Women’s houses in the Basque country: political, cultural and bodily laboratories of feminism

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the key characteristics of the Women’s Houses in the Basque Country and how they are run. These municipal centres are promoted by the feminist movement in close collaboration with local institutions and are part of the long international feminist tradition of creating spaces specifically for women. The Houses run a diverse range of programmes and offer legal, employment and sexual health counselling services and other targeted support for precarious groups. The central point of this article is that these spaces are laboratories in which activity related to politics, training and support services influences the recomposition of the political subjectivities of the people who participate in them. Another key and distinctive aspect is the particular interrelationships found in the Houses between the institutionalist rationale coming out of the politics of equality and the rupturist rationale of movements like the feminist movement. Furthermore, different groups of feminist women (members of associations or institutions, professionals and researchers) co-exist in the Houses, which contributes to the horizontality of the relationships. Nevertheless, these aspects are not free of tensions, a point that will also be analysed here.