Bringing the Revolution Home: Filipino Urban Poor Women, "Neoliberal Imperial Feminisms," and a Social Movements Approach to Domestic Abuse

Urban poor women in Metro Manila, Philippines, have developed social movement strategies toward domestic abuse. I consider how these synergize with and diverge from U.S. women of color feminist calls for "community accountability." "Survivor-organizers" in the women's federation GABRIELA influence place-based social networks to shift power relations, while organizing whole communities into a broader Left movement. I argue that their community organizing principles and survivor-centered ethics have served as vehicles to transcend carceral remedies. Entangling reformist, prefigurative, and revolutionary politics, they contradictorily invoke (and reify) carceral feminist logics and legal reforms—yet have fostered transformations that surpass possibilities offered by what I call "neoliberal imperial feminist" frameworks for punitive state action. I propose a protest politics grounded in how GABRIELA's and U.S. feminist of color political traditions speak to and expand upon one another.