Far-right President Javier Milei is pushing forward state antifeminism in Argentina. Milei’s discourse on financial freedom–key to this project–promises young people rapid success and redefines exposure to financial risk as an entrepreneurial virtue. In Contra el Autoritarismo de la Libertad Financiera (Against Financial Freedom Authoritarianism), Verónica Gago and Lucí Cavallero, feminist activist scholars within the Ni Una Menos collective, trace how this discourse operates as a counteroffensive to transfeminism. A series of movements led by women and LGBTIQNB+ people, transfeminism is explicitly opposed to the wave of trans-exclusionary feminism that has surged across Latin America over the past decade.
Financial freedom, the authors argue, is not merely entrepreneurship—though entrepreneurship paved the way for it. It reflects a broader shift from economic to financial freedom in which mechanisms such as microcredit and digital wallets are presented to an “empowered” individual encouraged to speculate in everyday life. While debt may offer short-term help to make ends meet, it locks people into recurring cycles of indebtedness and into what Gago and Cavallero call “pluri-employment,” the condition of juggling multiple jobs. Within this enclosed horizon, financial speculation becomes a form of labor in itself—one saturated with anxiety, concern, and shame, ultimately disciplining people, particularly women and LGBTIQNB+ people, into becoming “good” payers. To the authors, financial freedom is a counteroffensive to transfeminism because it involves a struggle over the future generations’ subjectivities, clearly shown in the simultaneous attack on sexual education and a promotion of financial education in schools.
In their new work, Gago and Cavallero also return to housing as a key site where debt takes hold. In their 2019 book Una Lectura Feminista de la Deuda (A Feminist Reading of Debt), they traced how debt comes to organize domestic space and in La Casa como Laboratorio: finanzas, vivienda y trabajo esencial (The Home as Laboratory), released in 2021, they tracked how this dynamic deepened during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, the Sindicato de Inquilinxs (Tenants Union)—Argentina’s first tenant union, closely linked to Ni Una Menos—produced a poster asking: “What did you stop doing to pay the rent?” The question lays bare the discipline people impose on themselves in order to “comply.” Considering the spread of pluri-employment, one might add its necessary counterpart: “What did you begin doing in order to pay the rent?” As Gago and Cavallero show, for many trans and travesti people, sex work becomes a main or complementary source of income to meet housing costs.
This trilogy was forged at a decisive conjuncture: Argentina’s last IMF agreement, the largest in the fund’s history, and a vibrant Latin American feminist tide that reframed gender violence as a public problem.
Contra el Autoritarismo completes a trilogy that takes debt seriously as a feminist problem—one that operates not as a momentary burden but as a lasting mechanism of dispossession. This trilogy was forged at a decisive conjuncture: Argentina’s last IMF agreement, the largest in the fund’s history, and a vibrant Latin American feminist tide that reframed gender violence as a public problem. Drawing on feminist activist research, Gago and Cavallero treat political language as a site of collective thinking. As the Ni Una Menos movement against femicide gave way to the March 8 feminist strikes, social reproduction moved to the center of political struggle, crystallized in the slogan Vivas, Libres y Desendeudadas Nos Queremos–We Want to Live, Be Free, and Free of Debt. It is from this terrain that the authors trace how debt and gender operate as interlocking forms of violence.
Across their books, Gago and Cavallero emphasize the disproportionate impacts of indebtedness on women and LGBTIQNB+ people, upon whom domestic labor—historically framed as “free” and “natural”—has long relied. Since their first book, they have argued that debt reorganizes social reproduction into what feminist scholar Silvia Federici describes as the fascistization of life. In Contra el Autoritarismo, rather than narrowing fascism to European experiences of the 1930s, the authors locate it in the diffusion of a logic of sacrifice through which specific populations are rendered expendable.
Milei’s appeal to financial freedom calls on individuals to act, invest, and speculate, while simultaneously generating frustration and resentment when promised outcomes fail to materialize, as was the case with his scandalous promotion of the $Libra cryptocurrency. This dynamic opens a way of understanding fascism “from below”: not as a coherent ideology imposed from above, but as a political formation that unfolds alongside everyday indebtedness, pluri-work and wounded expectations. Building on Gago’s earlier analysis of neoliberalism “from below,” the authors’ approach shifts attention to everyday economic practices, highlighting how fascist passions emerge unevenly and ambivalently through popular forms of critique, discipline, and rebellion forged within neoliberal conditions themselves.
One of Gago and Cavallero’s most significant contributions is their linking of financial freedom to gender. By identifying the “war against gender” as a central element of Milei’s larger agenda, they advance both feminist critique and broader discussions of the global rise of the far-right. Drawing on Judith Butler’s analysis of anti-gender ideology—particularly her account of nostalgia for a supposedly lost golden past that awakens present fascist passions—and Verónica Gago’s work on neoliberalism “from below,” this book locates a patriarchal renovation emerging from below that operates through financial freedom discourse. State antifeminism thus appears as a reactionary counteroffensive against transfeminist claims.
By identifying the “war against gender” as a central element of Milei’s larger agenda, they advance both feminist critique and broader discussions of the global rise of the far-right.
Why, many ask, has the current political moment not produced another outbreak like that of 2001—Argentina’s most dramatic financial crisis, marked by massive protests and popular organizing? Gago and Cavallero concur with the hypothesis that widespread indebtedness and pluri-employment have constrained this possibility as everyday financial speculation drains both time and cognitive energy, further limiting the conditions for organizing and imagining future communities. Here, the authors identify two timeframes at work: one of permanent emergency, and another composed through slower, artisanal political construction.
Just as these scholars have sought to unearth the ties between neoliberalism and authoritarianism in Latin America—most notably through the study of military dictatorships—, the political efficacy of naming fascism explicitly has become clearer to Argentina’s popular movements. On February 1 2025, Argentina witnessed its first Federal Anti-Fascist and Anti-Racist Pride protest, mobilizing thousands in response to Milei’s transphobic and anti-immigrant statements at the World Economic Forum in Davos. This protest energized organizing at a moment when fascism is increasingly installed in political vocabularies worldwide.
Beyond diagnosing the current political moment, Contra el Autoritarismo assembles a genealogy of intersecting struggles that embodies the book’s central political wager: “Uniting the struggles is the task.” Gago and Cavallero bring together experiences such as the Transvillera Plurinational Diversity Pride March, neighborhood soup kitchens, the struggle to defend Argentina’s Gender Identity Law, and the fight for decriminalized abortion. These struggles appear not as isolated victories but as part of a shared political fabric that sustains collective imagination.
As in the earlier books of their trilogy, this commitment takes material form in the final section, “Conversations.” Through a short series of interviews, the authors incorporate other activists’ points of view demonstrating how feminist critique is built collectively as struggles unfold. This editorial choice is reinforced by a second feminist gesture in Contra el Autoritarismo ’s composition: it is a brief, non-jargony, pocket-sized book—one that can be read on the way to work or during a break between shifts. Its accessibility is itself a political decision, attentive to the fragmented schedules of indebted lives.
Gago and Cavallero’s insistence that “uniting the struggles is the task” thus emerges as both a methodological and political orientation—one that treats feminism as a bridge between situated struggles rather than as a bounded national project. This orientation is especially urgent amid a Latin American reconfiguration marked by the strengthening of authoritarian right-wing forces, as evidenced by the electoral ascent of figures such as José Antonio Kast in Chile and by renewed U.S. interventions across Central America and the Caribbean. Against this counteroffensive, the book’s attention to how antifeminism, financialization, and authoritarianism travel—while being unevenly reworked from below—offers inspiration for thinking across borders without erasing singularities. In doing so, Contra el Autoritarismo de la Libertad Financiera advances a transfeminist horizon that calls for internationalist disobedience in the face of debt, anti-gender politics, and authoritarian “freedoms.”
María Mónica Sosa Vásquez is a doctoral student in cultural anthropology at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. Her research focuses on popular economies in Argentina, particularly the relationship between everyday economic practices and collective organizing against economic adjustments and financial capital in Buenos Aires.