Ana Gálvez-Mozo

Intersectional politics has been widely associated with progressive Millennial activists. Accordingly, most social movement research focuses on progressive movements that adopt intersectionality as a guiding framework for organisation and mobilisation, mainly feminist, reproductive justice, LGBTQ and other movements spearheaded by university-educated Millennials. In contrast to most studies, we conduct a qualitative digital ethnography of Las Kellys, a Spanish grassroots movement with no explicit intersectional approach, but located at the intersection of the labour and feminist movements, and consisting of middle-aged, working-class (immigrant) women with no university background who fit their activism into their spare time. Our findings suggest that (1) Las Kellys deploys intersectional practices and disputes despite lacking an explicit intersectional approach, and (2) the development of intersectional practices and disputes in Las Kellys is the result of inter-movement diffusion processes from the anti-austerity protest cycle and the current wave of feminist protest. Moreover, we argue that the case of Las Kellys is part of a larger diffusion of intersectionality across contemporary Spanish activism as an outcome of the anti-austerity and feminist protest cycles.

In the last decade, many scholars have begun to use the notion of ‘micro-resistance’ to refer to a kind of exercise carried out in fields involving meaning, identity, or subjectivity. These analyses link the idea of ‘resistance’ to discourse and linguistics, suggesting that discourse/linguistics also refers to specific practices with direct effects both on the political context of the emitter and on its position and subjectivity. However, these proposals present various methodological and theoretical problems. This text explores this link and posits that Positioning Theory, enriched with ideas directly from Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, can be an analytical tool for solving the aforementioned problems and offering a clearer, less ambiguous conceptualization of the notion of resistance. To show this, the chapter first offers a brief outline of the main elements defining Positioning Theory. Next, it shows the link between this theory and the Foucauldian tradition of linguistic-discursive analysis. Third, it argues that this link is enriched much more if articulated with several core concepts from the work of Deleuze and Guattari. The chapter ends with some empirical examples taken from recent research.

The growth of the hotel industry in Spain in recent decades has meant, among other things, the acceleration of the hotel room attendants’ labour. An overload of physical activity, illnesses, and physical and mental exhaustion are the most visible consequences. Based on a qualitative study carried out with hotel room attendants working in Spanish hotels, the article analyses the effects of work intensification on room attendants’ representation of their bodies. The results show that rather than the typical description of their body as a machine that must withstand high pressure, hotel room attendants define it as a vector body constructed through multiple flows and demands, which has to speed up its pace, being constantly overwhelmed and self-managed in the process. We discuss how the acceleration of work in hotels is the result of a series of organizational and individual practices, impacting the representation and corporal practice of the hotel room attendants.

This article analyses the forms of dividuation workers undergo when they are linked to technologies, such as algorithms or artificial intelligence. It examines functionalities and operations deployed by certain types of Talent Management software and apps—UKG, Tribepad, Afiniti, RetailNext and Textio. Specifically, it analyses how talented workers materialise in relation to the profiles and the statistical models generated by such artificial intelligence machines. It argues that these operate as a nooscope that allows the transindividual plane to be quantified through a process known as dividuation. Finally, by way of conclusion, the notion of the dividual is presented as the logic that characterises the human–machine relationship in the case of artificial intelligence and as the horizon of what Felix Guattari called “machinic capitalism”.

La gestión de la pandemia de COVID-19 por parte de los países occidentales es uno de los temas más controvertidos de los estudios sociales actuales. Uno de los conceptos centrales para analizar la ordenación de la gestión de la pandemia es el de Cosmopolítica, ya que nos permite ampliar la comprensión de la política para incluir a los ciudadanos, a los seres vivos no humanos, a los elementos terrestres y al propio SARS-CoV-2. Pero como argumentamos en este artículo, la cosmopolítica necesita un poder previo, una potentia generativa que emana de la disposición de los actores mencionados. A partir del ejemplo de los meses en que se desarrolló y comenzó a inocularse la vacuna contra la COVID-19, ilustraremos la propuesta cosmoética: una ética afirmativa que tiñe y permea el agenciamiento de actores que constituyen la vacuna, permitiendo su despliegue para un posterior momento cosmopolítica. De este modo, concluimos que la gestión de la pandemia necesita no sólo atender a los ciudadanos no expertos o a los actores no humanos, sino también atender a la emergencia de nuevas realidades, tiempos y espacios.

This must be a previous version of the The last version of the abstract was: The literature on labour conflict in the field of paid care work deals primarily with highly feminized occupations that fit in with the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) characterization of the care workforce, such as nurses, domestic workers and childcare providers. We focus instead on room attendants: a highly feminized occupational group that lies beyond the scope of the care economy defined by the ILO. Our analysis draws upon Briskin’s ‘politicization of caring’ through which care workers demand professional recognition, decent working conditions and fair wages, as well as call for the acknowledgement of caring as a collective responsibility. Following this thread, we look into the politicization of hotel housekeeping by Las Kellys, a Spanish movement of room attendants that frames hotel housekeeping as care work with the aim of subverting low social standing and improving precarious working conditions. Such a framing relies on two axes of meaning-making: (1) room attendant as provider of customer well-being, and (2) (hotel) cleaning as undervalued feminized basic care. This article expands the scope of the ‘politicization of caring’ beyond the limits of the care economy.

The Spanish room attendants’ movement, known as ‘Las Kellys’, has directly challenged hotel owners, unions and local governments. Its actions and results have generated a growing interest in the academic literature on labour and organizations, because it presents as a social phenomenon which seems to sidestep the usual key actions of similar movements. As this case is still very new, there are not yet any systematic academic studies explaining how the Kellys construct their identity as a group and coordinate their actions. Here we present the notion of collective agency as a tool for analysing and understanding these processes. Based on an empirical study conducted in the last three years, we argue that the Kellys constitute a movement which should be understood as a collective agency woven from relationships of solidarity and resistance, which can be summed up in two slogans: ‘We are the women who clean’ and ‘We are the structural base of the hotel’. Both slogans permit the emergence of a profile which gives a specific identity to the work of room attendants in Spain and makes them unique and sui generis among social movements.

‘Social movement unionism’ (SMU) has been suggested as a suitable strategy for union renewal in Spain, yet the literature on union renewal and SMU has two major shortcomings: (1) a lack of bottom‐up studies, and (2) a lack of dialogue between industrial relations and social movement research. To redress these shortcomings, we make three contributions in this article: first, we provide evidence on the current opportunities for SMU in Spain's feminized precarious service sector; second, we apply a bottom‐up intersectional approach to the study of SMU; and third, we bridge the research on industrial relations and on social movements by adopting a relational framework that looks at both union and non‐union actors as key actors for union renewal. Our results show a landscape of co‐existence, conflict, cooperation and competition between union and non‐union actors, including established unions, radical grassroots unions and emerging forms of collective representation; however, if we are to develop SMU as a strategy for union renewal in post‐Great Recession Spain, then there is still room for promoting deep coalition building between unions and novel forms of worker collectivism, as well as developing intersectional politics to reach non‐traditional membership groups.