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Article published In:
The Political Economy of Linguistic Landscapes
Edited by Johan Järlehed, Tommaso M. Milani and Tove Rosendal
[Linguistic Landscape 9:3] 2023
► pp. 286–305

Scaling student feminisms

Between political possibility and capitalist capture

ORCID logo | Universidad Autónoma de Madrid | Centre of Discourse Studies, Barcelona
Ethnographically informed, this article examines the recent transnational feminist uprising by focusing on the Spanish student movement. Drawing on the contributions of the sociolinguistics of globalization and the pragmatics of scale, it gives an account of how feminist demands acquire intelligibility in the political agenda of the student movement based on a Madrilenian university, vis-a-vis the institutionalization of gender equality policies at university. Thus, by tracking the (un)making of political alliances over time between various coexisting centring institutions – spanning from university official authorities to forms of student grassroots institutionality – the article delves into the valuation processes of feminist scales and their competing logics of value-production, paying attention to how these processes get inscribed in the semiotic landscape.
Keywords: scales, discursive scaling, scale politics, feminism, gender equality, value-production, valorization, student movement, street murals
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Transnational feminist strikes as a lens to read a political momentum
  • 3.Epistemological and theoretical framing
    • 3.1Characterizing the UAM SM case study and my positioning within it
    • 3.2Approaching the political economy of feminisms through the lens of (sociolinguistic) scales
  • 4.The UAM SM case study
    • 4.1‘La Universidad será feminista o no será’, or how to make feminism a collective problem
    • 4.2‘Feminism has screwed everything up’: Exploring the limits of the feminist uprising and the becoming of La Diana
    • 4.3From the erasure of women to the erasure of murals: Transfeminist organization in times of pandemic and postfascist advance
  • 5.Final remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 August 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.22042.elv
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