Recent years have seen a revival of feminist mobilization in virtually all regions of the world. A particularly successful example is that of the Argentinian feminist movement Ni una menos. Grounding its struggle in long-established feminist practices such as regular nationwide assemblies of women’s rights collectives, Ni una menos became manifest to a global audience with a rally that brought some 500,000 people in the streets of Buenos Aires in early-June 2015. Since then, the popularity of Ni una menos grew to the point that feminist movements elsewhere in the world adopted its name and started speaking through some of its key frames. For example, feminist mobilization in the Italian context saw renewed impetus under the banner of a new feminist network called ‘Non una di meno’ (Italian translation of Ni una menos) since a rally in Rome in November 2016. Non una di meno is heavily indebted to Ni una menos for what concerns its visual identity, vocabulary, and frames of contestation. I argue that Connell’s (2007) Southern Theory can be a fruitful lens to make sense of frame circulation between the two movements. In a nutshell, Southern Theory denounces the violence of those processes of knowledge production that privilege theories produced in the so-called ‘North’ (Northern Theory) while treating the so-called ‘South’ as a testing ground for these theories and a repository of raw data. Mindful of this, I contend that the relationship between Ni una menos and Non una di meno is one in which the two movements share a system of symbols that privileges perspectives produced ‘in the South’ by Ni una menos. This system of symbols allows for commonality between the two movements while remaining flexible enough to be re-entextualized in the respective socio-political spaces in light of their differences. Together with Morrell (2016), I argue that exchanges between Ni una menos and Non una di meno produce a grey area between South and North that challenges the epistemic violence of Northern Theory.

Tommaso Trillò is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Early Stage Researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Lodz, Poland, in the context of GRACE – Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe (MSCA Grant Agreement #675378). His main research project aims at exploring how key institutions and private users contribute to the construction of “gender equality” as a core European value through a comparative analysis of discourses circulating on Twitter at the EU supranational level and at the Italian national level. Trillò holds an MSc in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford and a BA in Political Sciences from John Cabot University, Rome, Italy.

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