ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the political and social feminist interventions against gender violence and sexual aggressions that occur in the popular festivals of the Basque Country in northern Spain. A clear example is the media case of ‘La Manada’, which happened at the San Fermín Festival in 2016. This sexual assault was met with a swift social and political rejection, but this response should not be considered spontaneous. In fact, it was related to several institutional actions and, above all, to the pressure exerted previously by the feminist movement. Consequently, the actions of the feminist movement and the performance of institutional feminism are set out in the following (especially that of Berdinsarea, a network of municipalities for equality between women and men founded in 2006). The chapter concludes by presenting the evaluations of young women from the Basque Country about their experiences of participating in these festivities. This provides an element for contrasting the institutionalised measures adopted and serves as a way of gauging the internalisation of empowering feminist discourse in the younger generations of women.
