Prefiguration of utopian spaces in feminist protest landscapes

Abstract

In recent years, urban and digital activism campaigns have given feminist mobilisations a transnational scope, establishing a politics of prefiguration and contributing to the feministisation of social struggles and protests. In this context, the Feminist May (2018) and the Social Uprising (2019) emerged in Chile, led by young women contesting patriarchy and capitalism as interrelated systems of domination. Drawing on a corpus of 70 photographs posted on Facebook and Instagram between May 2018 and May 2020, this article analyses the semiotic landscapes of protest from a multimodal and socio-cognitive perspective. It examines how semiotic practices, expressed through the emplacement and use of women’s bodies and messages, simultaneously signal and perform spatial, communicative, and cognitive processes. Findings show that feminist protest landscapes prefigure utopian spaces as disobedient spaces where affects and values prevail, and as liberated spaces where a project of an anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, and decolonial society is rehearsed.