Territories of Contested Womanhood: Pussyhats, the Pachamama, and Embodying Resistance in the Era of Hashtag Feminism

Abstract

In response to a recent surge of openly misogynistic political discourses at the highest levels of government, a vibrant wave of hashtag feminism across the Americas evidences women’s widespread concerns over their bodily and territorial rights. Engaging Twitter and Facebook as digital archives-of-the-present, in conjunction with ethnographic interviews and surveys conducted in Peru and in the United States, we analyze protest symbols in two high-profile women’s rights movements: the United States #WomensMarch and the Peruvian #NiUnaMenos March. For Native women in both movements, the land grabs perpetrated by state and corporate actors factored as heavily into their resistance motivations as did their concerns over bodily rights and reproductive justice, which were the central concerns of non-Native women respondents. In the United States, the majority of protesters used the pussyhat as an organizing principle to react against politicians’ allusions to the physical abuse of women and their policy-driven threats to reproductive choice; meanwhile, some Native women donned the warbonnet scarf to recognize their intersectional oppressions under Donald Trump. In the Peruvian context, women across the nation took to city streets with blood red paint dripping down their thighs to provoke social memory of a recent era of forced sterilizations under Alberto Fujimori. In the Andean highlands, Aymara and Quechua women invoked the Pachamama, or Earth Mother, as a vibrant ally to aid in their battle against threats to their bodily sovereignty and the ongoing destruction of indigenous landscapes. Within these two hashtag movements, we find a pattern of mainstream communications that emphasize body as territory, while indigenous protest symbols focus not only on who is being grabbed—but where.