Description
This panel examines how gender shapes everyday politics and resistance across diverse contexts. We focus on how power moves through mundane routines, care practices, non-state interventions, (im)mobility, and subtle refusals - not only through open contestation or formal political arenas. Looking across cases reveals how power circulates in households, streets, workplaces, and communities, bringing into view forms of agency that conventional International Studies often miss.
Bringing together four perspectives, this panel explores how gender intersects with everyday politics and resistance. Elisa argues that HarassMap’s interventions in Cairo redirected gendered governance towards everyday conduct and subject formation yet also reproduced neoliberal hierarchies and exclusions. Hazel analyses women’s everyday resistance under Iran’s religious authoritarianism, drawing on interviews to trace how repression both channels contention from streets to intimate spaces and catalyses durable routines of care and quiet defiance. Katherine analyses the political role that motherhood plays in Brazilian and Argentinian nation-building projects, starting from a historical perspective and continuing through to contemporary data from recent interviews. Belen draws on 12-year longitudinal data to show how adolescent girls in El Salvador and the Dominican Republic become political through everyday negotiations of familial and community constraints on their bodies and mobility.
Taken together, this panel shows that politics is made in daily interactions as much as in formal arenas. They demonstrate how non-state interventions can redirect governance; how women turn authoritarian control into leverage, relocating and intensifying their resistance; how motherhood organises national belonging; and how girls’ negotiations build political subjectivities. We emphasise centering less visible yet more enduring everyday practices is crucial to explain contemporary gender and International Relations.
