Feminist geographies from the slum: violence, care, and place-making in contemporary Buenos Aires

Bertelli, Lucrecia (2025) Feminist geographies from the slum: violence, care, and place-making in contemporary Buenos Aires. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

The expression negra villera is widespread in Argentina. Although this derogatory term refers to a person’s skin colour, it is often used to denote social class. The term is also bounded to specific urban landscapes: the villas. In the Argentine social imaginary, these stigmatised territories epitomise poverty, ignorance, and crime. In the quote above, however, a woman is reclaiming the term negra villera, arguing that she is proud to be part of a collective of strong women and sexual dissidents. This movement, Feminismo Villero (slum feminism) started in 2018 in Villa 31-31 bis, the oldest villa in the city. Based on a year of participant observation, life-history interviews and digital archival research, my thesis explores how Slum Feminism contests the idea that feminism is not materially compatible with the urgencies and needs of low-income women and dissidents. Contrarywise, these material urgencies have served as a driver for explicitly feminist mobilisations. This thesis examines how material and affective aspects of that territory (the villa) shape this social movement, and how in turn, it contributes to progressively shape and transform the spaces of mobilisation. In my aim to explain this ‘feminism from the slum’, I focus on the relationship between territory and the movement, mediated by activists' everyday experiences of gendered violence. My research analyses how gender-based violence intersects with different geographical spaces and scales: the body; the home; the street, and the neighbourhood. The thesis contributes to the scholarship on geographies of social movements by re-centring the role of place (and particularly, territory) in social movements’ framing and everyday activism.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2025 Lucrecia Bertelli
Library of Congress subject classification:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GF Human ecology. Anthropogeography H Social Sciences > HM Sociology H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races
Sets:	Departments > Geography and Environment
Supervisor:	Jones, Gareth A. and Centner, Ryan
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4854

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