Autonomies

It will be necessary to shake the fantasy of the state, the fantasy of law, the safe harbor and terra firma sustaining the patriarchal and state certainties that impede our advancement. It will be necessary, for example, to reexamine the unachievable, inclusive formula of human rights, “different but equal,” which papers over the persistent, unassailable binary asymmetry in which a masculine subject who pretends to be universal prevails. It will be necessary to suggest instead “unequal but different,” a formula based in the explicitly hierarchical structure of communitarian worlds, but radically pluralist. Such a formula would undoubtedly open a better path to a style adequate to women’s politics. It will also be necessary to invert the feminist slogan of the 1970s, according to which “the personal is political.” The paradoxical result of this slogan was a pious faith in the state, an investment in the achievement of victories in the state realm, in the achievement of more laws and public policies that could limit gendered violence in intimate contexts. The approach that I propose is not a translation of the domestic into public terms, or an insistence on rendering the intimate in the language of the public in order to achieve a measure of recognition by the politics of the state. I propose instead the opposite approach: domesticating politics, de-bureaucratizing it, humanizing it by transposing it into a domestic key, but where the “domestic” is re-politicized. The constant failures of the strategy of taking state power, whether by force or elections, in order to redirect history show that this cannot be the answer. We have never managed to reach our destination through the seizure of the state, because state power has ultimately imposed its reason on those who wield it. It has remained the site of an administrative elite that retains its colonial lineage. We should instead recognize and reclaim the plurality of spaces and the politics of different styles offered by communal life—in the village, between villages, and at the colonial front—remaining mindful of their differences from patriarchal politics. In the meantime, the way forward is amphibious, involving work inside and outside the state realm, work in both intra- and extra-state politics, reconstructing communities that are under attack and that have been dismembered by the colonial and state interventions called modernization.

Rita Segato,

On the occasion of the 8th of March, International Women’s day, we share through an interview, an essay, a video interview, the reflective work of Rita Laura Segato; a work that we consider amongst the most important in contemporary feminism.

Rita Segato: “A failure of feminist thought is to believe that gender violence is a problem for men and women”

(El Ciudadano 02/09/2017/La tinta 22/09/2017)

Rita Segato holds a doctorate in anthropology and is a researcher. She is probably one of the most lucid feminist thinkers of this age. She has written innumerable works based on her research with rapists in the Brasilia penitentiary, as an anthropological and gender expert in the historic Guatemalan trial in which members of the Army were tried and sentenced for the first time for crimes of sexual slavery and violence against Mayan women of the Kékchi ethnic group, and was invited to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico to present her interpretation of the hundreds of femicides perpetrated in that city. Her resume is long and impressive.

Beyond all scandalizing prejudice, Segato has proposed an in-depth look at lethal violence against women, understanding femicides as a problem that transcends gender to become a symptom, or better, an expression of a society that it needs a “pedagogy of cruelty” to destroy and nullify compassion, empathy, ties and local and community roots. In other words, all those elements that become an obstacle in a “predatory” capitalism, a capitalism that depends on such a pedagogy of cruelty to teach.

It is, in this sense, that the exercise of cruelty on the body of women, but that also extends to homophobic or trans crimes, all of these kinds of violence “are nothing other than the discipline that patriarchal forces impose on all those of us who inhabit the margin of politics, they are the crimes of the high intensity modern colonial patriarchy, against everything that destabilises it ”. The instructive message that this high intensity patriarchal capitalism needs to impose on all of society is written on these bodies.