Foreword
Natalia Brizuela and Leticia Sabsay

Scholarly interest in women's social movements is timely, given the massive demonstrations led by women internationally in opposition to the rise of the Global Right, the feminist mobilizations against anti-"gender ideology" campaigns, and the performative afterlife of #MeToo, #TimesUp and other hashtag feminist initiatives traversing borders and cultural contexts. In Europe, the Polish "Black Protests" against abortion restriction laws since 2016, the huge rallies that accompanied Ireland's vote for the legalization of abortion in 2018, or the enormous demonstrations in Spain of 8 March, which since 2017 have accompanied the International Women's Strike, have made mainstream media headlines. In the US, hundreds of thousands of women led counter-inauguration rallies across the country on 20 January 2017 protesting against the blatant misogyny of the new president and the foreseeable attacks on already fragile reproductive rights. To this "lean in" feminism, an intersectional collective responded with a call to a "feminism for the 99 percent" on International Women's Day. These experiences, among others, have greatly contributed to a renewed receptivity to feminist topics and theories by non-specialized publishers and journals. In this context, authors writing about the contemporary forms in which feminist ideals and tropes have been captured and neutralized called attention to the challenges raised by the renewed appeal of feminism and re-encountered some new hopes as well.1

This growing feminist trend has also provided an opportunity for women's movements and feminisms from the Global South to acquire a new visibility and, to some extent, a long overdue acknowledgment of their contributions. Visibility is, however, a tricky business, since the terms in which it emerges are never entirely straightforward. More often than not, neither those social movements to which some visibility is granted nor their (often self-instituted) spokespersons are in an easy position to set the terms. The false notion that the transnational feminist movement is some brand-new phenomenon, dating back to the last three to five years, speaks to a temporal framing shaped by a blind (and in many cases irritatingly white!) English-speaking gaze from the Global North. Such temporality belongs to, and relies on, a politics of ignorance furthered by academia and publishers alike. To give but one example, Fraser's recent discovery of the potentiality of a popular feminist future sits in stark contrast to her sustained dismissal of decades of black, postcolonial and subaltern feminist work.2

The reframing of a social movement, rendering it more or less visible or intelligible, is often marked by the social conditions that obscured the movement in the first place. The fact that such a tension is inevitable does not mean that it is not productive or that it cannot be reworked in ways that disrupt dominant logics of knowledge production and hegemonic narratives. And this is precisely the kind of work done by María Pia López's book.

Not One Less: Mourning, Disobedience and Desire tells one of the possible stories of Not One Less - the Argentinean women's movement that emerged in 2015. To Latin American feminists and Spanish-language readers more broadly, López is recognized as one of the key activists and chroniclers at the heart of what quickly became a widespread movement. Through a first-person narrative, Not One Less offers an account of the formative years of that movement as experienced by the author. Through this first-person voice, López masters the embodied writing for which many feminists have advocated. The author embraces two distinct roles, crafting a plural-singular voice: on the one hand, the body acting as part of a collective in the heat of every battle and, on the other hand, the meditative scholarly voice of the intellectual.

Not One Less emerged in Argentina as a collective affirmation of life and bodily presence in the face of a rampant increase in brutal murders and gender violence. In late March 2015 a small group of feminist activists and writers, María Pia López among them, organized a reading marathon with the slogan "Not One Less" at the National Library in Buenos Aires. At that time López was the director of the National Library's Museo del Libro y de La Lengua (Museum of the Book and Language). This reading marathon was not the first public event that linked politics, performance and collective outrage. In April 2014 a reading marathon had been organized in support of the national campaign for free, legal and safe abortion. The 2015 event was called to make femicide and gender-based violence a matter of public concern, and the large crowd that gathered for the mourning of individual deaths through a collective performance set the stage for the years ahead and, more specifically, became ground zero for the call to take to the streets to protest the systemic war being raged against feminized bodies.

On 10 May 2015 a hashtag went viral: #NotOneLess. We want to be alive. 3 June, 5 pm. The message brought together, under a single slogan, a polyphonic multitude and a long anti-patriarchal, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist feminist genealogy. The collective scream of "Not One Less" was a reaction to the growing number of brutal murders and forced disappearances of cis and trans women that had risen exponentially to such dramatic proportions that, on average, by 2015 in Argentina, one woman was murdered every day. To the extent that femicide had become an epidemic ignored by the state, Not One Less began to articulate, on the one hand, a transversal fight against gender-based attacks and, on the other hand, a counter-hegemony against myriad forms of state-sponsored violence and neglect.3 The 2015 hashtag has now become a collective with chapters throughout Argentina and beyond and has established alliances of solidarity with other collectives and labor unions relating gender-based violence to race, class and labor. These alliances have articulated a heterogeneous spectrum of demands. As an example, the second Not One Less march in June 2016 brought forth demands both for the decriminalization of abortion and an end to transphobia and for the rights of sex workers.

This heterogeneity is reflected in María Pia López's crafting of a plural-singular voice, where the sensory, the scholarly and the activist have merged through decades of writing as both a scholar and a public intellectual. Since the late 1990s she has authored academic texts as well as novels and essays. A professor, a researcher, a writer and a militant, López has been pushing the boundaries of academic writing for the last two decades. In Not One Less, her activist research structures the fluctuation between genres and authorial voices. As she asks in the Introduction:

Can a person write as an activist and as a theorist and critic at the same time? Is agitation so as to question people's wills and organize antagonistic to the analysis of obstacles and limits? It would be considered conflictive from the traditional conception of knowledge, where supposed objectivity overlooks the practical, historic and political conditions in which the very questions being studied here emerged. On the other hand, exposing these conditions, situating the questions to be answered among an archipelago of mobilizations and practical dilemmas, shows us that our words are always dependent on others' words, our bodies and existences entwined with those of others.4

In fact, López's voice is more than her own; it depends on a plurality of voices with which hers is entangled. It is an assemblage, but no less singular for that reason.5 Or, said otherwise, it can be singular precisely because it is an assemblage.

This book is not alone. It lives in company with the contemporary writings of feminist voices from Abya Yala to India, moving through Italy, Spain and France and back to Argentina.6 It is also in conversation with other insufficiently acknowledged voices, such as when López discusses the feminist strike in dialogue with the nineteenth-century French-Peruvian feminist and socialist Flora Tristan - a figure somehow overshadowed by the canonical name of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Honoring the transversal and transnational soul and history of Not One Less, the movement for which it is named, Not One Less is in dialogue with, and contributes to the construction of, a collective "live memory, capable of continuing to produce unforeseeable meanings and territories," as Virginia Cano and Laura Fernández Cordero put it. As they rightly remark, depriving this feminist revolt of an account of the "minoritarian genealogy of women's, feminist and LGBTQI social movements," as well as the sedimented memory of other radical mobilizations for social justice (such as the movement that emerged in Argentina immediately after the 2001 financial crisis), not only diminishes the success of Not One Less but also devalues its significance. And it entails surrendering to a sustained patriarchal and neoliberal effort to erase these insurgencies, both materially and symbolically.7 As López makes clear in this book, the transformative meanings opened up by Not One Less are possible to the extent that disobedience has a history - in fact many histories - and...