Introduction

As a form of protest, encampments are places both where participants strive for horizontal organising and a different way of living outside the neoliberal order, and where the hierarchies, violence and inequalities of wider society are reproduced on a small scale. In my chapter, I focus on this tension as it was made visible in the anti-austerity movement in May 2011 in Spain, when thousands of people took to the streets and camped in the squares of the country’s main cities, and when feminists and queer movements were also vocal critics of the encampments’ structure. In addition, I examine the phenomenon of no mixto [non-mixed] protest camps from which men are excluded in order to build an alternative organisation governed by the logic of recognition of subaltern identities. Specifically, I analyse the feminist encampment organised in Valencia on 8 March 2020 as part of the activities commemorating International Women’s Day. The chapter aims thus to contribute to a better understanding of the boundaries of protest camps as sites of resistance and, at the same time, to explore the possibilities of ‘non-mixed’ camps as sites of recognition.

To do so, I use Judith Butler’s work (Butler, 2009, 2011) in which recognition is seen as ambivalent. On the one hand, recognition is understood as a human need; therefore the lack of it generates violence and exclusion. On the other hand, recognition is experienced as constraining or oppressive by those recognised because it assumes a hierarchy in which one (inferior) group requires the recognition of another that, in addition, sets rigid specific parameters for the recognition to happen. In that sense, for Butler, the process of intelligibility is infused with practices of violence, including ethical violence, inasmuch as the frames of understanding are imposed on others. Butler insists on the inability to offer a complete narrative about oneself. However, the recognition process is generally spurred by asking who you are. When the answer to this is not closed, when it is unfinished, contradictory or does not fit in the dominant narrative, we find a lack of recognition or of understanding of another’s point of view.