from kaosenlared.net on December 4, 2022 / By Victoria Aldunate Morales translation thefreeonline
Machismo is just a symptom of inequality in difference, it must be proclaimed and revealed because violence against women is structural, which is not the same as universal: it does not operate identically in all territories, in all social classes , in all institutions or in all families. But it does structure the societies of almost the entire planet.
‘ Against the Terrrorist State – Feminist Autonomy’
Leer Original en Español – Read original in Spanish HERE
It crosses historical orders and times, knowledge and practices. It is a “fractal” way of operating because it irregularly repeats the same pattern at different scales and with different orientation[1].
We can also call it “fractal learning, since it applies the same irregular pattern, depending on individual or joint aggressors, and trains it in women and girls, in their corporalities and sensibilities.
This is how it manages to submit us humans to the roles they call “women’s” and “feminine” in the sexual, domestic, public, etc.
Violence against Women extends its practices to other bodies. The origin of fractal learning is Violence against Women. Thus, other people and other beings are identified with the same practices of Patriarchal Violence that are constantly exercised in humans.
These forms of violence are applied to all beings that seek to dominate and control, from sexual and physical to emotional abuse and crime.
Violence against Women operates at the local, national and international levels.
La lucha de una feminista maya kaqchikel en contra de la violencia …
The bodies of the human beings are a systematic booty throughout the history of all the territories:
Women and girls are exchanged. And this exchange is inaugurated by patriarchal societies before women, with the exchange and appropriation of animals, a practice that persists and continues to be used against women in trafficking, wars, occupations, etc.
In the political phenomenon of Violence against Women, as many oppressions are coordinated as those invented in each time and place by various individual or group aggressors.
It is a collective experience
Some lives have more value than others for various functions. Women are needed for the Family, but if some or many do not submit, they can be dispensed with, re-changed: The “generational change” before in the public world of social movements, has operated for centuries in marriage ( especially heterosexual) with aging, rebellious or inadequate wives. What has already been used and worn out is discarded, and another object is sought for the functions that the first [2] fulfilled.
There are expendable lives of women, the old, the disabled, the sick, the crazy… There are women who are worth more, dead than alive, for aggressors and for aggressor families. Women are killed, but they are also left to die, they are not cared for. Nor is their contribution to the family recognized and when they point it out they are described as vain or complaining.
The violence of individual or particular aggressors can control us without even touching us, with fear, threats, mockery, guilt.
Denigration -for example- is a systematic form that can be as immobilizing as any other aggression.
Institutional
There are institutional mechanisms for the perpetuation of Violence against Women. Laws that simulate technical failures[3] so that offending acts go unpunished. When those faults are corrected, other faults appear. Impunity is renewed.
Reporting procedures can be so humiliating that you prefer not to report. The police underestimate the complaints of victims with less power…
These patterns are repeated at different scales. Victims are investigated as if the violence they denounce had to do with their personalities. Diagnoses do not usually take into account territories, cultures, social class, lifestyles.
On the other hand, romanticizing the victims as “pure women”, sanctifying and fetishizing them as a political cause, does not help either. It turns against them and against those of us who accompany them.
When the victims act in an unfair and manipulative way, it is assumed as something that would prove that they deserved it, that they lied, and most seriously: that they should not show solidarity with the victims.
(But you don’t have to be a good person to be attacked, you just have to be a woman, a girl, old, impoverished, have less power…) The victims, in turn, can attack other people if they choose. And the fact is that the patriarchal order is hierarchical dominance .
On power
Academic descriptions often do not delve into power and domination as a political fact of structural politics. They describe it, but with a certain neutrality.
It is true that people and beings are equal and different from each other and depositories of true dignity (deep, non-formal: real). However, the patriarchal world does not operate like this because if it did, it would not survive.
States are capable of using a sexualized power to stop guerrilla insurgency and armed resistance, as stated -in general terms- by the activists of the ‘Always Resistant Surviving Women'[4] comrades who founded the concept of Sexual Political Violence, and develop it .
LesboFeministas Antirracistas, Tierra y Territorio – Posts | Facebook
In Corporate Femicide, a concept created by anti-racist ‘Lesbofeminists Tierra y Territorio'[5], violence against Women is used to control peoples and groups in resistance to the neoliberal, racist and speciesist capitalist system.
Defenders, women and trans-defenders members of the communities that resist are killed, they are attacked to control them individually and along with that, through them, the groups they make up.
Hitmen are used, always hiding those who have hired them: oligarchs and transnational companies.
“Violence”
Violence against Women is not a technical or academic concept. It’s not even just ideology. It is a collective experience, which is why it has developed in feminist and women’s political movements.
The hegemonic languages are not enough to describe their experiences. Women should not be their study objects, nor objects of political campaigns.
When political parties, governments, academies claim knowledge about Violence against Women, they are making invisible and denying that feminist movements and women’s movements have elaborated what we know today and that we continue to learn.
It is not by chance that the institutions want to call Violence against Women: “violence” and/or “gender violence”. Thus they neutralize it, reduce it, fragment it, disperse it as if it did not have a common origin. And they also manage not to mention women to us.
They do not need to delve into the political origin of Structural Violence when they speak like this. They can speak of “violence” as coming from particular individuals and as not operating as an organized method of domination.
But there is nothing neutral or horizontal about Violence Against Women
Justice against Cindy’s killers ACCIONES POR CINDY CONTRA LA IMPUNIDAD 4 de diciembre de 2022
It is true that anyone can carry out violent actions, but structural patriarchal damage is exerted from different types of instituted power: legal, academic, family, sexual, gender, from prestige and money, etc.
The greater the power, the greater the responsibility.
States, Governments, Judiciary Powers, International Organizations, occupy a privileged place in patriarchal domination, and are primarily responsible for not stopping it.
The State and liberal feminisms respond with prison systems, sentences, legalities to –supposedly- resolve “violence” and “gender violence” but do not resolve them.
Who killed Cindy? ¿Qué pasó con Cindy Estrada Muñoz? – puntada con hilo
International organizations invent indicators to say that they are going to eliminate them, but above all to justify their “Sustainable Development and goals” policies.
They say: “Significantly reduce all violence and the corresponding mortality rates worldwide.” This is because the death of workers and mothers -for example- attracts costs for the States and their financial systems.
UN Women, ECLAC, the World Bank and other organizations have promised in different years to achieve their agenda of goals against “violence”. In the 90s they said that it would be by 2000, then they said “in 2010”, “in 2015” and “in 2020”. It is now “2030”.
Its 2030 Agenda has 17 objectives and 169 goals that the institutions of Latin America and the Caribbean prioritized in 2018, for which they maintain a set of 154 indicators.
Just around 2018 we began to hear in our countries “All Women against all Violence”, a slogan that reaffirms “violence” and places “out of morality”, methods of self-defense of the peoples, of the animalists, of the women.
If the institutions were interested in eliminating Violence against Women, they would not analyze their fragmented figures in police, forensic institutes, Ministries of Public Security and any institution that independently applies its criteria -of any kind- to define what would be “the violence”, “gender violence”, femicide.
The classifications of femicide would not be limiting, scarce and squalid. And every institution would have the obligation to account for characteristics such as social class, ethnicity, identity, sexual orientation, territorialities, belonging to social struggles and more.
An economic geopolitics
But since that does not happen, the elites in all the territories are free to operate corporate femicide, sexual political violence and trafficking in which women and girls are a loot that is even more profitable than drugs, because women “don’t need to be sown or cultivated”, they are only born and “hundreds of men use them for sexual exploitation and then they just throw them away, killing them[6].
In wars and guerrillas, in territorial occupations, the men in charge act knowing that they have the right to the legal dispossession of minerals, seas and forests, also to kill fauna and flora and that, from the beginning, they can take advantage of the humans of the defeated or exploited peoples.
The “peace” forces and their paramilitary forces, from governments or from the UN, rape girls and women and exploit them. Patriarchy is a geopolitical system and it adapts to times, hegemonic political systems such as capitalism and other productive systems.
Patriarchal systems need the reproduction of humans to exist.
Violence against Women is a mega-mechanism that sustains these systems.
It is classist and racist in particular with humans who are a whole class and type of bodies, who are used, exploited, manipulated.
We are also the class that mostly supports the world and that is not only the euphemism of the “Economy of Care”. It is a Mode of Material Production and Reproduction, it is Economic Sexual Exchange[7].
In patriarchy, women and nature are specialized in certain areas, excluded from others, forced to perform some functions based on morality and established daily life.
And from that same area, we are prohibited from accessing, or we are considered part of, some spaces, while when we access others, we are labeled (positively or negatively, depending on who says it): Empowered, selfish, individualistic, vain and even ” liberals”.
From redistribution policies to “recognition” policies
If feminism, now called “feminisms”, back down from their radical and extreme policies of redistribution of time, territories, wealth, resources, and everyday spaces, and are left only with those policies of recognition of identities that imply visibility, like multinational advertising, feminism becomes an aesthetic fetish and a performative custom.
For this, neoliberal postmodernity gives quotas of power to certain women to empty feminism.
It does so with those who cultivate more power by aligning themselves with hegemonic masculine ideas and with mixed movements in which hegemony is masculinized.
In the mixed movements, the women are flattered for doing things, they build the organizations and their companions tell them that this is proof that they value them.
At home and in the family it is the same: We are told that what we do means that we are treated as equals (and that we even “command”).
On the other hand, in these organizations, old women are not given privileges unless they are publicly noted.
In fact Violence against Women is not a matter of symbols. Symbols are invented later to justify it. What Violence against Women persecutes is the reproductive and productive body of women and girls, the same ones that sustain the multiple organizations of societies, production and the family. The same family that works for bosses and consumes capitalism.
But it is not only Capitalism. In the vast majority of known societies, the division of labor is sexual. And it is the method that takes away from us women, our time, creation, the decision to give birth or not, authority, autonomy, life.
Transgenerational damage…
Women are attacked and killed for money, for inheritance, for hatred, for “correcting” our sexualities, our behaviors and behaviors.
Girls are systematically raped from an early age and this crime against humanity is kept hidden in the family or community. They are blamed for provoking their rapists.
Girls, adolescents and other women are made pregnant, and forced to give birth or abort. Children are raped as –yet- “not men” and an extension of their mothers.
Children of non-heterosexual sexualities are raped to “correct” them, and the rapists and aggressors are overwhelmingly men.
Structural Violence is sexual and intergenerational. The damage is transgenerational, and implies an extreme traumatization of humans, caused by patriarchally organized damage that, above all, is sustained by its institutions.
Institutions such as states, governments and -among others- international organizations that are maintained, financed and armed by the bourgeoisies and oligarchies and by billionaires from all over the globe.
Violence against Women is allowed even if those states say they have gender policies and even if they give us a “feminist” account. Because the Patriarchal pacts are metastable, capable of continually transforming their forms of domination in order to exist.
As Hanna Arendt says, Violence is not the interruption of History, it is History and it always has new devices like all those offices, private or public, that are currently not responsible for anything.
First say that patriarchal pacts are meta-stable
And they continually transform their forms of domination.
Neoliberal postmodernity gives quotas of power to certain women:
- To those who cultivate more power by aligning themselves with hegemonic masculine ideas
- To those who align with mixed movements, political parties, others.
- In mixed movements, women are praised for doing, they build organizations, and their compas tell them that this shows they are valued.
- At home it is the same, we are told that this power to do almost everything, gives us recognition, it is even said that we “command” for that
About the institutions
International organizations require indicators to say that they are going to eliminate violence against women
And they need it to justify their “Sustainable Development and goals” policies.
But also because the deaths and consequences of violence against women,
it has high costs for States and their financial systems.
The UN Women, the World Bank and other organizations, in different years have said that they would achieve sustainable development goals that involve the consequences of Violemcia against us.
In the 90s they said that in 2000 they would comply. Then they said in 2010, in 2015, in 2020, now they say in 2030.
The UN Women’s Agenda for 2030 has 17 objectives and 169 goals, and for this they speak of 154 indicators of gender violence that the institutions of Latin America and the Caribbean should prioritize.
In 2017, 2018, they delivered these indicators to governments and institutions.
And just around those years, we began to hear that of “All Women against all Violence.”
The slogan was a disappointment. Among other things because it seems to reject the self-defense methods of the Popular Revolts. In your subtext, we ask, could you argue that anti-terrorism laws persist and are used against aggressors?
The same ones that are used against peoples in resistance and other insurgent movements?
For example, anarchists, anti-speciesists, and the women who participate in those movements?
On the other hand, what aspects from the institutions clearly hinder the measures against violence against women?
- When they want to register “cases”, they do so, but in each country different institutions do it separately.
- Ministries, forensic institutes, SML, police, universities, they do it in a way that is disconnected from each other.
- Each institution does so with its criteria of what “would deserve” to be named femicide, “violence”, “gender violence”.
- Each institution operating with national laws and their classifications, which are always scarce and squalid.
- And they really do not count as relevant elements of violence against women, social class, ethnicity, territoriality, identity, sexual orientation… unless those affected participate in insurgent movements
- And they cannot do it, because they would reach anti-systemic conclusions. It’s not that they don’t know or don’t understand.
Regarding feminist self-defense, from my perspective it involves multiple spheres
There are no formulas, it is what we are learning:
- Historicizing and repoliticizing feminism and structural violence
- Find out about the denied history of feminism in the territories you inhabit Go deeper into experiential processes, rejecting the linear void
- Rescuing the material and concrete experience of humans
- Understanding that the material is not only what has gravity:
- Materialism as an ethical policy and method to distinguish reality, does not deny the mental, symbolic activity, the energies, the spiritualities or the forms of faith that the communities give themselves.
- Politicize strategic identities/ Do not mystify them
- Do not swallow categorizations, artificial languages, and on the basis of that, Western idealism, which is deterministic and dichotomous
In the ideological
- Follow a path of autonomous ideological development versus being inserted in masculinized contexts
- Own definitions, horizontal methodologies.
- Do not submit reality to theory.
- Unveil compulsory heterosexuality and its harm in all areas
- Problematizing Law and its bourgeois and patriarchal perspectives
- Break of knowledge, conceptual and methodological, with the classical visions
- Reveal power relations and violence in its multiple expressions, in the personal, collective and “public” spheres[8];
- Do not submit to the guidelines of political parties
In our movement
- Defense of strategies such as separatism as a way of political autonomy[9], without losing the ability to link and strategic alliances with organizations of oppressed groups of which we are part[10]
- Problematizing lesbophobia and racism within feminism[11]
- Do not assume the configuration of a feminism based on the policies of the World Bank (inclusion, equity, equal opportunities, empowerment, depoliticization of the concept of gender, citizenship that demobilizes revolutions)[12].
- Do not feed the elites that dialogue with the states, taking them for our global representatives.
- Do not assume or buy the “caciquismos” and feminist caudillismos and others.
- Do not romanticize or allow others to do it with us
- Distinguish the cornering and misogyny towards old women without prestige and their political memory, in our organizations and in those with which we are allied
- Feminist communications, feminist therapies, feminist knowledge
Street political theatrical installations and actions that speak to those passing by on the street
The therapeutic
- Problematize our consumption, everyone.
- Collective therapeutic experiences of dance, singing, corporality, arts, self-education, exchange of knowledge.
- Safe home networks for those fleeing violence.
- Review the abuse of power within our organizations.
- Recovery processes of loving attachments, rejecting the Domestic Reproduction Mode and its form of abusive motherhood.
The structural
- Return of the Body to all living beings.
- Frontal struggle against capitalism, against subordinate relations between countries (colonialism-imperialism)[13];
- Not integrating into the patronage, constitutionalist and bureaucratic logic of the governments in power.
- Unveil the cruelty and torture of Trafficking and the Meat Industry
- Reveal sexual exploitation without moralistic and class judgments, towards the victims and other people who access the capitalist and patriarchal sexual market.
- Make alliances with anti-species, self-management, cooperative, permaculture, revolutionary, and self-defense movements in their different forms.
On money and subsistence:
- Make solidarity economies without accumulation.
- Reunify the Use Value and the Exchange Value of our trades and creations.
- Reorganize labor and trade policies.
- Rearrange times and spaces.
- Distinguish between our conjunctural practices and survival tactics (salaried work in institutions for example) and our political autonomy.
- Those who know and can, reinvent, recover and invent technologies that support collective life.
by Victoria Aldunate Morales, anti-racist feminist lesbian from the Tierra y Territorio collective
References
[1] From the Latin fractus, which means fractured, broken, irregular
[2] Currently in Latin American feminisms, the need for "Generational Change" is also alleged. In $hile this becomes very clear with the process initiated by coalitions of parties such as the Broad Front (today in power), which produce an "8M" from their ranks for said "Replacement" which has signified a clearly liberal feminism. Also before the FA, institutional women's organizations, since 2005, proposed "Generational Change" with the introduction of the self-appointed "young feminists".
[3] Paula Santana Nazarit-Francia Hamett Pizarro, "Femicidal suicide and violence against women in Chile: feminist contributions to a debate on social and institutional complicity"
https://puntadaconhilo.cl/2021/08/02/suicidio-y-la-violencia-contra-las-mujeres-en-chile-aportes-feministas-para-un-debate-sobre-la-complicidad-social- e-institutional/
[4] The collective “Memorias de Rebeldías Feministas” have created and highlighted this concept, and develop it from their actions and narratives about sexual political violence used by the Chilean state to violate the human rights of insurgent and revolutionary women against the Pinochet dictatorship.
[5] The first time that the collective “Lesbofeministas antiracistas Tierra y Territorio” used this name was in 2016 to reveal for the first time the corporate femicide against Macarena Valdés Muñoz in Tranguil by alleged hitmen who were traveling in a vehicle with the logo of the transnational company hydroelectric R.P. Global S.A. and it goes by various names. We did it in political collaboration with Rubén Collio Benavides, Macarena Valdés' life partner.
[6] Sex Trafficking: The Business of Modern Slavery, Siddhart Kara, Columbia, London 2010.
[7] The European materialist feminists of the 70s elaborated these ideas, Paola Tabet among others. We also know that Chilean feminist proletarians made reference to the use of women as reproductive beings already at the end of the 19th century. For example, in the column "La Obrera", by Rosa Rubí, in "La Tromba", Santiago de Chile, March 6, 1898, which says in one of its paragraphs: "The worker is a meat machine whose reproductive system has been transformed into a producer. We know this from anarchist historians and activists and their book "Women and anarchist press in Chile, 1879-1931" (ADRIANA PALOMERA and ALEJANDRA PÍNTO, compilers. Ed. Espiritu Libertario, Santiago 2006).
[8] IEFLAC. BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA, 1981 (189 women attendees).
[9] VII, 1996, Cartagena, Chile (800 attendees)
[10] II EFLAC, LIMA, 1983, (600 women attendees).
[11] II and VII EFLAC
[12] II EFLAC, LIMA, 1983.
[13] I EFLAC, BOGOTÁ, 1981.
*This autonomous lesbofeminist political approach was presented at the Forum on Systematic Violence Against Women convened by the Justice Support Group for Cindy Estrada Muñoz
Victoria Aldunate Morales..read some of her work, in Spanish HERE
Victoria is a freelance feminist activist and anti-racist lesbian feminist. She is currently part of the Tierra y Territorio anti-racist Lesbofeminists and the Tierra y Territorio Network of Therapists. Among his books are “Survivor”, poetry and politics, Subalterna Ed., August 2020, “Borderlain” (Stories and microstories), Subalterna Ed., Santiago 2017, “Maliciosas. Marimachas, militantes, maracas y malditas” (Stories), 2nd edition Ed. Subalterna Santiago 2018, “Woman’s Body: Risk of Death” Book of compilation of articles and essays), Ed. Sarri-sarri Records, Santiago 2012 and 2018. She is co-author of the “Work Manual, Violence , Sexual Rights and Voluntary Maternity Building Movements”, La Paz 2010, and the “Gender and Citizenship Work Manual” La Paz, Bolivia 2009.
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