‘These feminists went too far:’ Excess, austerity, and leftist antifeminist backlash in Milei’s Argentina

We analyse how Argentina’s green tide feminist movement became the target of Peronist backlash following Javier Milei’s election. Whereas antifeminism is usually located on the Right, we argue that this reaction constitutes a distinctive ‘Leftist’ backlash grounded in claims to represent the working class as ‘the people.’ Peronist actors contend that feminists ‘went too far,’ advancing excessive demands that alienated working-class constituencies and facilitated Milei’s rise. We argue that this critique mobilises tropes of feminist excess that reproduce the zero-sum austerity logic Peronism claims to oppose. Drawing on social reproduction and feminist affect theory, the paper traces this backlash to competing representations of who is most affected by neoliberalism, and therefore who counts as ‘the people.’ By foregrounding precarised social-reproductive sectors, green tide feminists disrupted Peronism’s imaginary of working-class unity and plenitude. Feminist claims are thus recoded as irresponsibly consuming a depleted social body, mobilising restorative affects within ‘Leftist’ politics.