old Regime has also been analysed – the way urban women of the popular classes participated in political life and the changes that occurred with their relegation at the time from the institution of a bourgeois public sphere (Landes 1988). The role of women who attended the Assembly, Conventions, and clubs and played a vital role at the time of the Revolution has also been studied (Shusterman 2015), as has women's activism in popular societies and politics in general (McPhee 2013). We know, however, that during the Montagnard government, the views of the Jacobin deputy Amar prevailed: ‘[he] succeeded in having all women's clubs closed in October 1793, while the government journal La Feuille du salut public discouraged women from participating in popular societies’ (Martínez-Cava 2020).

Rousseau's concerns that women's ‘disorder’ and that effeminacy of mores would corrupt the virtuous politics of the people, leading to their decline and downfall, have also been studied (Pateman 1980). For republicans, women did not have the same capacity as men to fulfil civic duties. Therefore, their place was in the home, governed by ‘the law of love’, and their civic liberty was castrated (Darat 2019). On the other hand, in that revolution, the Convention approved laws on domestic violence and divorce and debated the ability of women to manage their properties autonomously.

Some other reflections and analyses on republicanism consider gender cleavages.⁴ They incorporate an analysis of the specific conditions of exploitation and domination of women, feminised and racialised bodies, and particular populations due to their migratory status, age, or place of origin.

In recent decades, academic feminisms have looked at republicanism from different perspectives. Iris Marion Young (1996), for example, produced a strong criticism of the citizen universalism wielded by the republicans that have not meant an extension of the status of full citizenship to all people. For her, on the contrary, republican citizenship has justified the explicit and/or implicit exclusion of groups that do not fit the universal ideal or are thought to disperse or divide political concerns about the common good. From this perspective, the fraternity at the core of the struggle for universal citizenship excludes women while men affirm their privilege. Therefore, there is no possible or desirable link between republicanism and feminism. G Geneviéve Fraisse produces a convergent critique of how the democratic ideal implies the universal and neutral rather than the particular and different and argues that this excludes women. In fact, Fraisse identifies republican postulates as the reason for the gap in their citizenship (Fraisse 1999 cited in Lucaccini 2020). The conversation between republicanism and feminism is objectionable there, too.

In dialogue with the previous ones, other approaches are more relevant to this article, affirming the possibility and need for a conversation between republicanism and feminism. There are two important texts in this sense: Feminism and Republicanism: Is This a Plausible Alliance?, by Anne Phillips (2000), and ‘Público y privado: Republicanismo y Feminismo académico’ (Public and private: Republicanism and academic feminism), by María Julia Bertomeu and Antoni Domènech (2007).

For Phillips, the republican framework can consolidate feminism's strong commitment to participatory democracy; it can broaden the discussion on women's political representation as a matter of collective interest. It can avoid an exclusively identity-based bias in feminist politics and consider issues of redistribution. Bertomeu and Domènech, for their part, address the convergence of republican and feminist concerns about the family as a political institution, the absence of this reflection in contemporary republicanism, and the need to adequately characterise, historically and institutionally, what is ‘public’ and what is ‘private’.

With the expansion of feminist politics on one side, and republican politics on the other, these analyses have resulted in a more systematic way to think about the nexus between feminism and republicanism. In the last year, three academic texts (Castillo 2021; Lucaccini 2020; Torres 2021b) and other forthcoming ones have asked the same question: Can feminist and republican politics bring together content and agendas?

The reflections on the matter face at least three central debates for republicanism and feminisms: the relationship between material dispossession and freedom; the fictitious division between public and private and the privatisation of the domestic sphere; and the question of autonomy and feminist politics about the autonomy of the body. From there, I propose a conversation situated between republicanism and feminisms. I draw attention to Latin American figures and processes that can be put into dialogue with those from other parts of the world.

Economic Autonomy Is Not Neutral to Sex-Gender Order or The Question of Political Freedom

A central discussion in the republican tradition centres on the relationship between liberty and property. Liberals of different ilks uphold that a dispossessed person can be free if they are formally recognised (because freedom and property are not politically related). In contrast, in republicanism, people are free when they do not depend on others to preserve their existence because they have the basic material necessities to ensure it (Bertomeu and Domènech 2005). Asking permission to live is equated to living enslaved.

In the republican framework, there is not only a lack of freedom when one has the legal status of an enslaved person but also whenever there are situations of dependency where a person does not ‘own’ their life trajectory (Martínez-Cava 2020: 41). A master can be good, as can an employer or a spouse who has control of all the family assets. But whether or not they use their power, the ties of domination exist (2020: 4–42), and freedom supposes the absence of domination. For that reason, economic autonomy and independence are fundamental to ensure freedom. Republicanism affirms this (Torres 2018) and so do feminisms, but not in the same way.

Although republicanism denounces all the ties of domination – marriage contracts, legal relations, labour for wages, despotic organisation of capitalist production – some republicans believe sex, gender, and ‘race’ are pre-political matters and the focus should be on ‘class struggle and secular and republican universalism’ (Amselle 2013). This framework has prioritised the ‘political passion’ that supports ‘republican patriotism’ (Viroli 2001), but this is disputable.

Sex, gender, ‘race’, and ethnicity, for example, are not natural categories of difference that precede political relationships. They have been configured in historically contingent power relations in which dispossession affects some more than others. Feminisms and history have progressed in this argument.

In fact, feminist politics has produced an extensive discussion about economic autonomy and dependency. Feminisms have denounced that women and feminised bodies suffer the most from material dispossession and that this further restricts their freedom. In academia, as in grassroots work and protests in streets and institutional spaces, feminists have shown the ways dispossession has a gender, sexual, and racial marker and how capitalist exploitation of women and feminised bodies is specific and many times more acute. This has been verified throughout history, not only in capitalism's latest phases.

Post-independence Latin American constitutions, for example, presumed that women had a nationality but not citizenship for the exercise of political rights. They proclaimed the equality of all citizens before the law but implicitly defined citizenship as a male domain, where men had the right to administer common (conjugal) patrimony and property women owned prior to marriage (Deere and León 2002). At the same time, women had limited or no property rights for a long time – in some Latin American nations, not until the end of the twentieth century (Deere and León 2002).

At present, the map of dispossession responds to sexual, racial, and social divisions of labour. Poverty indicators show this very clearly for Latin America and other world regions. In Latin America, the possibilities of impoverishment continue to be more significant for women and they are more likely to remain in that condition. Even when poverty rates decline, as happened between 2002 and 2014 in Latin America, the proportion of impoverished women increases (Torres 2019). Likewise, the probability of impoverishment is significantly higher in female-led households (UN-Women 2017). Their levels of education do not explain this⁵ since women have an increasing presence in school institutions and, on average, more years of study (ECLAC 2019). The situation is even worse for racialised women. Regardless of their level of education, Indigenous women, for example, are consistently at the bottom of the income scale (ECLAC 2019).

The conclusion is that lower levels of poverty do not translate into less poverty for women and that, when there has been poverty, policies to combat poverty do not take into account the specific processes of gender inequality. Women continue to be overrepresented among poor and extremely poor households (Torres 2021a), especially racialised, young, trans, and transvestite women.

This baseline situation is aggravated in times of crisis, demonstrated by the current global COVID-19 pandemic. The public health crisis will widen the poverty gap between women and men and is pushing 47 million more women and girls toward impoverishment. According to United Nations estimates, by 2030, it is expected that for every hundred men living in poverty, there will be 121 women globally (UN-Women 2020).

The rates and forms of participation in labour markets have also confirmed this under other circumstances. According to Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1977), the incorporation of women into the labour markets was the most critical silent social revolution of the twentieth century, made possible by changes that occurred in the labour market and the institutional (legal) framework, educational achievements, decreased fertility rates, changes in family relationships and advances in access to decision-making (Avolio and Di Laura 2017). However, although it remains on the rise (very slowly in recent years), women's participation rate in job markets continues to be just under two-thirds of men's, while their unemployment rate is higher.⁶

There are also gaps in earned income, whether salaried or self-employed. Women's income is 17 per cent lower than that of men of the same age and education, regardless of the presence of minors or other income generators in their homes, rural conditions, and type of work (ILO 2019). Likewise, women are overrepresented in lower-paying jobs and smaller enterprises. At the same time, they are concentrated in less-skilled, more vulnerable, low-productivity occupations, with a high incidence of part-time work, relatively low wages (Avolio and Di Laura 2017), and less access to social benefits (Weller and Roethlisberger 2011). Women are also overrepresented in informal and precarious work, which affects the consolidation of their retirement rights in the contributory pension scheme⁷ and is detrimental to their economic autonomy in old age (ECLAC 2018). In addition, they have more significant difficulties developing professionally and accessing positions with greater decision-making power and better remuneration.⁸ Racial mediations are fundamental. In Latin America, the salary differences between women and men increase the higher the level of schooling, mediated by ‘race’ and ethnicity.⁹

These indicators crystallise in a clear landscape that is fundamental for the discussion here: almost one in three women in the region does not earn their own income (with higher numbers in some countries, such as El Salvador and Guatemala). Although the figure was higher at the beginning of the twenty-first century (41 per cent), the number continues to be high and higher than that of men.¹⁰ This economic dependence is a robust barrier that prevents or limits women from leaving their homes when they are victims of violence, decreases their abilities to negotiate in domestic spaces and participate in public spaces, and reproduces situations of structural disadvantage within and outside the labour markets. By bringing this to light and politicising it, feminisms have vitally contributed to the republican debate about dispossession, dependency, and freedom.

For all the reasons above, the condition of being a woman, or a racialised woman, is not a pre-political factor, as some republicans have argued. Considering it in this way ignores that these are incontrovertible categories of domination (Fraser 2006). Both gender and ‘race’ are basic organising principles of the map of dispossession that we have today throughout the world.

Recently, a debate has emerged within feminisms that continues in that direction, now in a channel long metabolised by republicanism: debt. More transversely than ever, debt is a privileged device of new forms of exploitation and is marked by class, sex, gender, and race.

S. Federici, V. Gago, and L. Cavallero (2021), and other feminists are fuelling discussion about how adjustment policies spill over onto households and women in the form of domestic debt. Thus, they reveal a mark of contemporary capitalism: the progression of the financialisation of the lives of salaried workers and already impoverished people and households. Faced with the deterioration of the real income or the brutal loss of income, people seek credit (Stockhammer 2012). Data from the International Monetary Fund show that from the 1990s to 2016 (the latest year available), household debt in proportion to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increased between 15 per cent and 21 per cent in countries with ‘emerging market economies’ (Valckx 2017): between 2013 and 2017, it was 25.9 per cent in Chile, 23.8 per cent in Colombia, and 20.7 per cent in Mexico (ECLAC 2019). During the pandemic, household debt has continued to increase dramatically, leaving women in particular in a situation of dependency. The forms of life-reproduction are ever-more precarious for which they are held responsible (Cavallero and Gago 2019).

In effect, the mechanism for securing this debt – the debtor-creditor relationship – generates dependency, compromises the future, and ensures obedience: one must accept any job to be able to repay debt (Cavallero and Gago 2019), and it reproduces an integral, resounding, and expansive social precariousness. That is why feminist politics insists on individual and collective financial disobedience, and on the importance of recognising that the fight against the indebting of impoverished households is the fight against property violence and for freedom. The relationship between property and freedom is thus verified: the concern for the reproduction of life is none other than the destruction of the specific forms of obedience that make us non-free.

The Public, the Domestic, and the Private

Nevertheless, feminisms also fight against inequality via the politicisation of the family and the domestic space. They have done so in at least two interrelated ways. On the one hand, they have recovered the institutional centrality of the family for political reflection. On the other hand, they have objected to the division that liberalism produced between ‘public’ and ‘private’ and its reification as a natural order. On the contrary, feminisms have asserted that ‘indoors’ and ‘outdoors’ are co-constituent instances of the reproduction of capitalism.

Liberalism has, with certain occasional success, aspired to depoliticise spheres and activities that differ from each other – such as the domestic sphere but also the world of property and economic circulation – arguing that they are private matters (Benhabib 1992). Liberal feminists such as Martha Nussbaum have discussed the distinction between public and private and have noted what they consider to be scant attention paid to the family by liberal theories of justice. In their consideration, women would have paid a high cost for freedom and autonomy in the private sphere. This criticism, however, has not been able to avoid the contradiction between analysing the family as a space of public interest and affirming it as an alleged private sphere of love and care (Castillo 2021).

Other feminist approaches have focused on the implications of the distinction between public and private, but in other terms. For Carole Pateman (1983), this distinction is a mystification of the patriarchal liberal reality. According to her, the free subject capable of producing and participating in contractual relationships is a male subject that is presented as universal, without being so. Meanwhile, women's way of being in public life remains mediated by their position in so-called private life, which is their ‘natural’ place and is considered irrelevant to politics.

Women within the socialist militancies during the first half of the twentieth century had progressed in the politicisation of the domestic space and the invisible work that women did (and do) there. They thus made demands of the ‘real socialism’ states, such as public nurseries, workers’ canteens, and services that would grant them better conditions in their remunerated work. After the 1950s, Italian and American feminists argued that unpaid domestic work in households is what enables the reproduction of the workforce: for those who work for salaries to be able to do so, they need to reproduce their workforce, and that necessitates the direct and indirect care that other people offer them. These are two ‘assembly lines’: ‘one assembly line that produces goods and another assembly line that produces workers and whose center is the home’ (Federici 2018). That many times work is unpaid does not mean that it is not work: it ensures, through time, effort, and resources, that those who work for wages (or will do so at another time in their lives) reproduce as workers. It is not the salary that defines what is or is not work.

In this way, feminisms have politicised what happens in domestic spaces and have produced a profound criticism of the attempts to remove this area from the conversation about the public and the common good. On the contrary, what happens in the home is instrumental to sustaining life, for the reproduction of the labour force, and, in general, of social systems. If states, markets, and men take no responsibility for this – as has historically been the case – the result is greater dependency for women. For example, women's overload in households leads them to participate less in labour markets or to do so in more precarious conditions – either paid less well or in flexible jobs so they can carry out domestic work as well. More than half of the women in Latin America who are outside the ‘economically active population’ claim family reasons (mainly related to domestic and care work) as the main reasons why they do not seek paid work (VV. AA 2020). Furthermore, this sexual division of labour reaffirms that unpaid work is associated with ‘femininity’ and limits the possibility for women to get out of cycles of violence or to participate politically, and so forth. It can also deepen men's job insecurity if they and their families depend on that salary as the only family income because women must ensure domestic support without remuneration (Federici 2018).

By considering what happens in the home as a private, ‘indoor’ matter, the multiple subjects of exploitation (not limited to those who receive wages) are made invisible, as are the real duration of the work day (since many women support the households while they perform salaried work) and the main way through which gender inequality is reproduced: the sexual division of labour (Federici 2013). Meanwhile, markets and states extract value from domestic economies. Not knowing what happens in homes as a matter of public interest is then convenient and not natural.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, women, adolescent girls, and female children performed approximately 77 per cent of unpaid care and domestic work in households; that work ensured 12.5 billion hours of unpaid work per day worldwide (VV.AA 2020). If we translate this data point into its equivalent value of the GDP, it is equivalent to 20 per cent of the GDP of the Latin American countries. The poorest women dedicate even more time to this work. But whatever their position in the income structure, women are in charge: ‘unpaid work assignments for women have a minimum of around 20 hours a week, even in the case of households in the richest quintiles’ (ECLAC 2019: 146). Therefore, the impossibility of having one's own income and the dependence on other people or assistance services (which are provided by fragile public systems), are related both to the way the domestic sphere is organised and to the organisation of labour markets and social systems in general. The result is a robust and persistent sexual division of labour chained to the social division of labour that perpetuates inequality.

The politicisation of the domestic sphere has opened, in new terms, the debate about what is considered private and what is considered public, with an impact on republicanism. Family has held a marginal space for political reflection in the republican revival (Bertomeu 2012). This is likely due, among other reasons, to its relative contemporary disconnect with feminisms. However, through republicanism, Bertomeu and Domènech have insisted on the need to specify analytically and politically what it means for a relationship environment to be private and to demystify the privacy of the domestic. These authors have insisted that patriarchal-patrimonial oppression is present both in the family and in relations with employers: a private company can be as private as the family if the only regulation it has is that of the private power of entrepreneurs (Bertomeu and Domènech 2005). Conversely, the family ceases to be a private space when it is politicised and when other institutional agents can intervene non-arbitrarily to ensure rights on behalf of those in need. The latter is what feminisms have done by politicising unpaid care, or domestic debt, which was discussed earlier. For its part, republicanism has shed light on the need to identify and dispute all the spaces that function privately, and on how politically inoperative it is to associate the domestic with the private and the non-domestic with the public.

Finally, and as a result of the politicisation of mutual care, so essential for life, feminisms have questioned whether non-dependence is a value in itself or whether, on the contrary, it is necessary to build a framework where interdependence is the key to political relations. The feminist insistence on interdependence collides with the republican affirmation of autonomy, and opens a channel of conversation between both political programmes. This conversation continues to advance, for example, in reflections on care-citizenship (cuidadanía) (Rodríguez 2010) and on states of care (Biglieri and Cadahia 2020).

In dialogue with the republican conception of citizenship – which projects the political existence of free people, without ties of domination, but emphasises the subject – feminist citizenship certifies that citizens can only exist in relation and connection to each other. Thus, feminisms affirm that social, individual, and collective existence implies care, and that care is a key matter of public affairs. So-called care-citizenships verify the commitment to exclude no one, not out of goodwill but because it is thus institutionally assured while affirming the interdependence of rights and the duty to be active agents in the reciprocal assurance of the conditions of possibility of our lives and collective life. With this, the politicisation versus privatisation of our social ties and structures, central to feminisms and republicanism, goes one step further.

The Body: Another Angle of Autonomy

It has been said here that republicanism and feminisms intersect and can nourish each other in the challenge to domination and exploitation reproduced through relations of material dependence and the privatisation of the domestic space. For some, autonomy and freedom are co-constituted. This political principle has been radicalised by feminisms when they affirmed that political freedom is seriously limited or non-existent when there is a lack of autonomy over the sexed body itself. The lack of autonomy over the body¹¹ is only partly explained by material dispossession. Gender-based violence and limitations on sexual and reproductive rights permeate the existence of women and feminised bodies, whatever their place in the class structure. However, impoverished women are more likely to be dispossessed, die in unsafe abortions, and face material barriers to getting out of violence situations.

Global average contraception levels remain low, at approximately 63 per cent. In Latin America and the Caribbean, although the use of modern contraceptives has increased, significant inequalities persist. For example, in Haiti and Bolivia, contraception coverage does not reach 40 per cent. The long-term reversible contraceptive rate is low throughout the region, even more so for young Indigenous women between fifteen and seventeen years of age, who are in the lowest wealth quintiles, are living in rural areas and have no educational instruction (Gómez 2019).

The inability to terminate unwanted pregnancies is one of the most persistent issues. Until very recently, the only countries in Latin America and the Caribbean that legally allowed for terminations were Cuba, Guyana, French Guiana, Puerto Rico, and Uruguay, although there continue to be problems with access to services in some of the countries. Recently, Argentina and Mexico have joined that list after fierce feminist struggles. Between 2010 and 2014, the global annual average of abortions was 56 million, or thirty-five per one thousand women between fifteen and forty-four years old (WHO 2020). Between 2015 and 2019, it is estimated that the figure was 73.3 million, or thirty-nine per every one thousand women between fifteen and forty-nine years old (WHO 2020). Every year, 25 million abortions occur in unsafe conditions around the world. The results can be fatal. In so-called developing countries, 7 million women are hospitalised annually due to complications in unsafe abortions or become sterile or suffer reproductive or other biological health disorders for the rest of their lives. Between 4.7 per cent and 13.2 per cent of the annual maternal mortality rate can be attributed to abortion (80,000 women) (WHO 2020). In Latin America, three out of four voluntary pregnancy terminations are unsafe.

Again, it is imperative to visualise complex relationships. Feminist movements have shown that the criminalisation of abortion is, in reality, a criminalisation of poverty (Santillana 2018), and as long as states do not ensure access and the right to voluntary termination of pregnancies, women will continue to die in clandestine abortions or will give birth to the children of their rapists, often being children themselves. The vast majority of deaths are of women from popular, racialised, and migrant sectors who cannot pay for services with sanitary and professional conditions, even when they are illegal.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, both access to contraceptives and the voluntary termination of pregnancies have been even more affected, especially in countries in the Global South. The redirection of medical resources to treat COVID-19 and the fear of going to hospitals, among other issues, have limited women's control over their bodies and their sexuality, as has happened during other health crises. The same has happened with access to sexual and reproductive health for trans and LGBTQI+ people, who were most vulnerable during the crisis.

In the same way, there was a global alert due to the increase in cases of gender violence within homes since the beginning of the pandemic. Mobility restrictions locked women into homes with their assailants, while violence increased in public spaces, which are now more solitary. But the problem of gender violence, central to the laceration of physical autonomy, already existed previously on a large scale.

These types of violence are not explained exclusively or mainly by one's socioeconomic status, although there are links between material dispossession and the reproduction of violence. Nor is it explained by general social crime rates. For example, in Uruguay and Cuba, which have low rates of social crime, violence against women, girls, and feminised bodies continue to be high. Transwomen, transvestites, and transsexuals, for their part, are systematically more violated because of their gender identity and sexuality. Feminisms have insisted that gender violence is specific, and it cannot be explained on a universal norm around social violence. Gender violence performs an unequal power relationship that is based on the gender assigned to the victim: it is exercised because she is identified as a woman, not for any other reason. In the case of violence against men, there is no gender marker; they may be victims of violence because they are poor, migrant, elderly, or racialised, but not because they are men and therefore considered appropriable or inferior.

A report published by the United Nations in 2019 registered that 87,000 women worldwide were intentionally murdered in 2017. In 58 per cent of the cases, the aggressor was an intimate partner or another family member. Latin America is the second most dangerous region globally to be a woman: the fatality rate for homicides of women related to a partner or family member was 1.6 per 100,000 inhabitants. This is not the case for men (UNODC 2019). In 2019, at least 4,640 women were murdered in Latin America and the Caribbean, in a feminicidal gesture (ECLAC-Gender Equality Observatory 2021). One in three women in the region claims to have suffered physical or sexual violence in a relationship and 77 per cent of sexual crimes occur in homes (WHO 2021).

In the attacks against women, the appropriation of the body plays a main role. Rape prior to murder or access to the body in public spaces is very common, for example. In cases of workplace harassment, when the victims are women, sexual subjection is frequent. The same happens in situations of armed conflict and political violence. Furthermore, prohibitions against leaving the house, visiting relatives, studying, or working are frequent in violence against women within the couple. Thus aggressors seal their ties and ensure that women lose economic autonomy, cementing their material, psychological, or social dependence. This dependence is underscored in economically dependent women who are victims of sexist violence.

Between 2007 and 2019, eighteen Latin American countries modified their regulations to include the classification of femicides, and two others have specified these cases as aggravated homicides. Today, thirty-three countries in the region have first-generation laws that regulate state action against gender-based violence in the domestic and intra-family sphere. Others have second-generation laws, which intervene in the reproduction of gender violence in public spaces, workplaces, politics, and so forth. In 2019, more than twenty Latin American countries had national gender-based violence prevention policies. There are comprehensive protection laws in thirteen countries in the region (ECLAC 2019).

However, feminisms insist that the policy against gender violence is also against the impossibility of having control over the conditions of existence, on how someone can be forced to do something against their will. Material dispossession speaks to the impossibility of saying no. Violence against women's bodies speaks about the same thing. This has been another way feminisms have tried to de-privatise domination: by politicising the body's autonomy. For republicanism, that is, and must be, a vital path for radicalisation.

Final Thoughts on Political Participation

Feminist interpretations of autonomy, affirmed through interdependence, also imply the possibility of intervening in the public arena, making decisions, and participating politically on equal footing.

Liberalism and its neoliberal update have argued that it is possible to settle common issues through ‘interest groups’, but this ignores the fact that people and groups do not reach the public space under identical conditions. The accumulation of power is not prevented by the existence of a multiplicity of actors because this occurs within a limited (elitarian) framework where not all subjects and groups have the same point of departure: they cannot make use of similar resources because initially they occupy different and inferior positions in the economic and political order. Feminisms have decried the fact that, due to all of the above, women and racialised people, while occupying lower echelons in the economic reproduction order, have fewer possibilities to insert themselves into the circuits of institutional political participation. In 2019, for example, only 24.3 per cent of the world's national parliamentarians were women, and only three countries had at least 50 per cent women in parliament (UN-Women 2019).

The multicultural response, neoliberalism's baseline agenda, has been creating and implementing ‘recognition policies’, focused on making differences viable and integrating them into previously structured political communities. It would not be necessary to question the property regimes that make up unequal societies, social classes would not be a field of inquiry, and inequalities resulting from a lack of fair recognition of groups could be corrected once they were unstructured (Taylor 2001). It is about equalisation of status without involving the debate on the organisation of the economy or generating other forms of political life (Díaz-Polanco 2007). Neoliberalism's spread has not assured changes in the order of things. Rather, popular political struggles, including feminist struggles, continue to push for comprehensive democratic programmes. From there, the multiple spaces of politics continue to be tested, the disjointed places where unequal orders of power are disputed that take their pulse inside and outside formal institutions to intervene in the unequal order of people.

The fact that political freedom and material dispossession are mutually constituted has been demonstrated through republican and feminist routes. We must question both the unfair recognition and the non-existent or limited redistribution and exclusive political representation. The feminist agenda questions public and domestic debt, supports economic autonomy and affirms interdependence, politicises the domestic, expands the public over the private to guarantee a reciprocally free life, and clamours for the virtue of citizenship and citizen care. The republican tradition can add weight to an essential part of that policy. Republicanism, for its part, needs to feed on a critique of the patriarchal order that feminisms have developed. The conversation between both traditions and agendas needs its own revival.