Contemporary Portuguese feminist activisms through the analysis of the International Feminist Strike website: subversive revolt and counterpower

The International Feminist Strike, emerging in 2017, seeks to redefine International Women’s Day (8 March). Its objective is to reclaim and revitalize the day by aligning it with its original purpose, effectively re-politicizing the narrative surrounding it. Additionally, it aims to challenge the traditional conception of a strike, expanding its influence beyond labour strikes (pertaining to paid work) and evolving into a broader social strike. In Portugal, the integration of the feminist strike into the repertoires of action of national feminisms gained expression in 2019, displaying the dynamics of contemporary feminist movements within the prospective context of a feminist fourth wave. The March 8 Network, a coalition of feminist activists, created a website that functions as an archival and memorial repository for discursive objects (images, photographs, written texts, posters, banners, pamphlets). Through a Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) of that website, this article proposes to determine how the International Feminist Strike was discursively conceptualized as a tool for social contestation and counterpower. The results reveal that the feminist strike is portrayed as a subversive force that transcends the conventional notion of a strike by confronting issues related to productive and reproductive work and challenging the power of neoliberal capitalism.