Collective action and organisation against gender violence in Spain

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to study the emerging activism of victims of gender violence. Along with the movement against gender violence in Spain by mainly feminist organisations that talk and claim in the name of those victims – an activism for victims – in the last years some abused women have created more or less formal associations – what Martinez calls, instead, an activism by victims. This is a phenomenon still not examined, in part, because of its size (still limited) but her argument is that the lack of attention is to be found in the fact that the activism of gender violence victims is considered uncanny and unthinkable. The mainstream discourses on gender violence consider this victim as passive, helpless and dependent; with her agency – individual and mainly collective and political – being as something impossible (Dunn, 2010; Jenkins, 1996; Lamb, 1999). This chapter seeks to analyse the activism of gender violence victims looking both at the trajectories of those activists and to the strategies and repertoires of action that those emerging associations are developing so that the resignification that those trajectories and actions perform to the (gender violence) victim category and identity itself are analysed.