“PLUS ÉCOUTÉ E•S MORT•E•S QUE VIVANT•E•S ”: Gluing for grievable lives

To study how social movements can make some lives grievable (Butler, 2021), we focus on a feminist social movement acting against femicides in the streets of +150 cities by pasting posters on the walls. We see this movement through the lens of commoning (Fournier, 2013).

Commoning is a social organizing process that creates and maintains commons to act upon a societal problem by mobilizing embodied relations. Through our ethnographic study, we show how one can produce and maintain commons with people without knowing them well through specific roles and a dedicated mode of action in an urban context. We define the concept of ‘Gluing’ that should be understood both in a metaphorical and a literary way. ‘Gluing’ is a practice of commoning in which members create prefigurative relationships, triggering recognition of certain subjects and revising their understanding of their past.

Relying on a specific mode of action performed collectively, members show their vulnerability in the urban space while denouncing it simultaneously. ‘Gluing’ enables the mourning of dead bodies that were ignored by the rest of society through alternative commemorative practices of storytelling and self-archiving.