By Amassuru — Women in Security and Defense in Latin America and the Caribbean

The following text was published in the journal The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, volume 50:2 — Summer 2026. We reproduce the opening pages of the article in this post and provide a link to the full text, including references, which is available here. Previous versions of this article were published in Spanish on the FESColombia website and in Portuguese on Portal Catarinas magazine.

ABSTRACT This article emerges from a collective dialogue within Amassuru, a network of over 900 women working on security and defense across Latin America and the Caribbean, following the U.S. military intervention in Venezuela on January 3, 2026. Drawing on testimonies from Venezuelan colleagues and researchers from the region, the piece examines the intervention’s geopolitical drivers, the contested language used to describe it, and its gendered impacts. Centering women as political subjects rather than passive victims, it engages in a feminist reading of sovereignty that links territorial dispossession to bodily violence, situating Venezuela within broader global patterns of intervention and accumulation.

In a world undergoing a profound rebalancing of power, Latin America and the Caribbean have once again become a site of foreign intervention. The January 3, 2026, military action by the United States in Venezuela, resulting in the detention of President Nicolás Maduro and Congresswoman Cília Flores, his partner, cannot be understood as an isolated event. It is embedded in a recurring history of foreign interventions across the region, compounded by international economic blockades and the systematic undermining of national sovereignty. Responses from multilateral organizations have been insufficient, and political exits promoted from within affected countries have repeatedly failed to halt institutional deterioration or alleviate social emergencies. At the national level, the intervention unfolded against the backdrop of more than a decade of humanitarian crisis and systematic human rights violations in Venezuela. These conditions were deepened by economic tumult, political repression, and the state’s inability to guarantee minimum conditions of protection for its population.3 This history left broad sectors of society, including women, exposed to multiple and overlapping forms of structural violence long before January 3.

In the days that followed the intervention, amid bombings, damage to military and civilian infrastructures — including a research institute — disruptions to communications, and a generalized climate of fear, women from the Amassuru network came together to talk, listen to one another, and put into words what had happened. On January 15, 2026, twelve days after the intervention, a three-hour conversation took place via video call among fifteen women, grounded in the direct testimonies of Amassuru colleagues in Venezuela, the human rights experiences of activists and researchers, and political reflections built over long periods of analysis. This exchange later gave rise to this article. The conversation included Venezuelan women living in the country as well as members of the network from other countries in the region. For our protection, we decided to anonymize our names, though we share that we are professors, researchers, international consultants, and activists in the field of security Women from the Amassuru network came together to talk, listen to one another, and put into words what had happened. Sovereignty over Our Bodies and Territories 63 vol. 50:1i summer 2026 and defense from across the region. This article does not stem from an external or neutral gaze, but from voices that live, accompany, and analyze the consequences of violence in everyday life in the country and the region. In our analysis, women do not appear solely as victims of war, repression, or crisis, but as political subjects who occupy a central role in sustaining life, defending sovereignty, denouncing violence, producing knowledge, and building horizons of peace.

Why has Venezuela become a central territory in the dispute over global hegemony, and what risks does this intervention pose for Latin America?

Woman 1 — Professor and researcher of International Relations from Mexico: From a perspective outside of Venezuela, the country has become strategic not only because of the government in power, but also due to its geopolitical, energy, and territorial weight in the dispute between the United States and other powers. Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves and maintains economic ties with China, Russia, Iran, and India, making it a key node of inter-capitalist competition. The United States seeks to reaffirm its hemispheric supremacy by activating a renewed version of the Monroe Doctrine, not only to control resources but also spaces, trade routes, and communications. Unilateral U.S. action weakens multilateralism and may legitimize similar interventions in other countries in the region while international cooperation is in sharp decline. From a Latin American memory marked by coups and dictatorships, these disputes primarily affect people rather than elites, and violence falls disproportionately on the most vulnerable bodies and territories, especially those of women.

Woman 2 — Professor and researcher of International Studies from Ecuador: What happened must be read within the framework of a “deviated” or “dark” globalization, in which the classic model of globalization has weakened and gives way to a simultaneous reorganization of local, regional, and global powers. States in the region are adapting to the new conditions of global power dynamics. This also affects how regional partner states or strategic allies perceive their new forms of interaction with the United States, particularly given the internal tensions, conflicts, and political crises they face, accompanied by a broad war of narratives, or cognitive warfare. In this scenario, readings cannot be made only from the top down. Analysis from below is necessary because it is where the greatest turbulence is expressed and where the political leadership of each state has its own dynamics and interests that seek resolution through different strategies and courses of action. Such fragmentation has weakened state resilience against organized crime, and threats (including environmental and border-related ones) are political constructions driven by transnational interests.7 In other words, the scenario described above requires an understanding of constant change and uncertainty. It is necessary to analyze what is happening not only in terms of U.S. policy toward the region, but also in terms of local foreign policies vis-à-vis the United States, while taking into account ongoing global instability and the impact of discursive and narrative conflicts on social media, particularly those driven by digital natives.

Woman 3 — Professor and researcher of Political Sciences from Ecuador: The international isolation Venezuela is experiencing is something I also identify in Palestine and other contexts of prolonged violence. In both cases, clear economic interests sustain war, invasion, and dispossession, while the international community has not done enough to stop the violence and abuse in these places. Coercive pressure by the United States on non-aligned Latin American governments may produce political and economic reconfigurations that are functional to the expansion of transnational capital. Within this framework, the intervention in Venezuela in 2026 could be interpreted not as an isolated episode, but rather as a precedent that reopens the possibility of new forms of regional coercion and of economic appropriation linked to strategic resources. By this logic, accumulation is more important than life, and women are the ones who put their bodies on the line — as caregivers, family sustainers, and the main actors in the defense of imprisoned people. We must connect the dots between Venezuela, Palestine, Sudan, Nigeria, and Ukraine to understand this as a global pattern of dispossession and violence. There must be international feminist activism that forcefully denounces these connections and their differentiated impacts on women.

You can read the continuation of this text in its original link: here.

Sovereignty over Our Bodies and Territories was originally published in Data + Feminism Lab, MIT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The use of large language models and generative AI has significantly impacted computational social science, creating new capabilities and raising new questions for those using software to support social analysis. Key among those is how to evaluate if large models or prompt-based workflows are actually performing better than conventional machine learning. Against this backdrop, we want to propose a more sociotechnical approach to evaluation, one that includes contextual metrics and discussion beyond the standard recall and precision scores. This brief case study shares what happened when we tried this approach on a classifier we’ve built as part of the Counterdata Network’s collaboration with the nonprofit, US-based organization Pregnancy Justice.

Some Background

Building on software systems built as part of the Data Against Feminicide project, the Counterdata Network partners with groups tracking human rights violations via online news to partially automate some of the content discovery and evaluation. In practice, this looks like working together with organizations to train custom ML classifiers that score candidate news articles from online news archives (based on geographic filtering and on keyword matching) for relevance to the violations they want to track.

One of our more recent partnerships is Pregnancy Justice, a national legal advocacy organization that advances and defends the rights of pregnant people, no matter if they give birth, experience a pregnancy loss or have an abortion. Pregnancy Justice’s research team tracks pregnancy criminalization cases across the U.S. in collaboration with academic partners. These are cases charging pregnant people with crimes related to pregnancy, pregnancy loss, or birth. Their extensive and rigorous work is documenting the impact of the Dobbs supreme court ruling, and supporting people brought into the criminal system because of their status as pregnant. Our software system surfaces relevant news articles about cases that fit their focus each week.

Improving the Model

After collecting and annotating a sample training set and experimenting with ML models, the first version of the model was deployed into the email alerts system to retrieve articles in November 2024. The Pregnancy Justice team reviewed retrieved articles each week and labeled each as Relevant / Not Relevant. When our team analyzed the results, we found the false positive rates were near 40%, meaning that every 2 out of 5 articles returned to the team was not relevant to their search.

From a purely technical standpoint, this was alarming. The model seemed barely better than random chance. As ML researchers, our instinct was to fix the model. We designed three parallel improvement experiments to reduce false positives and boost conventional ML performance metrics. What we learned through the process challenged our concepts about what better even means.

First, we updated our TF-IDF model using a subset of newly annotated data from PJ’s weekly reviews. After incorporating the new data, the model’s false positive rate decreased from 55% to 10%. Our analysis showed that much of the original misclassification was a result of domain-specific terms, such as “midwives,” which appeared frequently in real-world news cases but were absent from our initial manually sourced training set. By incorporating the team’s feedback, the dataset better matched the real-world linguistic context, allowing the simple model to more accurately generalize.

Our first model used TF-IDF, a method that identifies important words that are common in documents we care about but relatively rare in the entire collection. It’s a relatively simple approach by modern NLP standards, as it counts words rather than attempting to understand semantic meaning.

We hypothesized that more sophisticated embedding models might perform better. Unlike TF-IDF, large language models (LLMs) like BERT, Universal Sentence Encoder, and MPNet are designed to understand the semantic context-the meaning behind sentences. Theoretically, they should capture the nuanced relationships inherent in complex social issues like pregnancy criminalization.

We tested several state-of-the-art embedding models against our current TF-IDF baseline. However, given the ongoing debates about the ecological impacts of LLMs, we decided to evaluate them on more than just accuracy. We also evaluated their environmental and computational costs.

The Trade-off: Accuracy vs. Environmental Impact

The AI community is increasingly recognizing that model performance cannot be divorced from its environmental cost. Extensive research has emphasized the nontrivial energy consumption and associated CO2 emissions from training and deploying LLMs. This environmental footprint -through pollution, resource extraction, and climate change- disproportionately affects marginalized communities, many of the very communities Pregnancy Justice serves. As a result, our team was committed to prioritize environmental sustainability. With this in mind, we evaluated not just accuracy metrics but also running time and CO2 emissions (estimated using the codecarbon package).

Our results show that while some embedding models achieved low false positive rates, the computational costs were staggering. The mxbai-embed-large model, for example, took 353 times longer to run and emitted significantly more carbon than our original model. The accuracy gains were small, especially compared to the retrained TF-IDF model, with substantial environmental costs. This matches findings from other research, where simpler models such as static embeddings have been shown to perform comparably on digital humanities tasks while requiring significantly less compute ( Ehrmanntraut et al., 2021).

After discussing these results with the Pregnancy Justice team, we reached a critical conclusion that the marginal gain in accuracy does not justify the increased environmental and computational harm.

Experiment 3: How confident should the models be?

Our final experiment involved adjusting the model’s decision threshold. Our model outputs a probability score between 0 and 1 for each article, indicating the model’s confidence that the article is relevant. For the first model we used a threshold of 0.5: articles scoring above 0.5 were classified as relevant.

We hypothesized that If the threshold were raised, e.g. to 0.7 or 0.8, the model would reduce false positives by only returning articles it was very confident about. Our experiments confirmed this, but also showed a tradeoff: a stricter threshold means missing some truly relevant articles.

When we presented this tradeoff to the Pregnancy Justice team, they offered a surprising insight: they wanted the false positives.They explained that reviewing even the false positive articles, those not directly about pregnancy criminalization, was actually valuable. These articles helped them understand the broader landscape: adjacent policy discussions, related criminal justice issues, and the wider context in which pregnancy criminalization occurs. What we labeled as irrelevant from a technical standpoint was often relevant from a strategic advocacy standpoint.

This insight fundamentally reframed our evaluation. The model wasn’t just a filter to remove noise-it was a discovery tool that exposed the team to a broader information ecosystem. The “noise” contained signals we hadn’t anticipated.

Towards Sociotechnical and Community-Centered ML Evaluation

This case study highlights three critical lessons for evaluating ML systems with stakeholders and communities:

1. Bigger isn’t always better: Improving the training data might yield far significant improvements than increasing model complexity.
2. Let communities define success: Technical metrics like accuracy and false positive Rates are proxies for utility. What counts as correct output depends on contexts, workflows, and values that these metrics cannot capture. We recommend co-designing metrics and success criteria with the people who will use the system.
3. Evaluate the System, Not Just the Algorithm: Efficiency is an ethical metric. By quantifying the time and CO2 costs, we made a value judgment that aligned our technical infrastructure with our project’s justice-oriented values.

Originally published at https://dataculture.northeastern.edu on February 22, 2026.

Beyond Accuracy: A Case Study of Sociotechnical ML Evaluation was originally published in Data + Feminism Lab, MIT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I learned recently about the passing of Carmen Castelló and was very saddened to hear the news. In her honor, I wanted to post an excerpt from my 2024 book Counting Feminicide, that discusses her work. As with so many of the feminist activists who document cases of feminicide, her work was a labor of love, care and memory. May she rest in peace 💜.

From Chapter 2: Official Data, Missing Data, Counterdata

In 2019, two nonprofit organizations released a somber report called La Persistencia de La Indolencia: Feminicidios En Puerto Rico 2014–2018
(The Persistence of Indolence: Feminicides in Puerto Rico 2014–2018). The report compared news reports and official death registry records about feminicide with police records of murdered women and found that, in any given year, police data were missing between 11 percent and 27 percent
of the year’s feminicide victims. That is to say, the police did not know about, or have on record, the murders of more than a quarter of the women killed in Puerto Rico in a given year. Thus, the “indolence” in the title of the report referred to the state’s response to the problem of feminicide on the island. This indolence had grown in the years leading up to the report and was woven together with larger shifts: the Office of the Attorney General of Women was increasingly politicized and rendered ineffective; neoliberal measures gutted public services; and the island experienced increasing environmental shocks. All of these were backgrounded by the colonial political context. As a territory of the United States, Puerto Rico has struggled for autonomy for more than a century. The report was undertaken by Proyecto Matria, an organization that works
toward economic justice for women, in collaboration with Kilómetro Cero, a nonprofit that monitors human rights and police violence in Puerto Rico. As Mari Mari Narváez, founder of Kilómetro Cero, explained to our team, “Our interest initially was to collect data for us to be able to further expand our work on the state’s response, particularly that of the police, in regards to gender-related violence. There really was a very basic data problem in Puerto Rico. In other words, it was simply not known how many feminicides there were.”

This chapter explores the official data published by the state in relation to the twin phenomena of missing data — exemplified by the many murders of women in Puerto Rico that are inexplicably absent from official reports — and counterdata — those cases painstakingly compiled by individuals and feminist organizations in Puerto Rico and assembled for analysis in the report. Missing data and counterdata are central concepts for data activism about feminicide, so this chapter provides more background on both,
including literature review, practical definitions, and further theoretical elaboration. The chapter also introduces the idea of restorative/transformative data science — a concept that aims to encompass the motivations, process, and impacts of undertaking data activism about feminicide, as well as in other domains characterized by durable structural inequalities. We will see how all of these concepts are at work in this specific case of the Persistence of Indolence report and its impact in Puerto Rico. The production of counterdata is not a simple task, particularly in an information ecosystem characterized by institutional inaction — a will to not know that invisibilizes feminicide and legitimizes impunity. As Alice Driver observes, there is a disquieting parallel here with the disappearances that often mark the murder of women: missing bodies
are accompanied by unrecorded violence. And no one can be held accountable for what is not known.

When the two nonprofit groups decided that they wanted to study feminicide in Puerto Rico, they had to figure out how to get the data. At the time, there was no official data explicitly about feminicide because no legislation had been passed that outlined a legal framework for the concept. The closest thing to official data was the police data about deaths due to domestic violence, which only came in aggregated form. That was how, in 2018, Proyecto Matria and Kilómetro Cero made a visit to an
égida — a senior living facility — in San Juan where Carmen Castelló lives on her state pension. Castelló retired from a career in social work in 2010 and began caring for her grandniece, baby Alba. While the baby slept, she would watch the news on TV and read newspapers, and she was alarmed at what appeared to be increasing rates of feminicide and sexual assault. She started applying skills she had learned on the job, “Because we, as social workers, when we serve people, we open a case file and follow up on it, right?”

Castelló learns about new cases through the news and logs each case of feminicide that she finds in a Word document. She monitors the news every day but tries not to do it early in the morning because it affects her emotionally to start her day with violence. Castelló has become an expert on the media ecosystem in Puerto Rico and in particular looks to lesser-known news sources from small towns and villages for details about each
case. As the case develops, she uses the media reports on it to follow it through the justice system and updates the Word document with the new details, carefully noting the sources of the information. At the same time, she also publishes all cases and updates on her Facebook page: Seguimiento de Casos (Case tracking). Castelló also compiles separate databases about sexual abuse and missing women. When Proyecto Matria and Kilómetro Cero approached her about their study, Castelló was happy to work with them; she shares her files freely with any organizations working to address the issue.

Castelló’s data became the starting point for the Persistence of Indolence report. Kilómetro Cero, an organization led by journalists, fact-checked
and verified each case in Castelló’s database. Says Debora Upegui-Hernández, a data analyst who joined the Observatorio de Equidad de Género Puerto Rico in 2020, “So far [Castelló’s data] has been the most reliable and most up-to-date source I have seen.”

Keep reading the open access version of Counting Feminicide, including how Castelló’s data, in combination with the work of the two human rights organizations, led to novel legislation and policy around feminicide in Puerto Rico.

Honoring the legacy of Carmen Castelló, pathbreaking auntie and caregiver, who monitored feminicide… was originally published in Data + Feminism Lab, MIT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve begun a new project to synthesize the emerging literature around “technofascism” into an accessible explainer. Since I’m an educator, I’ve also been thinking about ways that teachers and facilitators could involve newcomers in these conversations. So, I came with a first draft of a “Technofascist Technology Quiz” designed to be used in formal or informal learning settings. I’d love to hear about anything you think is wrong or missing and, if you make use of it, I’d love to hear how it goes.

Definition of Technofascism

As you may have read in my prior post, I’m working on an accessible non-academic definition of technofascism. I’ve revised it since that first post and here are the current working definitions:

Short: Fascism amplified by technology.

Medium: Technofascism describes the collusion of large technology firms, right-wing billionaires and tech culture with authoritarian, extractive, violent, and anti-democratic political agendas.

Long: This convergence of technological and financial power with fascist state inclinations leads to products that directly threaten democracy, human life, and the planet: AI and advanced technologies placed in the service of violence, war and military occupation; the surveilling and policing of citizens and residents; the systematic traumatization of public servants; the racialized deportation and internment of migrants; the censorship and silencing of free speech; and the elevation of propaganda, misogyny, transphobia, hate speech and mob violence on media platforms.

The Technofascist Technology Quiz

This quiz can be used as a teaching and reflection exercise to start to think together about the anti-democratic nature of the production process, governance, and impacts of specific technologies, systems and platforms. This includes AI but it is not limited to AI. Choose any tech product out there and do your research to be able to answer the following questions.

1. Do billionaires own, control and profit from this technology?
2. Is a military or law enforcement agency a main client for this technology?
3. Is the data infrastructure for this technology centralized, corporate and proprietary?
4. Do the firms that control this technology spend millions to resist regulation?
5. Is this technology marketed to bosses? Would workers reject it?
6. Does this technology surveil or cage or kill people?
7. In the hands of fascists, could this technology be used to surveil or cage or kill people?
8. Does this technology sort people into deserving and undeserving groups?
9. Does this technology ration public services (housing, health care, education, food benefits)?
10. Is this technology built on the theft and looting of human creative labor?
11. Does this technology automate labor that workers value and do not want to automate?
12. Does this technology incentivize the exploitation, degradation or harassment of trans people, Black people, women and/or other minoritized groups? Do its owners profit from those behaviors?
13. Does this technology incentivize the circulation of propaganda, disinformation, or spectacle? Do its owners profit from those behaviors?
14. Does this technology require more water and energy to develop and run than a small city?
15. Are any workers in the supply chain of this tech exploited and underpaid? Are any of them, anywhere in the supply chain, prevented from unionizing?

Scoring the Technofascist Tech Quiz

Add up how many questions you answered “Yes” to.

0: Technofascism Free. Congratulations! The tech you chose to analyze appears to be fascism-free. This means the financers, owners and developers have carefully considered its ownership model, supply chain, labor rights, development process, environmental impacts and potential for anti-democratic and violent outcomes. Or wait! It could also mean that the technology is so early-stage that it hasn’t yet gotten its chance to enter the surveillance fascism economy. So keep an eye on it!

1–3: Technofascism on Tap. This technology has some anti-democratic tendencies and potential for major harm. Could you work with others to exert some pressure to reform it? It might be worth a try. Either way, you shouldn’t trust this technology. Want to get off it? Here’s a handy guide for finding a non-fascist alternative.

4–8: Technofascist Treachery. This technology appears to be aiding and abetting the intersection of authoritarianism and surveillance capitalism. This means it is profiting off of the erosion of our democratic norms, institutions and systems. It is materially harming many people, including its users and workers. You definitely shouldn’t use this technology and you can consider joining forces with others to fight against it. Want to get off it? Here’s a handy guide for finding an non-fascist alternative.

9–15: Technofascist Trash. Did you choose a technology made by Palantir? Whatever this technology does, it’s not worth the risk to democracy, human life, and planetary viability. Do whatever you can to abolish this technology.

Key References for Technofascism

Chenoweth, Erica, and Zoe Marks. 2022. “Revenge of the Patriarchs.” Foreign Affairs, February 8. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2022-02-08/women-rights-revenge-patriarchs.

Coeckelbergh, Mark. 2026. “Technofascism: AI, Big Tech, and the New Authoritarianism.” AI & SOCIETY, 2025.

González, Roberto J. 2025. “American Technofascism.” Human Organization 0 (0): 1–5.

Haymarket Books. 2026. AI and the Techno-Fascist Nightmare. 2:30:01. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWIyuHfirrc.

Kaul, Nitasha, and Barry Buzan. “Trump’s new America and the question of fascism.” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations (2026): 13691481261418500.

Lewis, Becca. 2025. “‘Headed for Technofascism’: The Rightwing Roots of Silicon Valley.” Technology. The Guardian, January 29, 2025.

Translash Podcast, host. 2025. The Rise of Techno-Fascism. April 10. https://translash.org/podcasts/translash-podcast/the-rise-of-techno-fascism/.

Zuboff, Shoshana. 2022. “Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy? The Death Match of Institutional Orders and the Politics of Knowledge in Our Information Civilization.” Organization Theory 3 (3): 26317877221129290.

The Technofascist Technology Quiz was originally published in Data + Feminism Lab, MIT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When data is missing, it’s not just a technical glitch — it’s a story about power. Recently, at McGill Love Data Week, Data + Feminism Lab's research affiliate, Alessandra Jungs de Almeida, presented the chapter "Missing Data," which examines how data gaps shape our lives, from government accountability to community protection.

Why do some numbers disappear? Who decides what gets counted — and what doesn’t? Through real-world examples, Alessandra shows how activists fight to uncover hidden truths, why some communities choose to keep data secret, and how these choices impact justice and equality.

You can read the chapter by Catherine D'Ignazio, Lauren Klein, and Alessandra Jungs de Almeida in the book Keywords of the Datafied State, published by Data & Society. The talk is available in the video below:

Why Missing Data Matters: Power, Justice, and the Stories We Don’t See was originally published in Data + Feminism Lab, MIT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m on sabbatical this spring and was studiously avoiding starting any new projects. But the siege of Minneapolis, the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti and Silverio Villeges González and Keith Porter Jr., the detentions of hundreds of Hispanic neighbors in my own Boston/Cambridge region, and all of the reports about ICE spending its war chest on tech to violently police and repress US cities and their residents got me onto thinking about technofascism.

Back in early 2025, when Elon Musk and Mr. Big Balls and the No-Clue Bro Crew were running roughshod over the federal government, I started seeing the word “technofascism” pop up across news articles and podcasts: “The Rise of Techno-Fascism,” “Technofascism comes to America”, “Headed for Technofascism”, “The Technofascist Mind: A Guide to Its Psychology and Philosophy” and even “AI and the Techno-Fascist Nightmare”. The DOGE debacle, Musk’s Nazi salute and the tech-bro dudes lined up dutifully at the presidential inauguration all appeared to be key triggers for pundits to rethink the relationship between Big Tech and government and start discussing technofascism as the word that names that relationship.

Yet, while these relatively recent and spectacular examples of collusion garnered headlines, once I started digging into technofascism as a concept, there is far more to it than simply what has happened since Jan 20, 2025. For example, communications scholar Becca Lew has an exciting forthcoming book on the nascent technofascism of Silicon Valley in the 1980s and 90s. And Janis Mimura has used the term to describe Japan’s distinct form of fascism in the 1930s: an authoritarian, technocratic state that fused its public and private spheres.

I’ve now started a hopefully not-too-ambitious project to research and write a basic explainer on technofascism. The idea is that it will be geared towards the tech community (broadly speaking) and especially young people getting their start in tech and tech-adjacent fields. At MIT, I teach students who are eager to understand how their work in computer science, AI, design, data science and tech can contribute to making the world a better place. They don’t typically come to college to build tools to surveil people, cage people or kill people. We might begin to think about technofascism as a negative design space — how do we avoid doing that?

But before we can design against technofascism, we need a working understanding of what technofascism might mean. Based on my reading and listening so far, I’ve developed the following long-ish definition of technofascism:

In its contemporary form, technofascism describes the collusion of large technology firms, right-wing billionaires, and tech culture with authoritarian and anti-democratic political agendas. This convergence of technological and financial power with fascist state inclinations leads to products that directly threaten multiracial democracy, human life, and the planet: AI and advanced technologies placed in the service of violence, war and military occupation; the surveilling and policing of citizens and residents; the systematic traumatization of public servants; the racialized deportation and internment of migrants; the censorship and silencing of free speech; the devaluing, deskilling, automation and pauperization of workers; and the elevation of misogyny, transphobia, hate speech and mob violence on out-of-control social media platforms.

Technofascism did not begin in 2025. Rather paradoxically, it has its roots in Western liberal democracy: colonial and imperialist systems that were always predicated on human rights for some and conquest and extraction for others. Such regimes regularly used their most advanced technologies to exploit nature, steal land, subjugate women, discipline gender-nonconforming people, and dehumanize racialized populations. Over history, various ideologies emerged to justify such adventures in resource-hoarding. Some of those are still with us: e.g. eugenics, the gender binary, scientism, and the cult of the male genius. Today’s technofascism is acute because it has been exacerbated by extreme wealth inequality, financialization, environmental destruction and billionaire delusion.

What do you think? Drop me a line with comments, readings and resources I should be reviewing as this moves forward.

What is Technofascism? was originally published in Data + Feminism Lab, MIT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Reflections on the recent Conference on Gender and International Affairs

I recently co-chaired the Fletcher School’s 11th Annual Conference on Gender and International Affairs: “Interrogating the Authoritarian Frame: Boundaries of Belonging.” This year, we convened ‘CGIA’ with the intention of examining how the global rise of authoritarianism is reshaping identity, rights, and belonging across political, economic, and cultural domains.

This conference aimed to defend feminist language, frameworks, and values, proving the utility of feminism in identifying and addressing human problems, across disciplines. On November 13th and 14th, through two keynote addresses, a workshop, and several panel discussions, I had the joy of sharing a space with other people concerned with resisting authoritarianism and advancing feminist approaches, and I learned so much.

Our first keynote was Data + Feminism’s very own Catherine D'Ignazio (she/ella), who offered me the opportunity to publish on this blog. In the spirit of other reading lists and letters shared here, I’d like to offer some reflections through our conference lineup, sharing the conversations we had and highlighting each voice that contributed. I will also share recommended material. Part of CGIA 2025’s mission was to create a collective learning experience, and I hope to extend that through this blog.

Some context: this CGIA which followed ten other powerful, thematically diverse explorations of gender in the international affairs arena at the Fletcher School. From the inaugural CGIA theme “Gender and International Affairs: Avenues for Change” in 2015, to “Power, Policy, Progress: Redefining Authority, Reshaping Influence” in 2023, CGIA seeks to meet the global affairs zeitgeist with diverse feminist perspectives and critical conversations. When offered the opportunity to co-chair this year, Emily Ruhm and I found ourselves in simultaneous, mutual agreement that under our leadership, CGIA must explore and resist authoritarianism through its central theme. No other theme felt more prescient in global affairs or gender studies today.

Emily Ruhm and I co-authored an essay contextualizing the theme and describing the ‘authoritarian frame’ that CGIA 2025 sought to challenge. In it, and throughout our promotion, we cited many works as inspirational, which I recommend:

• A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
• Emily’s substack, The Gendered Compass
• “(En)Gendering Authoritarianism,” Míriam Juan-Torres, Laura Livingston, and Tara Chandra’s report for UC Berkeley’s Institute of Othering and Belonging
• “Feminist Curiosities in Dark Times,” Cynthia Enloe’s Clark University retirement lecture and her book The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire
• Freedom Is A Constant Struggle by Angela Y. Davis
• Intimate Enemies by Kimberly Theidon
• Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez
• Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler
• “Why Gender Is Central to the Antidemocratic Playbook” by Saskia Brechenmacher

As mentioned, Catherine D’Ignazio offered our first keynote with presentation titled “Another AI is Possible” that traversed AI’s limitations and its potential. She introduced the concept of technofascism by referencing autocratic leadership, their relationship with government, and the role of patriarchal norms in corporate ‘Big Tech’ entities. She described the resounding impact that this context has, both on tech development, and resulting from its imposition on the general public. She provided an overview of the past 15 years of work in critical data theory, including its advancement of important concepts toward naming the discriminatory and harmful effects of data systems and AI. She noted that critique is essential, but that we can do more, that we need to paint alternative visions about how to move in the world while using data and AI in the service of justice. Catherine also shared the following recommendations in her presentation, which I pass along and will be adding to my own list:

Work describing the harmful ideologies and discriminatory effects of AI:

• Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks
• Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Azoulay Katz
• “The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence” by Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
• The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias

Work exploring the role that AI/data/tech have to play in building a more just world:

• Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action by Catherine D’Ignazio
• Data Action: Using Data for Public Good by Sarah Williams
• Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein*
• Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need by Sasha Costanza-Chock
• Indigenous Data Sovereignty
• Indigenous Statistics: A Quantitative Research Methodology by Chris Andersen and Maggie Walter
• Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action by Kevin Guyan
• “Seeking Liberation: Surveillance, Datafication, and Race” by Roderic Crooks
• Tierra Común, interventions for data decolonization
• Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want by Ruha Benjamin

In addition to these (*especially Data Feminism, which was already on my list, of course) I recommend:

• Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis
• For folks (like me) who are not technologists/have grown up post-2000 with internet telecommunication being utterly ubiquitous, I also recommend reading about the development of the internet (like the highly romantic book Where wizards stay up late by Kate Hafner) and early internet culture, while keeping in mind which identities are not represented in those histories and spaces.

Our second keynote was offered by Katharine Young who spoke about the misappropriation of human rights language by the new global right, which she has written on with Gráinne de Búrca in “The (mis)appropriation of human rights by the new global right: An introduction to the Symposium.” She provided an overview of the many examples of this trend across the globe, from Russia, Uganda, India, Brazil, Turkey and the US, illustrating the ways in which autocrats have manipulated normative and legalistic advances in the promotion of human rights, to restrict rights and freedoms.

• In addition to her paper, I recommend The Oxford Handbook of Economic and Social Rights, which Katharine co-edited,
• and “The Right to Be Human: Rest and Leisure in International Human Rights Law” by Chidi Anselm Odinkalu.

We began the second day with a panel discussion titled “The Silencing of Academics: Gender, Identity, and Voice under Authoritarianism,” which was moderated by Emily Ruhm. We heard from Rose Anderson, Director for Protection Services at Scholars At Risk; Feven Araya Teclehaimanot, a Licensed Clinical Psychologist with extensive experience as both a lecturer and clinician who provided Mental Health and Psychosocial Support to survivors of various atrocities, primarily focusing on gender-based violence, throughout the two years of the Tigray war; Raquel Rosario Sánchez a writer, researcher and campaigner from the Dominican Republic and a former frontline worker in women’s services, who focuses on ending male violence against girls and women; and Simten Cosar, a feminist political scientist, editor, translator and author from Turkey.

This conversation was grounded in the context of heightened risk to academics around the world. The panelists’ comments explored many of the ways in which academic freedoms can be limited, from politics to institutions to communities, and affirmed the necessity of critical, open dialogue as necessary for upholding democratic ideals. It also pushed participants to explore the complexities of broad coalition building and of navigating institutions, both their limitations and their role in platforming voices.

• The Scholars At Risk Network tracks and publishes information around academic freedom. This is a resource to use and to contribute to!

In addition to SAR’s work, I recommend reading:

• “A Feminist Defense of Transgender Sex Equality Rights” by Catharine A. MacKinnon
• AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom Volume 16
• The Embattled University in full, but particularly Judith Butler’s “Academic Freedom in a Time of Destruction: Reconsidering Extramural Speech”
• “Prospects for Coalition Building Across Difference” by Giuseppe Feola, Anya Al-Salem, Ozan Alakavuklar and Yousra Rahmouni Elidrissi
• “Zombies No Longer Willing to Make Do, Or, How to Save Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the Neoliberal and Illiberal Apocalypse” by Tracey Jean Boisseau and Heather Rellihan

I moderated our second panel, “Tech, Power, and Gender: Navigating Control and Resistance Online.” The panel included Alessandra Jungs de Almeida, another Data + Feminism contributor, educator and researcher who focuses on reproductive rights and lethal gender-related violence in Latin America; Dragana Kaurin, founder and Executive Director of Localization Lab, where she leads global efforts to decolonize technology and make digital tools equitable, accessible, and rooted in lived experience; and Rachel Cohen, External & Strategic Affairs Coordinator at Lowell and Associates, a law firm that aims to challenge government overreach, and a social media commentator who regularly discusses American politics and law on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

Our conversation covered how AI and social media can both challenge and support authoritarianism and inequality, focusing on whose voices are heard, whose are silenced, and how power is contested in digital spaces. Rachel Cohen contributed comments on allyship and leveraging her white, cis-gendered privilege to promote progressive and inclusive messaging on platforms with racist and sexist algorithmic bias that amplifies authoritarian ideology, rather than resisting it. Dragana Kaurin shared powerful reflections on algorithmic bias, surveillance, and how Big Tech can fuel modern authoritarianism saying “modern authoritarianism doesn’t need secret police when they have your SIM card.” She talked about what it takes to make people feel safe online across contexts and how the English-language bias of the internet and internet tools limit the potentially liberating elements of tech tools as they currently exist. Alessandra Jungs de Almeida shared reflections on what tech tools might look like without Big Tech at the center, pushing participants to consider alternatives beyond outright rejection of tech tools. All three panelists emphasized that applying feminist approaches cannot happen retroactively, as Cohen said “you can’t just sprinkle feminism on top,” but it must be present throughout development and implementation.

In addition to following Rachel’s Instagram and exploring the work of the Localization Lab, I recommend:

• Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble
• “Economic Rationales for Regulating Behavioral Ads” by Pegah Moradi, Cristobal Cheyre and Alessandro Acquisti
• “Missing Data” by Alessandra Jungs de Almeida, Lauren Klein, and Catherine D’Ignazio
• Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin

During our lunch ‘break’ I participated in a workshop called “Masculinity (Re)imagined,” facilitated by Isha Bhatnagar, Senior Research Officer with Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice. It began with a presentation on Equimundo’s report “The Cost of the Man Box: A study on the economic impacts of harmful masculine stereotypes in the United States” and concluded with a group discussion around defining masculinity as we see it now, and imagining what it could be.

I recommend: The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love by bell hooks

Following lunch we had a panel called “Security for whom? Feminist perspectives on militarism and peace” moderated by Professor David C. Logan, we heard from Kate Alexander, policy and campaign officer at MADRE and an expert in feminist foreign policy, peacebuilding, and grassroots advocacy; and Dr. Shirley Graham, Director of the Gender Equality Initiative in International Affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs and an expert in global gender policy, peacebuilding, and UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325, with a focus on military institutions, inclusive teaching, and feminist approaches to conflict resolution. Beginning with reflections on the recent 25th anniversary of UNSCR 1325 (known colloquially as 1325 or the Women, Peace and Security Agenda), their conversation spanned across regional and institutional perspectives, digging into the complexities of how militarization and authoritarianism intersect with gender, peace, and security. They focused on how securitization, and connected narratives about perpetual female victimhood, are central to authoritarian messaging and are instrumental in their power consolidation.

I recommend:

From the panelsists,

• Dr. Shirley Graham’s TedxTalk “How Feminism Saved Me” and “How a ‘feminist’ foreign policy would change the world” which she co-authored with Rollie Lal
• and Kate Alexander’s Substack

And for further reading about securitization and gender:

• “Advocates Decry the Rise of Authoritarians, the Demise of Women’s Rights” by Cynthia L. Cooper,
• another Cynthia Enloe classic: Bananas, Beaches and Bases (2nd Ed.),
• and “The Securitization of Conflict-Related Sexual Violence Against Women and the Myth of Protection in War” by Signe Skovgaard Madsen

We had a packed panel for “The Politics of Care: Challenging Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Authoritarianism.” This panel was convened to explore how the global care economy — shaped by capitalism and patriarchy — reinforces control, extraction, and exclusion, and to reimagine caregiving as shared public infrastructure rather than a private, gendered burden.

Moderated by Fletcher PhD candidate Dipali Anumol, we heard again from Isha Bhatnagar and from Catherine Rottenberg, Head of Culture and Media and Professor in the School of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, co-author of The Care Manifesto and “From Human Rights to A Politics of Care,” and editor of This Is Not A Feminism Textbook!; Wendy Chun-Hoon, President and Executive Director of the Center for Law and Social Policy and former executive director of Family Values @ Work; Alexis Cheney, an Analyst on the Women, Business and the Law project at the World Bank; and Sebastian Molano, Senior Advisor on Gender Justice at Oxfam America and the founder of Defying Gender Roles, an advocacy initiative that challenges harmful gender norms and seeks to transform masculinities through a feminist lens.

Catherine Rottenberg grounded the conversation with the important reminder that “our survival is and will always be contingent on others,” something that she said we must recognize especially as we imagine solutions to our societal problems. The panel discussed the dystopian visions of the future common in populist and authoritarian narratives, proposing alternative ways of envisioning a world based on mutuality and humanity. The conversation also addressed some of the ways in which authoritarians co-opt care, discussing the unpaid labor that underpins patriarchal systems, and the insidiousness of romantic and decontextualized trends like ‘tradwives.’

• Panelist Wendy Chun-Hoon was involved in the US Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau in 2023, bringing results from the Urban Institute’s “Lifetime Employment-Related Costs to Women of Providing Family Care” to the federal policy arena. While the report is no longer available on US government websites, Chun-Hoon’s presentation of it is referenced in “READOUT: US Department of Labor report finds impact of caregiving on mother’s wages reduces lifetime earnings by 15 percent” and the report can be read in full here.

In addition to the Urban Institute report and Catherine Rottenberg’s aforementioned works I also recommend:

• Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon,
• “Providing Unpaid Household and Care Work in the United States: Uncovering Inequality” by Jeff Hayes, Cynthia Hess and Tanima Ahmed and
• “Sundresses and rugged self-sufficiency: ‘tradwives’ tout a conservative American past … that didn’t exist” by Carter Sherman

Our final panel on transnational activism called “Our Power, Our Protest: A New Chapter in Gendered Resistance,” was convened as an opportunity to explore how feminist and gender justice movements globally have fought against oppression, patriarchy, and systemic inequalities. It was moderated by Professor Tamirace Fakhoury and included Jok Madut Jok, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Anthropology Department, and a Senior Research Associate, Program for Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration at Syracuse University; Jamila Raqib, Executive Director of the Albert Einstein Institution and a specialist in the study and practice of strategic nonviolent action; and Laura Nyirinkindi, a specialist in democratic governance, rule of law, and gender, and a member of the UN working group Group on Discrimination against Women and Girls.

Each speaker shared their experiences and reflections on the role of resistance in bringing about change. Jamila Raqib provided a powerful historical reminder that women have always been political actors, despite their absence in many mainstream narratives, citing an example of women’s protest leading to legal change in ancient Rome. Referencing protests in Bangladesh, Sudan and elsewhere, Jok Madut Jok and Laura Nyirinkindi both provided personal anecdotes and insights on everyday forms of protest, reminding us all that protest is not always organized and does not always come in large-scale, public ways, but in how individuals choose to live their lives, which must also be considered in reflecting on longitudinal change and in contextualizing institutional histories. Jok Madut Jok emphasized this, debunking the (elitist) myth that ordinary people under authoritarian regimes need to be enlightened in order to be mobilized, saying that what inspires people to engage in revolutions is what they live on the ground, and that revolutions would not be without ‘ordinary people.’ The panel concluded with stories of success and of joy, with Professor Jok encouraging everyone to celebrate any wins in human rights loudly and with pride.

The panelists work includes:

• Albert Einstein Institute’s Self-Liberation strategic planning toolkit
• Statement: Working Group on discrimination against women and girls Check against delivery 8 October 2024, Laura Nyirinkindi, Chairperson
• RESISTING SECTARIANISM: Queer Activism in Postwar Lebanon by Tamirace Fakhoury and John Nagle
• “Towards Sustainable Cultural Institutions for a New Nation: Creating a National Museum and Archives for South Sudan” by Elke Selter and Jok Madut Jok

I also recommend:

• Civil Resistance by Erica Chenoweth
• Femina by Janina Ramirez
• The Missing Thread by Daisy Dunn

To conclude, I would like to share that it is never lost on me that the inherently critical nature of feminist approaches, and therefore feminists and our reflections, are often painted as negative, angry, pessimistic, etc. It is not just that I have personally been accused of being what Sarah Ahmed termed a “feminist killjoy,” but because as a feminist, I spend so much time thinking about how the world I live in does harm, that I feel the exhaustion and pain that comes from seeing the world through feminist eyes (Sarah Ahmed has more beautiful, affirming words on this).

The two days of the CGIA this year reminded me that feminism’s critiques aren’t just that, they are gateways to solutions. They help us identify what does not work for us all, so that we can make something that does. The harm revealed by feminist lenses does not disappear without feminist curiosity, and cannot be addressed without it. The careers and contributions of every participant of CGIA 2025 is evidence that these solutions are not as far out of reach as they may feel in the face of the intimate violence of authoritarianism, which is a great source of hope for me. In her keynote, Catherine D’Ignazio shared a quote from Arundhati Roy in War Talk that is summative:

“Another world is possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

With gratitude,

Maeve Murphy

Note: While CGIA is a fully student-run conference, the team and I owe great thanks to the institution that hosts us: The Fletcher School of Global Affairs. Our coordination was closely supported by Cyndi Rubino and the Office of the Student Experience, and we raised significant funds by petitioning research institutes and departments within our community. The conference itself would not exist without the institutional backing of the Fletcher School, which is thanks to professors Dyan Mazurana and Kimberly Theidon. We opened the conference with comments from our esteemed Dean Kelly Sims Gallagher.

Interrogating the Authoritarian Frame: a reading list was originally published in Data + Feminism Lab, MIT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Written by Elena Keighobadi

Scrolling through TikTok one day, I came across a post of a woman making sourdough bread from scratch. The post appeared unremarkable at first, just another cooking video, until I noticed the hashtag #tradwife embedded in the caption. The tradwife is short for “traditional wife”, a popular social media trend where content creators encourage women to adopt a traditional lifestyle of staying at home and submitting to their husbands. Clicking on the hashtag, I came across hundreds of other videos that similarly used peaceful, domestic moments to convince viewers that a woman’s true purpose in life is confined to social reproduction tasks.

This is more than just a hashtag. Many of the posts represent highly conservative, if not far-right, views, which encapsulates current political divisions in the United States. From conventions where conservative young women express similar values to men dressed as ICE agents assaulting immigrant women, the trends online are a stark reflection of the country’s current political leadership’s increasingly harmful effects on women and minorities.

It is interesting to compare the tradwife hashtag with another popular online trend. The girlboss hashtag represents a movement which promotes the idea of achieving female empowerment through hustle culture. Aligned with neoliberal values like hyper-individualism and entrepreneurial greed, for the girlboss, only her own success is important; everything else comes second.

At first glance, the tradwife and girlboss trends appear wholly different. Yet, they share a number of traits. They are both packaged in appealing visuals, often including viral audios and memes. At first, watching their videos feels quite light-hearted and fun. However, as one examines the content more closely, as I did in my master’s dissertation research, engaging with their content reveals a slippery slope towards exposure to posts containing ultra-nationalism, white supremacy, and misogyny.

The tradwife posts in particular romanticise reproductive labour by showing women performing domestic housework dressed up and in full makeup, with plenty of time to spare for leisurely activities. In their world, this is a woman’s true purpose, and the fact that social reproduction is often unrecognised in the economy and presupposes full financial dependence on the husband is only celebrated. In fact, one post portrayed this as a “getaway from the stressful corporate world”.

In contrast, the girlboss trend shows labour within the corporate world. They are expected to work all day every single day to climb up the ranks and are, like the tradwife, expected to look good doing it. Housework here is reserved for underpaid cleaners and nannies.

As I discuss below, these trends pose challenges to online intersectional feminist activism.

A feminist intersectional lens on “tradwife” and “girlboss” trends

As I scrolled through “tradwife” and “girlboss” trends on TikTok, I became interested in exploring how these social media trends represent and promote oppressive ideologies, and what their implications might be for the mobilisation efforts of intersectional feminist activists who seek to confront these narratives. Feminist activists are also engaged in social media platforms, using it to disseminate feminist perspectives. How do these forms of online engagement and activism relate and respond to one another? How might we critically interrogate “tradwife” and “girlboss” trends from an intersectional feminist lens? These were the questions that guided my research.

Intersectionality here refers to the idea that multiple forms of oppression, such as racism, sexism and classism, are connected and that overcoming these issues requires us to address and fight against them as a collective.

I focused my research on TikTok because it provided a useful window into those trends. As a shared social media platform, TikTok is used by many young people and has become a hub for cultural and political expression across the ideological spectrum. I created two separate TikTok accounts, one to follow the #tradwife and the other for #girlboss. Both accounts were set for the US context to reduce the geographic scope. During the month of July 2025, I checked the accounts daily for related posts, collecting over 150 posts that contained the hashtags #tradwife, #girlboss and other associated hashtags. I then constructed a database, analysing each post based on their messaging, aesthetics and representation. I also documented top comments for each post to understand the response tactics by both supporters and activists who oppose those views.

Behind the Facade

Examining the narratives portrayed in the posts, a key finding of my research is that, despite differences among the two hashtag trends, both normalise beliefs that challenge intersectional feminist perspectives. Their narratives are accompanied and even highlighted by the help of visual styles and performances. While aesthetics are often used to ‘soften the blow’ of expressing oppressive views, they can also be political statements within themselves.

As the examples below illustrate, several tradwife posts display serene views, bright colours and put-together women that are meant to show unpaid, gendered labour and subjugation in a light-hearted way, acting as an entryway to becoming desensitised towards more radical ideas around misogyny and white supremacy. Creators simplify housework tasks by only showing the aesthetic and pretty aspects when filming the videos, such as baking sourdough bread, going on walks with the kids and getting spa treatments to “look presentable for the husband”. The girlboss posts, in contrast, glorify the corporate world with videos showing luxurious items and using influencers as role models. It sells the romanticised idea that achieving a millionaire-like status is possible for anyone, dismissing the oppression that people of colour and the working-class face within the current capitalist system.

Posts typically weave political beliefs with personal storytelling in ways that encourage disregard for others and spread harmful opinions, making them appear more publicly acceptable. As a result, the posts actively antagonise marginalised groups. The casual use of the word “illegals” when referring to migrants or queer people being labelled as mentally ill are just some of the tamer examples.

By going one step further, the posts also actively spread misinformation about feminist thinking and movements. Take, for example, a post where a blonde, white woman displays an illegible graphic without a stated source to blame feminism for the current state of the US economy. She states that women entering the workforce and earning their own income directly led to the drastic rise in living costs, as two-income households became “expected”. This constitutes a harmful tactic that aims to legitimise their beliefs while undermining opposing ones.

Anti-feminist rhetoric also often includes racist, transphobic, and Islamophobic remarks, which shows how oppressive ideologies intersect at multiple points. This ranges from tradwives labelling Latino communities as “illegal” and justifying the current ICE raids to girlbosses saying that a transwoman is “still a man” and cannot embrace the inherent feminine energy needed to become successful.

By spreading these ideas both through their messaging as well as making them seem appealing through visual methods, they challenge intersectional, collective action and discourage critical discourse that question the underlying systemic oppressions of marginalised communities.

It is also worth noting that most of the creators I documented across both trends were conventionally attractive, young, white women. The deliberate exclusion of POC drives the disconnect and exclusion even further. POC were never included in the idealised worlds represented, suggesting that they do not have a place in them.

How online trends distract activists from making a real difference

Given TikTok’s large userbase and popularity, trends like #tradwife and #girlboss inevitably encounter and clash with feminist accounts and movements. In fact, communities focused on intersectional feminist activists are often being infiltrated and co-opted by these other trends. One tactic for this is what is called “hashjacking“, an abbreviation for hashtag-hijacking, where content creators use prominent network hashtags like #feminism to spread misinformation and harmful content. This tactic can severely undermine feminist community-building in social networks. With doxxing being a prominent tactic among more radically conservative users, this can also invite ill-intentioned people into their spaces and even put activists, such as POC at risk of being attacked by ICE, in danger.

Another tactic through which #tradwife and #girlboss content creators can co-opt and undermine feminist activism online is through what I categorised as trolling, also called nowadays “rage-baiting”. This involves deliberate attempts to provoke anger and frustration, a tactic that fuels hostility and that diverts the attention of feminist users away from more constructive engagement such as uplifting marginalised voices and experiences within their own circles instead. During my research, I encountered multiple posts by tradwife content creators stating that feminism ruins femininity, or how, in the case of the girlboss trend, women not “hustling” every single day makes them losers.

This observation leads to what was perhaps one of the most interesting findings from my research, related to audience engagement. For example, documenting the comments on posts where tradwives give a general overview of their lifestyles, there were supportive and encouraging responses, but also harmful rhetoric and highly critical and hateful replies which demonstrated deep division within the audience. The screenshots above exemplify such comments. One response shows support towards a tradwife by fuelling hatred against opponents, while another, from a self-proclaimed feminist, argued against submitting to the husband suggesting a depressing future.

In relation to the tradwife trend, one subset of comments was particularly striking. As indicated in the screenshot below, I noticed the concept of choice feminism, which describes every choice a woman makes as ‘inherently feminist’, being used on multiple occasions by both supporters as well as satirically by critics.

Users responding with such comments risked legitimising racist and misogynistic ideas portrayed in tradwife posts — ideas that can actively harm and oppress marginalised communities in the name of “women supporting women”. By relying on this form of contemporary feminism within the subsection of comments as a simple way of gaining the high ground in online altercations, this shallow form of feminism empties the space for genuine and intersectional discourse.

How should feminist activists respond?

While the “girlboss” and the “tradwife” hashtags are only specific examples of how online feminist discourse can be disrupted, they reflect a wider picture of how entertaining and often visually appealing trends may infiltrate the viewer’s subconscious with harmful ideologies and slowly radicalise them.

By keeping a close eye on how harmful rhetoric is repackaged into seemingly innocuous online trends, intersectional feminist activists can prepare more effective and informed counter-movements. This includes being able to discern between distracting rage-bait posts and serious content as well as being aware of aesthetics as a politicised tactic to lure people in.

Moreover, it is important to develop engagement tactics that confront internalised forms of racism and misogyny. Using surface-level responses, like choice feminism, comes across as performative and reinforces privileged perspectives without addressing the underlying, systemic oppressions that marginalised communities face. Activists need to make a conscious effort to amplify the voices of those who have long and continuously been silenced.

About the author: Elena Keighobadi recently completed her master’s degree in International Business and Politics at Queen Mary University of London. As a volunteer activist, she is very interested in how today’s political climate affects activism.

Further reading:

- Arshad, M. (2022). Girlboss, Gaslight, Gatekeep: Feminism in a Capitalistic World. [online] Harvard Political Review. Available at: https://harvardpolitics.com/girlboss-gaslight-gatekeep/.

- Sykes, I. (2025). From ‘girlboss’ to #stayathomegirlfriend: The romanticisation of domestic labour on TikTok. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 28(3). doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494241285643.

- Sykes, S. and Hopner, V. (2023). Tradwives: The Housewives Commodifying Right-Wing Ideology. [online] GNET. Available at: https://gnet-research.org/2023/07/07/tradwives-the-housewives-commodifying-right-wing-ideology/.

My Body, Whose Choice? was originally published in Data + Feminism Lab, MIT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The research presented below, which focuses on sexual and reproductive rights in Latin America, was also developed within the context of the Data + Feminism Lab and the Women's and Gender Studies Program, at MIT. It brings together international politics and critical data studies to examine how transnational activists have been producing data either in defense of or in opposition to abortion rights.

Dissertation on Reproductive Rights in Latin America Wins National Award

By Ana Paula Lückman (Journalist at Agecom — UFSC)

Organized feminist movements in the Global South are capable of disseminating and working toward the internalization of reproductive rights norms without depending predominantly on the structures and organizations of the Global North. This analysis, which challenges classical International Relations literature, is one of the main contributions of the dissertation “Reproductive Rights in Latin America: Transnational Activisms and the Evolution of Abortion Legalization and Criminalization Policies in Argentina and Brazil (2010–2022)”, defended in 2024 by researcher Alessandra Jungs de Almeida in the Graduate Program in International Relations at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (PPGRI/UFSC). The work won first place in the 2025 Marcos Costa Lima Award, promoted by the Brazilian Association of International Relations (ABRI).

In her dissertation, Alessandra emphasizes the importance of studying sexual and reproductive rights from a Global South perspective, not necessarily geographically, but as a political and identity-based stance. “Doing research through a lens committed to Latin American feminism produces a different way of doing research, a lens that also carries a political commitment to lived realities,” she states. This, she stresses, considers the historical struggles within feminism, “understanding the daily violations related to sexual and reproductive rights as absurd, and recognizing the lived experience of those impacted by the denial of such rights — like the human right to decide whether to continue a pregnancy or to raise children in dignified conditions.”

In her analysis, Alessandra observes that Latin American feminisms, such as those in Brazil and Argentina, were able to circulate abortion rights norms within the region autonomously, without needing to pressure Global North institutions — contradicting what IR literature calls the “boomerang effect.” “These activisms did not require the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, nor what International Relations calls the ‘boomerang effect,’ where international institutions or states — especially from the Global North — are pressured to in turn pressure national governments like those of Argentina or Brazil. What I observed was an autonomous movement capable of building networks, coordinating strategies, and influencing public and foreign policy from within the region,” she explains.

The research methodology combined interviews with 17 activists from transnational organizations and movements, analysis of 770 documents from multilateral forums — 249 of which were on reproductive rights — and discourse analysis of content published by anti-abortion groups on their social media.

Political Process

Despite the historical strength of feminist movements in Brazil and Argentina, the situation of sexual and reproductive rights in Latin America remains highly restrictive, with a few recent legal victories in Uruguay (2012), Argentina (2020), Colombia (2022), and Mexico (2023). Alessandra notes that the growth of anti-rights movements is, paradoxically, a sign that feminist movements are having a positive impact in advancing these rights. She argues that feminists are on the right path, actively confronting disinformation and stigma, pushing for public policies, and producing data that reveal structural violence. She highlights important achievements, such as the removal of the phrase “life from conception” from Brazil’s 1988 Constitution and the right to abortion in cases of anencephaly, reinforcing her belief in the possibility of changing political processes. “Understanding that laws can be changed is part of the process. I interviewed Brazilian activists who have been fighting for abortion rights for 40 years. I hope they live to see these changes. I hope current generations — my own generation — continue this fight and achieve these victories with them. In my view, we are on the right path when we are not fatalistic and see political processes as changeable,” she reflects.

Alessandra’s interest in the topic arose from the intense political context of the 2010s, marked by the activism of transnational feminist movements such as Ni Una Menos, the International Women’s Strike (8M), and the Green Tide for abortion legalization, led by Argentine feminists. This, coupled with her perception that this context could be analyzed through International Relations (IR) — a field in Brazil lacking specific debates on abortion — shaped her path.

“From that point on, I began to see the field’s potential to analyze these transnational feminist movements and their relationship with formal politics. I started questioning — also in direct response to the provocations of my advisor, Professor Mónica Salomón — how Brazil positioned itself on abortion in international forums like the UN; how the Green Tide movement, though originated in Argentina, spread and became localized in other cities through transnational and regional coordination; or how local social movements connected with broader international dynamics, such as the Catholic Church’s disputes over the use of the concept of gender,” Alessandra explains. She argues that it is possible to think of International Relations beyond the closed spaces of governments or international organizations, “but also from the struggles of various people in different cities — struggles that are also transnational and influence international and foreign policy.”

Antifeminism

Another analysis developed by Alessandra identifies the expansion of transnational anti-abortion activism, which she situates within the broader scope of the antifeminist movement. “This movement grows precisely in response to the advances of feminist movements. That’s something we’ve seen historically,” she notes. “For example, in 1973, when Roe v. Wade was approved in the United States, legalizing abortion at the federal level, countermovements began organizing more strongly. That’s when the Marches for Life began, initially in Washington. Today, these marches are held in several cities in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Mexico — always with the same discourse: defending life from conception. In other words, it is a direct reaction to feminist legal and political advances,” she describes. For the researcher, the growth of conservative groups may signal that feminist movements are succeeding in spreading and strengthening the norm of sexual and reproductive rights. “The anti-abortion movement gains strength as a reaction, which reveals the impact of feminist movements.”

Alessandra admits she was surprised that her dissertation was recognized as the best in the field of International Relations in 2024 — first, because it deals with a socially stigmatized issue like reproductive rights and abortion; and second, because of its use of a feminist and gender-sensitive perspective, which is still often overlooked in many academic fields, “but especially in International Relations,” she emphasizes. “This award is not just my achievement: it also has meaning for everyone researching abortion and sexual and reproductive rights in areas where the topic is still marginalized,” she concludes.

Data + Feminism Lab Researcher Receives National Award in Brazil was originally published in Data + Feminism Lab, MIT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The reading group met weekly during the academic year and discussed books, articles, podcasts, short videos, etc. So much of the best thinking about abolition is not coming from academic books written by professors in their offices, so we stayed flexible with the kinds of material we engaged with, being mindful that our own guiding interests in abolition were generally not abstract or theoretical. That is, we wanted to read more than theory: we wanted to listen to community organizers, activists, writers, and fighters doing the work to build a better world.

Below is a selection of some of the themes we discussed over two years.

Getting Oriented

First, what is abolition?

We began by engaging with material that oriented us towards contemporary abolitionist thinking

• Watch this video (37 min), recommended by Critical Resistance’s “New To Abolition Study Guide” (This one is a high-level accessible theory overview)
• Miriame Kaba leads another abolition 101 (1:47:34)
• This one is very stats/quant heavy which might be useful for folks who are interested in hearing data about prison industrial complex and the specific ways it harms groups of people. (TW: mentions of abuses of chattel slavery — included clip video approx 46:00–50:00)
• Davis, Angela. Are Prisons Obsolete?, Chapter 1
• Lamble, S. (2021, August 19). Practicing Everyday Abolition — Abolitionist Futures
• Rodríguez, D. (2019). Abolition as a praxis of human being: a foreword. The Harvard Law Review.
• related: More on Rodríguez’s critique of the term mass incarceration in Issue 26 of The Abolitionist
• Arvin, M. (2015). Still in the Blood: Gendered Histories of Race, Law, and Science in Day v. Apoliona. American Quarterly, 67(3), 681–703.
• Police Unions and the Labor Movement

Abolition in international contexts

• Australia
• Building An Abolition Movement for International Criminal Law?
• Abolitionist and Retentionist Countries | Death Penalty Information Center
• Canada — Defund The Police

What can abolition look like in practice?

• The Interrupters (1:54:42) This is a documentary about violence interrupters in Chicago. (wiki page)
• So is this Actually an Abolitionist Proposal or Strategy? A collection of resources to aid in evaluation and reflection Some of these are discussed in this presentation transcript
• Quick case studies:
• This Black Working Class Community Policed Itself For 5 Days. Here’s How It Turned Out — Essence
• Abolition Struggle Ongoing in Minneapolis 2 Years After Police Killed George Floyd, Spurring Protests | Democracy Now!
• What Went Wrong With the #8CantWait Police Reform Initiative? — Colorlines
• 8 to Abolition’s community models
• Extended Case Study: Unarmed responders
• The Marshall Project: Sending Unarmed Responders instead of Police
• (podcast) https://tradeoffs.org/thefifthbranch/
• Extended Case Study: The Polynesian Panthers
• Podcast: The Platform: the radical legacy of the Polynesian Panthers
• Book: Anae, M. (2020). The platform: The radical legacy of the Polynesian Panthers (Vol. 85). Bridget Williams Books.
• On the Dawn Raids here and here.
• Podcast: Once a Panther — 6-part podcast series
• TV Show: The Panthers Mini-Series (Described as “faction” a little bit of fact, a little bit of fiction”)
• Book Chapter: Shilliam, R. (2012). The Polynesian Panthers and the Black power gang: Surviving racism and colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand. In Black power beyond borders: The global dimensions of the Black power movement (pp. 107–126). New York: Palgrave Macmillan US.

Connecting Abolition to Other Issues

Abolition & Environmental Justice

We were guided by this quote from Ruth Wilson Gilmore:

“Abolition has to be “green.” It has to take seriously the problem of environmental harm, environmental racism, and environmental degradation. To be “green” it has to be “red.” It has to figure out ways to generalize the resources needed for well-being for the most vulnerable people in our community, which then will extend to all people. And to do that, to be “green” and “red,” it has to be international. It has to stretch across borders so that we can consolidate our strength, our experience, and our vision for a better world.”

• Pellow, David N. “Struggles for environmental justice in US prisons and jails.” Antipode 53.1 (2021): 56–73.
• Americas Toxic Prisons: The Environmental Injustices Of Mass Incarceration
• Mass Incarceration is an Enviornmental Justice Issue (25m video)
• Ovienmhada, Ufuoma, et al. “Satellite Remote Sensing for Environmental Data Justice: Perspectives from Anti-Prison Community Organizers on the Uses of Geospatial Data.” Environmental Justice (2023).
• Purdum, Carlee et al. “No Justice, No Resilience: Prison Abolition As Disaster Mitigation in an Era of Climate Change.” Environmental justice 14.6 (2021): 418–425. Web.
• Ybarra, Megan. “Site fight! Toward the abolition of immigrant detention on Tacoma’s tar pits (and everywhere else).” Antipode 53.1 (2021): 36–55.

Abolition and Disability

We focused on Liat-Ben Moshe’s book Decarcerating Disability to frame our conversations.

Related materials:

• Sick Of It! Is an org that makes zines about disability & incarceration disabled. Here is their first zine, which is largely a disability justice primer:
• Committable is a podcast about involuntary commitments
• Death Panel: Disability and Abolition (podcast) Ben-Moshe discusses the book.
• New Books Network episode in which Ben-Moshe discusses the book

Abolition and The Family / Sexuality

Podcasts:

• Dr. Kim TallBear on Decolonizing Sexualizing Through Critical Polyamory (Strippers and Sages) [2020] or Decolonizing Sex (All My Relations) [2019]
• Sophie Lewis “Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation” (New Books in Critical Theory) [2022]
• Scott Lauria Morgensen “Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization” (New Books in Critical Theory) [2012]
• Leila Raven on Strippers and Sages: Abolition & Decriminalizing Sex Work [SEPT 29 2020]
• Lucy Bloom — When We’re Not Hustling Sex Workers Talk about Everything But: Anarchist Organizing & Community Care [JAN 2024]
• Socialism Conference (academic panel): Sex Work, Policing, and Border Abolition [DEC 2023]

Accessible academic article:

• Berg, H. (2024). If you’re going to be beautiful, you better be dangerous: Sex worker community defense. Radical History Review, 2024(148), 130–153.

Abolitionist Futures

• Muslim Abolitionist Futures (website)
• Abolition on Stolen Lands (46m video of zoom panel)
• Toolkit with readings and a playlist
• Astraea Foundation — Tech for Abolitionist Futures (printed or web-based report)
• A Podcast (1h16m) (w/ transcript) about Miriame Kaba’s One Million Experiments
• One Million Experiments is an experimental documentary film that showcases and explores how we define and create safety in a world without police and prisons, produced by Respair Production and Media, Interrupting Criminalization, and SoapBox Productions and Organizing.
• The Rise of a Trans Abolitionist Vision (1h26 video of zoom panel plus blog post)
• Futures of Abolition: Trans and Queer Resistance Against the Prison Industrial Complex (1h26m video of panel talk)
• The Radical Imagination Podcast (episode list) has content about a variety of aspects of abolition & future visioning

Other Related Material

During our discussions, participants shared related resources. Here are just a few:

• Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a Decolonial Feminism. Hypatia, 25(4), 742–759. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01137.x
• Kamelamela, K. L., Springer, H. K., Ku’ulei Keakealani, R., Ching, M. U., Ticktin, T., Ohara, R. D., Parsons, E. W., Adkins, E. D., Francisco, K. S., & Giardina, C. (2022). Kōkua aku, Kōkua mai: An Indigenous Consensus-driven and Place-based Approach to Community Led Dryland Restoration and Stewardship. Forest Ecology and Management, 506, 119949. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2021.119949
• Reimagining ‘justice’ in environmental justice: Radical ecologies, decolonial thought, and the Black Radical Tradition. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848618770363
• https://letsgetfree.info/2022/07/22/let-grandma-go-campaign-launch/
• Whyte, K. (2020). Against crisis epistemology. In B. Hokowhitu, A. Moreton-Robinson, L. Tuhiwai-Smith, C. Andersen, & S. Larkin (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies (1st ed., pp. 52–64). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429440229-6
• About constant change, and disaster as agents of decolonization: http://www.the-ciej.org/disaster-decolonization-a-manifesto.html
• https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/the-female-inmates-fighting-californias-wildfires.html (as part of fire fighters in/as the PIC)
• I really like this entry of carcerality in feminist keywords for gender and sexuality studies podcast(https://sites.libsyn.com/536737/carcerality ) link to essay: https://keywords.nyupress.org/gender-and-sexuality-studies/essay/carcerality/
• Teves, S. N. (2018). Defiant indigeneity: The politics of Hawaiian performance. UNC Press Books.
• An Indigenous Abolitionist Study Guide
• Care, not incarceration: exploring the carcerality of fisheries enforcement and potential decolonial futures in Hawaiʻi
• Indigenous Knowledge and Abolition: Criminalization, Decolonization and Lessons from Indigenous Justice Systems with Pamela Palmater, Giselle Dias, Joey “Twins” Young, Wanda Whitebird, Les Harper, hosted by Nicole Penak (~2.5hrs)
• The Medical Industrial Complex
• Against Crisis Epistemology
• New Books in Critical Theory — “Apartheid Remains” Sharad Chari

Prison Abolition: an introductory reading list was originally published in Data + Feminism Lab, MIT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.