16,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Critical South
- Sprache: Englisch
On June 3, 2015, massive women’s street demonstrations took place in many cities across Argentina to protest against femicide. Under the slogan
Ni una menos, Not One (Woman) Less, thousands of women took to the streets to express their outrage at systematic violence against women, giving a face and a voice to women who might otherwise have died in silence.
Maria Pia López, a founding member and active participant in the Not One Less protest, offers in this book a first-hand account of the distinctive aesthetics, characteristics and lineages of this popular feminist movement, while examining the broader issues of gender politics and violence, inequality and social justice, mourning, performance and protest that are relevant to all contemporary societies.
A unique analysis of a social movement as well as a rich and original work of feminist theory and practice, this book will appeal to a wide readership concerned about gender based violence in the neoliberal contexts and what can be done to resist it.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 380
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Ähnliche
Contents
Series title
Title page
Copyright page
Foreword – Natalia Brizuela and Leticia Sabsay
Notes
Introduction: The Tide
Note
1 Mourning: All Victims Count
The body as rubbish
Between human rights and public safety: the social archive
Public mourning, private melancholy
Mourning and desire
The right to mourn and the speech of the bodies
Notes
2 Violence: The Role of Crime
More freedom and more punishment
Sedimentations
Women held captive
Terror and normalization
Economic violence
Forms of violence
Precarious lives
Notes
3 Strike: The End of the End of History
International feminism
8 March
Work
Immeasurable
Debt is violence
Strike, interruption and foundation
Strike, the many modes
Disobediences
Body and time
Pounds of flesh
The personal is political
The end of the end of history (footnote)
Notes
4 Power, Representation and Bodies: The Construction of a Political Subject
Forms of feminism
Multitudes
Not One Less
The collective statement
Dubious victories
Life in question
The affective appeal
What will the revolution look like?
The neoconservative offensive
Power and collective logic: dichotomies and ruptures
Micropolitics and organization
Political
conventillos
and friendships
Assembly
Leadership and power
Feminist power
Notes
5 Modes of Appearing: Language and Theatricality
Languages
Politics of language
The fight for translation
Media and networks: disputes over meaning
Narration
The street and bodies: rituality and performance
Inherited knowledge
Queer staging and carnival
The unknown in question
Bodies on stage
Public art
Theatricality of the street
Notes
Provisional Epilogue
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
1 Mourning: All Victims Count
Pages
ii
iii
iv
vi
vii
viii
ix
x
xi
xii
xiii
xiv
xv
xvi
150
151
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
152
153
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
154
155
156
157
158
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
159
160
161
162
163
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
146
147
148
149
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
Series title
Critical South
The publication of this series is supported by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Series editors: Natalia Brizuela and Leticia Sabsay
Leonor Arfuch,
Memory and Autobiography
Aimé Césaire,
Resolutely Black
Bolívar Echeverría,
Modernity and “Whiteness”
Celso Furtado,
The Myth of Economic Development
Eduardo Grüner,
The Haitian Revolution
María Pia López,
Not One Less
Pablo Oyarzun,
Doing Justice
Néstor Perlongher,
Plebeian Prose
Nelly Richard,
Eruptions of Memory
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui,
Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa
Tendayi Sithole,
The Black Register
Not One Less
Mourning, Disobedience and Desire
María Pia López
Translated by Frances Riddle
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © María Pia López 2020
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3191-2 hardback
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3192-9 paperback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: López, María Pia, 1969- author. | Riddle, Frances, translator.
Title: Not one less : mourning, disobedience and desire / María Pia López ; translated by Frances Riddle.
Description: Cambridge ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2020. | Series: Critical south | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A first-hand account of the internationally renowned movement protesting against femicide and violence against women”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019057554 (print) | LCCN 2019057555 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509531912 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509531929 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509531943 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Women--Crimes against--Argentina. | Protest movements--Argentina. | Feminism--Argentina.
Classification: LCC HV6250.4.W65 L665 2020 (print) | LCC HV6250.4.W65 (ebook) | DDC 362.88082/0982--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057554
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057555
Typeset in 10.5 on 12pt Sabon
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Limited
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
ForewordNatalia Brizuela and Leticia Sabsay
Scholarly interest in women’s social movements is timely, given the massive demonstrations led by women internationally in opposition to the rise of the Global Right, the feminist mobilizations against anti-“gender ideology” campaigns, and the performative afterlife of #MeToo, #TimesUp and other hashtag feminist initiatives traversing borders and cultural contexts. In Europe, the Polish “Black Protests” against abortion restriction laws since 2016, the huge rallies that accompanied Ireland’s vote for the legalization of abortion in 2018, or the enormous demonstrations in Spain of 8 March, which since 2017 have accompanied the International Women’s Strike, have made mainstream media headlines. In the US, hundreds of thousands of women led counter-inauguration rallies across the country on 20 January 2017 protesting against the blatant misogyny of the new president and the foreseeable attacks on already fragile reproductive rights. To this “lean in” feminism, an intersectional collective responded with a call to a “feminism for the 99 percent” on International Women’s Day. These experiences, among others, have greatly contributed to a renewed receptivity to feminist topics and theories by non-specialized publishers and journals. In this context, authors writing about the contemporary forms in which feminist ideals and tropes have been captured and neutralized called attention to the challenges raised by the renewed appeal of feminism and re-encountered some new hopes as well.1
This growing feminist trend has also provided an opportunity for women’s movements and feminisms from the Global South to acquire a new visibility and, to some extent, a long overdue acknowledgment of their contributions. Visibility is, however, a tricky business, since the terms in which it emerges are never entirely straightforward. More often than not, neither those social movements to which some visibility is granted nor their (often self-instituted) spokespersons are in an easy position to set the terms. The false notion that the transnational feminist movement is some brand-new phenomenon, dating back to the last three to five years, speaks to a temporal framing shaped by a blind (and in many cases irritatingly white!) English-speaking gaze from the Global North. Such temporality belongs to, and relies on, a politics of ignorance furthered by academia and publishers alike. To give but one example, Fraser’s recent discovery of the potentiality of a popular feminist future sits in stark contrast to her sustained dismissal of decades of black, postcolonial and subaltern feminist work.2
The reframing of a social movement, rendering it more or less visible or intelligible, is often marked by the social conditions that obscured the movement in the first place. The fact that such a tension is inevitable does not mean that it is not productive or that it cannot be reworked in ways that disrupt dominant logics of knowledge production and hegemonic narratives. And this is precisely the kind of work done by María Pia López’s book.
Not One Less: Mourning, Disobedience and Desire tells one of the possible stories of Not One Less – the Argentinean women’s movement that emerged in 2015. To Latin American feminists and Spanish-language readers more broadly, López is recognized as one of the key activists and chroniclers at the heart of what quickly became a widespread movement. Through a first-person narrative, Not One Less offers an account of the formative years of that movement as experienced by the author. Through this first-person voice, López masters the embodied writing for which many feminists have advocated. The author embraces two distinct roles, crafting a plural-singular voice: on the one hand, the body acting as part of a collective in the heat of every battle and, on the other hand, the meditative scholarly voice of the intellectual.
Not One Less emerged in Argentina as a collective affirmation of life and bodily presence in the face of a rampant increase in brutal murders and gender violence. In late March 2015 a small group of feminist activists and writers, María Pia López among them, organized a reading marathon with the slogan “Not One Less” at the National Library in Buenos Aires. At that time López was the director of the National Library’s Museo del Libro y de La Lengua (Museum of the Book and Language). This reading marathon was not the first public event that linked politics, performance and collective outrage. In April 2014 a reading marathon had been organized in support of the national campaign for free, legal and safe abortion. The 2015 event was called to make femicide and gender-based violence a matter of public concern, and the large crowd that gathered for the mourning of individual deaths through a collective performance set the stage for the years ahead and, more specifically, became ground zero for the call to take to the streets to protest the systemic war being raged against feminized bodies.
On 10 May 2015 a hashtag went viral: #NotOneLess. We want to be alive. 3 June, 5 pm. The message brought together, under a single slogan, a polyphonic multitude and a long anti-patriarchal, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist feminist genealogy. The collective scream of “Not One Less” was a reaction to the growing number of brutal murders and forced disappearances of cis and trans women that had risen exponentially to such dramatic proportions that, on average, by 2015 in Argentina, one woman was murdered every day. To the extent that femicide had become an epidemic ignored by the state, Not One Less began to articulate, on the one hand, a transversal fight against gender-based attacks and, on the other hand, a counter-hegemony against myriad forms of state-sponsored violence and neglect.3 The 2015 hashtag has now become a collective with chapters throughout Argentina and beyond and has established alliances of solidarity with other collectives and labor unions relating gender-based violence to race, class and labor. These alliances have articulated a heterogeneous spectrum of demands. As an example, the second Not One Less march in June 2016 brought forth demands both for the decriminalization of abortion and an end to transphobia and for the rights of sex workers.
This heterogeneity is reflected in María Pia López’s crafting of a plural-singular voice, where the sensory, the scholarly and the activist have merged through decades of writing as both a scholar and a public intellectual. Since the late 1990s she has authored academic texts as well as novels and essays. A professor, a researcher, a writer and a militant, López has been pushing the boundaries of academic writing for the last two decades. In Not One Less, her activist research structures the fluctuation between genres and authorial voices. As she asks in the Introduction:
Can a person write as an activist and as a theorist and critic at the same time? Is agitation so as to question people’s wills and organize antagonistic to the analysis of obstacles and limits? It would be considered conflictive from the traditional conception of knowledge, where supposed objectivity overlooks the practical, historic and political conditions in which the very questions being studied here emerged. On the other hand, exposing these conditions, situating the questions to be answered among an archipelago of mobilizations and practical dilemmas, shows us that our words are always dependent on others’ words, our bodies and existences entwined with those of others.4
In fact, López’s voice is more than her own; it depends on a plurality of voices with which hers is entangled. It is an assemblage, but no less singular for that reason.5 Or, said otherwise, it can be singular precisely because it is an assemblage.
This book is not alone. It lives in company with the contemporary writings of feminist voices from Abya Yala to India, moving through Italy, Spain and France and back to Argentina.6 It is also in conversation with other insufficiently acknowledged voices, such as when López discusses the feminist strike in dialogue with the nineteenth-century French-Peruvian feminist and socialist Flora Tristan – a figure somehow overshadowed by the canonical name of Mary Wollstonecraft.
Honoring the transversal and transnational soul and history of Not One Less, the movement for which it is named, Not One Less is in dialogue with, and contributes to the construction of, a collective “live memory, capable of continuing to produce unforeseeable meanings and territories,” as Virginia Cano and Laura Fernández Cordero put it. As they rightly remark, depriving this feminist revolt of an account of the “minoritarian genealogy of women’s, feminist and LGBTQI social movements,” as well as the sedimented memory of other radical mobilizations for social justice (such as the movement that emerged in Argentina immediately after the 2001 financial crisis), not only diminishes the success of Not One Less but also devalues its significance. And it entails surrendering to a sustained patriarchal and neoliberal effort to erase these insurgencies, both materially and symbolically.7 As López makes clear in this book, the transformative meanings opened up by Not One Less are possible to the extent that disobedience has a history – in fact many histories – and it is the performative afterlife of those disobediences that provides each iteration with an overdetermined and therefore incalculable strength. She states:
The mobilizations of women are ceremonies of creation and transmission; they affirm belonging to an identity in construction, something new that would not have been possible in the past. They seek reaffirmation through ritual. No one was born into this community (as one is born into rites and liturgies of national identity), because the community is built through the very act of public appearance. Every action may live on as citation, as a ritual.8
Surely, the force of this community, ever in formation, carries, over the reverberations of symbolically charged public spheres, political words and claims such as “diss-appearance” and “the right to identity,” as well as objects and rituals such the use of scarves, all practiced by historic and contemporary struggles. The May 2015 hashtag called for demonstrations in the major public squares and plazas in Argentina. Those in the city of Buenos Aires assembled in the Plaza del Congreso, where a set of demands were “delivered” to the state legislature, which had failed to address the disappearances properly. In April 1977, during the first years of the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983, a group of fourteen women had come together in another highly symbolic public plaza in Buenos Aires, demanding the appearance of their forcibly disappeared children and grandchildren. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo made their demand in public outside the federal government building, at the time a symbolic site of the suspension of democracy. As López reminds us in her account, both in their manifestos and in their public actions and performances, the women of Not One Less established a relationship with the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo as a gesture of alliance and solidarity against “dictating who may live and who must die,” making evident the necropolitics at the heart of power.9 Establishing a relationship between the disappearances under military rule and the disappearances under democratic government also made visible the relationships between state and market violence. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo embroidered the names of their disappeared onto head scarves, alongside the demand “We want them back alive.” Not One Less demanded: “We want ourselves alive.” The demands and voices of the Mothers were reactivated as Not One Less recognized the long history of female-led struggles against government-sponsored violence.
Furthermore, as López suggests, the force of this emerging movement and its capacity for organization would probably have been unsustainable without the previous experience of many of their protagonists in popular, LGBT, HIV and cultural activism. Nor would its capacity to grow have been possible were it not thanks to the experience amassed by the feminist movement over decades of National Women’s Assemblies and the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe and Free Abortion.
Not One Less traces a genealogy that transcends national borders and insists on transnational solidarities because the structures that safeguard the long histories of violence against women’s bodies are themselves transnational. The Argentine movement has produced its mobilizing calls by quoting Mexican activists, scholars and writers in particular. Its name is a Mexican slogan that had been crucial in what was probably the first femicide epidemic in the Americas under neoliberal rule. The slogan “Not one woman less, not one more death” had been written in 1995 by Susana Chávez Castillo, a Mexican poet and activist, as part of a poem that reflected on the femicides taking place in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. As the NAFTA agreement between the US, Mexico and Canada strengthened neoliberal measures, a series of femicides broke out in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez. The first faint news of the disappearance of fifty women dated to late 1993, as the first maquilas or sweatshops for US clothes companies were set up in Mexico in order to increase profits. By the end of the 1990s the number of disappearances had grown close to one thousand women. Even though the Mexican legal apparatus was put to work, the crimes were never resolved, and they remain largely unpunished. Susana Chávez Castillo was murdered in Juárez in 2011. The Argentine movement’s name is an elegy to the memory of a prominent and fearless poet and activist and the identification of a political and economic problem as, at the very least, hemispheric.
The 2015 Not One Less strike also quoted the demand to the Mexican state that emerged after the disappearance of the forty-three students in Ayotzinapa in 2014. That slogan read “The government is responsible,” to which Not One Less added “We want ourselves alive.” Months before, in July 2014, the Mexican feminist collective Mujeres Grabando Resistencias (Women Carving Resistance) began an international graphic campaign through their webpage around the hashtag #WeWantOurselvesAlive. They created seventeen artworks, which they distributed via Facebook and feminist organizations throughout Mexico, Latin America and Europe, to be printed and used for political activities in public spaces. In February 2015 they issued a second call with #WeWantOurselvesAlive. The Argentine collective also borrowed from Mexican feminists the phrase “If my life has no value, produce without me.” The second call for a massive strike coincided with the inauguration of Mauricio Macri’s neoliberal government, and the dramatic austerity cuts that it brought, particularly in the removal of subsidies for services such as electricity, water and gas. That is why in the second call for a mass mobilization in Argentina in June 2016 the slogan was “The government is responsible,” politicizing the Not One Less demand. Once again, victimization was not an option.
The initial agenda of the mobilizations for bottom-up gender justice, called for a strike on October 2016 in alliance with fifty other organizations. Violence and economic rights were articulated by this broad coalition, which denounced the “democratically elected” government as responsible. The government is responsible, if my life has no value, produce without me. The call for that strike happened in an open assembly of the Confederation of Workers of the Popular Economy. Unions, collectives and political parties articulated the structural relationship between femicides and economic factors: 76 percent of unpaid domestic work is done by women; the tasks associated with the many forms of caretaking expose women to a more extreme form of labor precarity; in precarious jobs the gender pay gap between men and women is 40 percent; 20 per cent of women in employment are engaged in domestic work. This work is essential to the economy yet remains formally outside it. One of the speeches read during the march stated that femicide revealed “the most extreme expression of patriarchal logic, one that subjugates, objectifies and undervalues women across all spheres of life.” Femicide brought them together, with a clear understanding that gender violence is a structural issue, determined largely by economic forces, as López remarks.
In the first pages of chapter 1, “Mourning: All Victims Count,” López asserts:
Not One Less is the outcry against a growing horror: it says that lives matter and that every body counts … their stories should be recounted. Justice for these wasted lives is also narrative; it implies extracting them from the patriarchal discursive mechanisms that resound in the mass media and in courtrooms …. Faced with this reality, we have tried to … use words as defense against violence; to commemorate the dead women in a kind of public act of mourning.
… The manifesto maintains that there is no substitution, no metaphorical representation where death is concerned, but that there must necessarily be a painstaking construction of common foundation, through acknowledgement of what has been lost.10
These reflections emerge from what has been the politics of mourning in the Not One Less movement from the very beginning. Woven into these words, López offers us a first-person chronicle of one of the first public vigils held by Not One less before the collective was fully formed, on 26 March 2015. Since then, López tells us, the movement has been working to transform grief into collective strength. In their narratives, their manifesto, their actions, the women have channeled public mourning into concrete demands. Claiming – or, indeed, performatively enacting – the right to grieve and be grieved, they reclaim the lives of those who were lost, fighting so that their names should not be further erased. Seen in this light, this haunting “ecology of death,” to take Kashif Jerome Powell’s powerful image, poses an ethical-political demand that has been taken up by Not One Less in a call that cannot be ignored. Not One Less transforms the work of mourning through collective affirmation of another possible life, a life where gender, poverty or marginalization would not entail fewer chances to live, and live well.11
Even though Not One Less is a response to the injury inflicted on bodies forced into universal categories created for the exercise of modern biopower and capitalism – gender, class and race – the mobilizations have always been in protest against the disappearance of particular bodies. Not One Less came together in 2015 and 2016 after the horrific murder of Chiara Paez and Lucía Pérez. In the collective’s successive alliances with workers affected by massive layoffs, and with indigenous communities attacked because of their demands for land, they were again rallying for specific persons – the PepsiCo workers and Santiago Maldonado. All of the major mobilizations held by Not One Less have been organized around individuals.
This is also true of the Black Lives Matter movement, where the murder of particular black individuals at the hands of the police spurred the street protests that started in 2014, when the numbers and systematic racialized killings had reached a limit of unbearable proportions: Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray. Of the many points in common between Not One Less and Black Lives Matter, with the right to life at the center of both movements, is this galvanizing force of the singular name.
The singular name operates as the exact opposite of the individual subject who competes to be the most productive in the fast-paced pursuit of success imposed on us by our neoliberal times.
Perhaps echoing this ethical-political demand, Not One Less emerges as the name for the construction of a popular feminist social movement. In López’s view, this is enacted partly through its capacity to establish alliances with other popular movements, “of finding truth in other struggles”12 – hence not only its intersectional but also its transversal impulse. To talk about alliances here is essential to counter commonly held beliefs and presumptions about how struggles are to be played out. If a number of alliances have been possible, this is in large part because of the disobedient character of Not One Less, making its presence public, and in so doing disputing the public sphere as a space that emerges only in protest, contesting the conventional definition of strike or assembly.
Disobeying not only the patriarchal canon but also the normative definitions of gender that restrict the category “woman” to a dated binary logic, as well as hierarchical classifications that assign differential value to multiple “women” based on racial, cultural, national, class-laden, religious or moral factors, Not One Less calls, as López suggests, for new political subjectivities to emerge.
At the center of today’s popular uprisings, straining against all forms of containment are bodies performing multiple, heterogeneous modes of agency, acting up, fighting back, demanding visibility, recognition, justice, self-identification, territory, infrastructure. In many of the most recent popular mobilizations these demands have a force that is both centrifugal and centripetal: the demand for the right to livable lives. These bodies claim an agency emboldened and strengthened through political and affective solidarity, never through victimization. These are bodies in resistance, bodies of resistance, pressing against the precarization of life in these neoliberal times. In their resistance they are not submissive: these are rebellious bodies that will not submit. They are expansive and they are incommensurable.
As Foucault and many others have argued, one of the crucial aspects of the political project of modernity can be summarized as the distinction between reason and unreason in order to delimit those who, as “fully moral agents,” exercise reason in the institutional, limited, closed-off and constrained sphere of society and politics. This is the logic of biopower, biopolitics. As Mbembe has shown in his reading and discussion of Foucault in light of present-day global politics (and Palestine in particular), maximum destruction of persons and the creation of what he calls death-worlds are new and unique forms of social existence for vast subjected populations.13 Speaking about the potency of Not One Less, the writer and activist Marta Dillon said: “We convert death into pure life, pure desire. ”14 Not One Less is a form of collective agency and collective subjectivity that resists the raison d’état, biopolitics and necropolitics, through the body. Not One Less mobilizes forms of life that proliferate, as Verónica Gago has argued, reorganizing the notions of freedom and obedience, projecting what she calls a “new rationality and collective affect.”15 To borrow Gago’s term, Not One Less operates on the basis of a “persevering vitalism” that aims to safeguard the expansion of liberties, joy, pleasure and affects. Are there political forms that could keep up with these bodies?
It is precisely the life-force of these bodies that López conceives of as desire. This is a vitalist vision of desire that, according to López, allows us to see the ways in which Not One Less opposes a restricted understanding of politics. These bodies, these movements, and this plural writing, which includes López’s voice, may well disrupt the way we understand the transnational women’s revolt of recent years. While this is articulated from the Global South, these notions are not for that reason local. And neither is this book, which demands that we revisit what we think we already know about feminist embodiments and invites us to reimagine feminist potentialities in the midst of uncertainty.
Notes
1
See, for example, Banet-Weiser, S., Gill, R., and Rottemberg, C., “Postfeminism, Popular Feminism, and Neoliberal Feminism?”
Feminist Theory
21/1 (2020), pp. 3–24; Aruzza, C., Bhattacharya, T., and Fraser, N.,
Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto
. London: Verso, 2019; Wiegman, R. (ed.), “Sexual Politics, Sexual Panics,”
Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
30/1 (2019) [special issue]; Farris, S., and Rottemberg, C., “Righting Feminism,”
New Formations
91 (2017) [special issue].
2
See Bahndar, B., and Ferreira Da Silva, D., “White Feminist Fatigue Syndrome,”
Critical Legal Thinking
, 21 October 2013,
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/10/21/white-feminist-fatigue-syndrome/
; Sabsay, L., (2014) “Nancy Fraser:
Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis
,”
Feminist Legal Studies
22/3 (2014), pp. 323–9 [book review]; Brenner, J., and Fraser, N., “What is Progressive Neoliberalism? A Debate,”
Dissent
64/2 (2017), pp. 130–40.
3
About the notion of femicide, see Russell, D., and Harmes, R. A. (eds),
Feminicidio: una perspectiva global
. Mexico City: UNAM Press.
4
See Introduction, pp. 3–4.
5
We evoke here the idea of singularity considered by Gilles Deleuze: see Deleuze,
Difference and Repetition
. London: Continuum, 1994, pp. 251–2.
6
Among a number of publications on the recent feminist revolt released in Argentina in the last years, see, Peker, L.,
La revolución de las mujeres: no era sólo la píldora
. Córdoba: Eduvim, 2017; and
La revolución de las hijas
. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2019; Gago, V., et al.,
8M constelació
n
feminista: ¿Cuál es tu lucha? ¿Cuál es tu huelga?
Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2018; Cavallero, L., and Gago, V.,
Una lectura feminista de la deuda
. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2019; Gago, V.,
La potencia feminista o el deseo de cambiarlo todo
. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2019; Nijensohn, M. (ed.),
Los feminismos ante el neoliberalismo
. Buenos Aires: La Cebra, 2018; Nijensohn, M.,
La razón feminista: políticas de la calle, pluralismo y articulación
. Buenos Aires: Cuarenta Ríos, 2019.
7
Cano, V., and Fernández Cordero, L., “Prologo” to Butler, J., Cano, J., and Fernández Cordero, L.,
Vidas en lucha: conversaciones
. Buenos Aires: Katz Editores, 2019, p. 10 (the translation is ours).
8
See chapter 5, p. 144.
9
See Mbembe, A., “Necropolitics,”
Public Culture
15/1 (2003), p. 11.
10
See chapter 1, pp. 8–9.
11
Powell, K. J., “Making #BlackLivesMatter: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the specters of black life – toward a hauntology of blackness,”
Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies
16/3 (2016), pp. 253–60.
12
See chapter 2, p. 36.
13
Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” p. 11.
14
Dillon, M., “La amistad, nuestra victoria,”
Página 12
, 14 October 2017.
15
Gago, V.,
La razón neoliberal: economías barrocas y pragmáticas populares
. Madrid: Traficante de Sueños, 2015, p. 23.
Introduction: The Tide
Vision ceases to be solipsistic only up close, when the other turns back upon me the luminous rays in which I had caught him, renders precise that corporeal adhesion of which I had a presentiment in the agile movement of his eyes …
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible
… this encountered richness is infinite.
Tununa Mercado
“Here, no one is dispensable,” Nora Cortiñas said before hundreds of thousands of demonstrators on 8 March 2018. This sentence condenses a movement, a political commitment, an ethical proposal. The previous year we’d marveled at the massive march of women in protest of the conservative offensive led by Trump. The 8 March movements in fifty-five countries converged to become the first ever international women’s strike. An army of women participated in the liberation of Raqqa, the capital of the Islamic State; and Brazil’s female president was ousted by a coup. In Mexico, the Neo-Zapatista party launched a presidential campaign led by Marichuy, a traditional Nahuatl medicine woman. A large part of the huge country of Brazil was traversed by the Black Women’s March. Marielle Franco, black councilwoman and favela activist, was assassinated in Rio de Janeiro, becoming a symbol for these contemporary struggles. In Argentina a wave of massive, popular and intersectional feminism has repeatedly flooded the streets since 3 June 2015, when it marched under the slogan “Not one less.” On 13 June 2018 hundreds of thousands of protesters, the majority young women, camped outside the National Congress in Buenos Aires to demand legalization of abortion. This surging tide is international and polyglot. It is capable of reinventing and transforming itself. Hydra of a thousand heads, a new political subject, a menacing force, an enigma to be solved, a challenge for our insomniac intellectuals and politicians.
Womanhood is not a biological trait but a site of political articulation: a name given to a multitude of existences that go beyond the traditional construction of the gender called woman to construct themselves as lesbians, travestis, transsexuals, transgender or more broadly trans*. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” as Simone de Beauvoir wrote, although some feminists maintain gender essentialist strategies for establishing another order within the sensibilities historically attributed to feminine bodies. Essentialism does not serve as the basis for this book, nor does it match the experiences narrated herein. This practical and theoretical review affirms the historicity of “women” as a political subject and takes it as a category established by the social and discursive order. The political deconstruction of our bodies is at the same time a politics constructed from our bodies.
The subject of contemporary feminism is built on the recognition of gender and at the same time questions existing genders and its patterns of regulation of behavior. It overlaps with the materiality of trans feminism, which banishes any naturalizing meaning. Feminism today ranges from strategic essentialism to the surging demand for political recognition of socially available identities. Perhaps, like Marx’s proletariat, feminism may be able to conceive of its own redemption only through a complete transformation of the social order.
There is not one feminism but a plurality of feminisms. Heterogeneous and conflicting. With distinct emphases and propositions. In modern-day Argentina, they converge in shared organizational goals. The writing of this book coincides with assemblies to organize the 8 March women’s strike in Buenos Aires and as meetings held by the Not One Less collective draw over a thousand people every Friday. It is an unprecedented and powerful experience of organization across many sectors, with regulated speaking time and precise planning with a festive tone. It offers a break from everyday life, as the assemblies and meetings have an atmosphere of celebration, of change, feeling the women’s strike like a tingling in our bodies. As I write, I hear the speakers, I see my colleagues, and we are dazzled by this coming together, from such diverse backgrounds, to create something new. What it will turn out to be we do not yet know.
Within the feminist revolution there are various rebellions. Breaking the glass ceiling and having our hands free for the battle of equals is not the only goal, nor do our dreams stop at merit without distinction of gender. Already underway are egalitarian and heterodox insurrections that see in feminism a contemporary means of communism – a communism that does not shy away from a radical rejection of patriarchal sexism – and these diverse ideas are woven into the design of a new fraternity, like a crowded tenement building, like the complex composition of existence. There are strains of feminism that draw on collective intelligence, understanding that the emancipation of women cannot be limited to the few, to the white or the rich. Adjectives swirl: intersectional feminism emphasizes the crisscrossed network of issues related to gender, race, class; popular feminism challenges the neoliberal translation of the movement.
This book is part of the tide. A fold. Conceived of and written in parallel to activism in the Not One Less collective and the experience of public mobilizations in the streets over recent years. It is part record and chronicle of events. But, fundamentally, it is an attempt to distill from these events some reflection that can be systematized and debated, opened up for discussion. Can a person write as an activist and as a theorist and critic at the same time? Is agitation so as to question people’s wills and organize antagonistic to the analysis of obstacles and limits? It would be considered conflictive from the traditional conception of knowledge, where supposed objectivity overlooks the practical, historic and political conditions in which the very questions being studied here emerged. On the other hand, exposing these conditions, situating the questions to be answered among an archipelago of mobilizations and practical dilemmas, shows us that our words are always dependent on others’ words, our bodies and existences entwined with those of others.
Far from having any illusions of full individual autonomy, my theories are in dialogue with the collective in which I have participated from 2015 up to the present. Rejecting the notion of the mind as separate from the body, conceptual and abstract, I write from sensory experience, from the memories of humiliations and harm, the euphoria of a massive gathering, the power of the occupation of a street, the challenge of conflicting organizational practices. My intention is not to project new images of comfortable plenitude but to contemplate the concepts and ideas that have been sparked by the mobilization of women in order to determine what they might tell us about our times, about neoliberalism and about power. To reflect on what we are doing, what is being achieved by this vast and heterogeneous movement, through its public demonstrations and its words.
The site of enunciation is complex. I write as a sociologist, essayist, novelist and activist who began to identify as a feminist on the streets only in 2015. I write also as a member of a feminist collective that shares a name with the greatest mobilization of women in the history of Argentina: Not One Less. The public demonstration is separate from the collective. We are no more heiresses and agents of that mobilization than any other activists. But we declare ourselves committed to its founding ideals. If the street is happily heterogeneous and multiple, if it unfolds diverse languages and tensions, so too the collective must avoid being univocal. Detailed herein is one singular intervention in a land of multiplicities, on a terrain of untested practice and disparate discussions.
The narration of this experience does not ignore the fact that in it the experiences of many forms of feminism in Argentina sediment: from the suffragist pioneers of the early twentieth century to the insurgent militants of the 1970s, from the organizers of the renters’ strike to the women who took the factories in the chaotic Córdoba of 1969, the female writers who were brave enough to sign their texts and the tenacious activists who organized the national campaign for the right to abortion, from the journalists who created the first feminist publications to those who led the movements of the unemployed, from the travestis who demanded rights to the mothers of “the disappeared” who reinvented motherhood. All of these experiences in some way flow into the multifaceted experience of contemporary feminists in Argentina. They cannot be erased or made to disappear; they are woven into the massive public demonstrations we have witnessed in the streets over the past few years.
“Not one less” is a shared slogan that resonates with a wide range of women from different generations and social classes. The phrase expresses a common horizon that unites diverse groups; it is the name taken by the collective established to organize the first of the demonstrations and was instrumental in setting up the following ones. In 2016, during one of the many territorial disputes in Greater Buenos Aires, existing occupants disputed with a new group who employed violent practices. The local government didn’t want to get involved. In a meeting, an activist from the Greater Buenos Aires collective told the local Secretary of Security that they were part of Not One Less, which had already organized two strikes. The tone quickly changed. Behind the small group was a national and international force, implicit but well known. Days later, a meeting was held among feminist groups in the area to discuss the conflict. In the round of introductions, each woman declared her dual membership: to a specific collective and to Not One Less. The phrase is at once essential to our times and a point of unity for Argentine feminisms.
Contemporary neoliberal governance appeals to emotion; it places individual experience at its center and constructs its dominion on the basis of agitated feelings. In contrast to modern modes of government, aimed at a supposedly contemplative public, the new right wing distances itself from political rationality. The old illusion of ideas without a body, of spiritual life prevailing over the corporal, is reversed by the notion of a body without ideas, of pure sensitivity, bare life, an existence without qualities. But this emotional life held up as the opposite of rationality is a damaged life, stripped bare, turned into a marketing device. They invoke the joy of living – wrote Adorno1 – as the antechamber to the slaughterhouse.
Certain strands of feminism could be written off as “purple marketing” or as part of the model that appeals to the emotional, but at the same time they have the power to subvert the established order. They are able to do so because they are wise to these emotional appeals and understand both abstract words and pure rationality as inventions that legitimize an unequal order. The contrast of private–public, body–reason, reproduction–production, feeling–ideas, as they are articulated in modernity, condemns women to subordination and the systematic exploitation of their strengths upon tasking them with the socially necessary but habitually unpaid domestic work of reproduction and carework. Discussion on sexist exploitation aims at overturning these underlying axioms. That the new right wing appeals to the primacy of emotion should not erase this critical genealogy.
Writing this book has a political objective: to further understand the actions and achievements of contemporary feminism; to impede the conservative appropriation and stop the work being done from devolving into something purely ornamental; to describe the powerful process of constructing a feminist political subject. We are witnessing the dawn of feminism in real time, hearing the questions it poses and seeing the disobedience it incites. Bearing witness to the dawning of this movement turns the story we write into a story about ourselves. A girl cries inconsolably at school. She is referred to a social worker. The girl is too upset to speak, until finally she says: Not One Less happened to me. The phrase provides a starting point for reporting sexual abuse in the home. Another girl speaks with her grandmother. She is eight years old and asks about a lesbian couple. She is surprised to learn that this kind of relationship could only recently be expressed publicly. She ventures an interpretation: now they can show it because Not One Less is here to defend all the rights of women.
What is this phenomenon, encapsulated in a single phrase, which has become password and symbol, common code, filled with multiple meanings, tool employed by diverse political constructions, contested territory? A movement is occurring which, as we say in the assemblies, has no boss, no leader, no owner. Nor does it have one singular or legitimate interpretation. The pages that follow are an attempt to contribute to the discussion on how to conceptualize this movement and also an attempt to gather some “strands of thread” with which to weave our political imagination.
Note
1
Adorno, T.,
Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso Books, 2005.
