gender – Virtual Koerners, or persistence in times of pandemic

July 8, 2020July 8, 2020

Apuntes sobre lo doméstico

Domesticar, doméstico, domesticidad… Al escuchar estas palabras las primeras imágenes que me vienen son las de un domador de fieras. Y casi simultáneamente, la amplia cocina de adobe y piedra de la casa de mi abuelo en una aldea perdida por Ávila, en medio de un secarral que hoy en día está deshabitado. Una cocina cubierta de telarañas y cuyo hogar (nombre que se le daba antiguamente a la chimenea) ha sido también tapado.

Tales imágenes tienen que ver con la misma etimología de lo doméstico: el diccionario nos informa que proviene del latín domestĭcus, de domus “casa,” y hace referencia tanto a todo lo que pertenece a la casa, como a los animales que se crían en compañía del hombre (opuestos a los salvajes).

De este modo, cuando se sugiere que el mundo doméstico es de las mujeres nos imagino no sólo dedicadas a todas las tareas del hogar a lo largo de los siglos, sino también como animales salvajes sometidas “a la vista y compañía del hombre” (como nos indica, de nuevo, el diccionario). Animales de compañía, como los gatos que, según me dijeron hace poco los del control de plagas, ya no asustan a las ratas al saber que dejaron de ser cazadores salvajes hace mucho tiempo. Una lástima pues nos acompañan pero han perdido parte de su poder dentro del espacio común.

La idea de que el espacio doméstico nos pertenece a las mujeres y, por el contrario, el espacio público a los hombres es ciertamente muy problemática: aceptar la misma división del mundo de las dos esferas implicaría aceptar el (injusto) reparto laboral por sexos. Sin embargo, la frontera entre estos dos mundos –público y privado– es bastante porosa y siempre ha habido algo de una esfera que se escapa a la otra, interacciones y contactos.

Ahora bien, retomar esta división para hacerla visible no siempre implica aceptarla. Creo que en muchas ocasiones posibilita el hacer notar y discutir tal reparto y la desigualdad que conlleva, paso inicial para transformarla. Segato propone empezar a nombrar esas historias del espacio doméstico de forma que creen una nueva retórica que haga frente a la dominante (la del valor de las cosas) y refleje lo que ella llama “política de los vínculos” y que asocia a lo femenino.

Pero, una vez más, dicha asociación puede resultar problemática. Al igual que cuando se asocia a la mujer a los cuidados (del hogar, de los hijos, de los mayores, de los enfermos, de las plantas, de los animales…) no podemos olvidar que es una labor histórica y arbitraria, al asociar a las mujeres a ciertos modos de sociabilidad y hacer política, no se debería perder de vista su carácter contingente. Nada hay que por nuestra fisiología haga mejores a las mujeres para los cuidados como todavía algunos se empeñan en asegurar, como tampoco en el pasado histórico las mujeres se encargaban de ello en exclusividad.

Muchos enfatizan que al ser nuestro cuerpo el que alumbra y sostiene la vida por medio del embarazo y el amamantamiento tal función biológica tiene un correlato social; sin embargo, según Durkheim todo lo social requiere una explicación de orden también social, no biológica. Por lo que tal vinculación de las mujeres a los cuidados tiene que ver más con los modos opresivos que se han usado históricamente para controlar a las mujeres en un espacio creado para ese fin. Tal espacio, además, ha ido adquiriendo una serie de significados relacionados con lo íntimo, lo privado, lo familiar y, hoy, lo individual, despojando de lo social y político al trabajo reproductivo (con el que me refiero no sólo a la procreación sino a todo el trabajo de cuidados y doméstico que facilita el sostenimiento de la vida). Según Bourdieu, “el orden social funciona como una inmensa máquina simbólica que tiende a ratificar la dominación masculina en la que se apoya” (Dominación 22).

El simbolismo de tal espacio doméstico es lo que Segato propone transformar adoptando una nueva retórica, a pesar del riesgo esencialista que implica nombrar lo que ha estado por tanto tiempo en los márgenes de la política en una supuesta naturalidad.

El peligro mayor, no obstante, está en la aceptación e inmovilidad de tal espacio donde seguiríamos siendo animales de compañía. Animales que al tomar el espacio público se exponen a recibir, como sabemos, acusaciones de ser salvajes que cometen actos vandálicos.

Parece necesario para la des-domesticación de lo doméstico y cambiar el rumbo de la historia de violencia contra las mujeres dejar de una vez atrás esa simbología del hogar y la mujer como su ángel o animal de compañía del hombre: seamos, en cambio, (todas y todos) compañeros salvajes.

June 24, 2020

“Patriarchy: From the Margins to the Center”

Cross-posted from Posthegemony.

It has been observed that the higher up a corporate hierarchy you look, the more likely it is you will find a psychopath. Indeed, in an article in Forbes (of all places) we read that “Roughly 4% to as high as 12% of CEOs exhibit psychopathic traits, according to some expert estimates, many times more than the 1% rate found in the general population and more in line with the 15% rate found in prisons.” The same article also reports that “the top four career choices for psychopaths are CEO, attorney, media personality and salesperson.” In other words, there is a congruence between psychopathic personality traits and some of the key institutions of contemporary society: business, the Law, the media, and commerce. So much for psychopathy being an “antisocial” disorder. It is part of the very fabric of the world we live in.

In her chapter, “Patriarchy: From the Margins to the Center” (from La guerra contra las mujeres [2017]), Rita Segato goes further. We are all trained to be psychopaths now, she tells us, as part of a “pedagogy of cruelty” that is the “nursery for psychopathic personalities that are valorized by the spirit of the age and functional for this apocalyptic phase of capitalism” (102). Segato presents a brief reading of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange to make her point, though what she sees as “most extraordinary” about the film is that the shock with which it was received when it came out (in 1971) now seems to have almost totally dissipated. What was once taken as itself an almost psychopathic assault on the viewer’s senses is now just another movie; this shift in our sensibility is “a clear indication [. . .] of the naturalization of the psychopathic personality and of violence” (102). The narcissistic “ultra-violence” of the gang of dandies that the film portrays is now fully incorporated within the social order that it once seemed to threaten.

For Segato, moreover, this psychopathic violence to which we are increasingly inured is ultimately gender violence: it both establishes and is grounded upon what she elsewhere terms a “mandate of masculinity” by which masculine identity and at the same time both the public sphere and the state is inscribed on and at the expense of women’s bodies. Moreover, all this is folded into a “decolonial” perspective that does not claim that indigenous social structure were free of sexism or patriarchy, but which argues that Western modernity transformed what were once gender relations characterized by reciprocity into a binary system from which empathy is absent and woman are treated as things on which male narcissism inscribes itself.

In short, Segato offers a grand theory of human society and epochal history, at the root of which is (almost) always and everywhere violence against women. As she puts it: “Buried down below, at the foundation, at the foot of the pyramid, sustaining the entire edifice, a woman’s body” (97). As even the reference to a pyramid suggests, confirmed by the frequent invocation of diverse folktales and origin narratives from wildly different contexts, all this adds up to a kind of mythic anthropology that (for all the glancing citations of contemporary theorists such as Judith Butler) has a nineteenth-century feel to it. Indeed, there is a tension between the universalizing gestures on the one hand (an appeal to transhistorical ways of knowing and being), and the attempt to periodize and draw out specificities and differences on the other. Are we all psychopaths now, or is there something psychopathic inherent to modernity? At times, Segato seems to want to have it both ways. Equally, I’m not particularly convinced by her calls to feminine (and indigenous) empathy and reciprocity as modes of resistance to the increasingly violent structure of everyday life, not least because (despite her protests otherwise) all this does indeed sound very much like a form of essentialism.

For me, the parts of Segato’s analysis are very much more interesting and provocative than the whole. I don’t think that we need buy into the (quasi) cosmic unity of her over-arching vision to appreciate the very important ways in which she contributes to our understanding of the mechanisms of gender violence, for instance, not least in her specific studies of cases such as the femicides in Northern Mexico. Even if we see society less as a pyramid (with its base and superstructure) and more as a network or web, Segato’s analyses help us see in new ways how everything is connected, both to ensure the reproduction of forms of domination across many axes, and to offer hope that local resistances can have broad and unexpected repercussions throughout the system. The center has permeated the margins: there are few if any spaces of refuge, and certainly no pre-lapsarian community to which one might fantasize a return. But at the same time, the margins continue to haunt the center: multiplicity is everywhere.

June 24, 2020June 26, 2020

Peruvian Punks

Peruvian Punks
y la minorización de lo femenino

By Fabiola Bazo
Student in the PhD program in Gender, Race and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia

As I read Rita Segato for this week’s discussion I thought, Damn! Why didn’t I have this text while I was writing about misogyny in the Peruvian punk scene in the 80s?

A punk scene sprouted in Lima in the 80s. It was a youth counterculture dominated by men and with clearly masculine symbolism and rituals. However, a small number of women dared to participate in this counterculture as musicians, among them Patricia Roncal, best known as María T-ta.

María T-ta had a very assertive discourse about female sexuality, and made it clear that she did “with her life and with her body what she wanted.” Her lyrics, presentations, interviews and publications evidenced her critique of machismo in Peruvian society. For instance, one of her songs describes the rape of a maid (a racialized woman from the Andes) by the son of a white family in a rich neighbourhood in Lima.

Her discourse was not welcomed in the punk scene, because the “dominant social thought” considered women’s issues to be a minority issue. As Segato argues, this minorización infantilizes women, and confines women/feminine issues to the sphere of the intimate, of the private, as a “minority issue” (2017: 91). Advancing feminine themes that were at that time considered intimate was against the punk canon. A canon that considered it “of little importance” to bring to the public sphere issues that affect women due to their condition as women.

To devalue María T-ta’s attempt to merge spheres, her project to de-minorizar feminine issues, punks claimed that María T-ta’s music and performative style was not serious. It was unpleasant and trivialized important social issues because “she had shit in her brain.”

Enforcing the punk masculinity mandate

“El mandato de la masculinidad exige al hombre probarse hombre todo el tiempo; porque la masculinidad, a diferencia de la femineidad, es un status, una jerarquía de prestigio, se adquiere como un título y se debe renovar y comprobar su vigencia como tal” (Segato 2018: 40).

“El hombre que responde y obedece al mandato de masculinidad se instala en el pedestal de la ley y se atribuye el derecho de punir a la mujer a quien atribuye desacato o desvío moral…el estatus masculino depende de la capacidad de exhibir esa potencia, donde masculinidad y potencia son sinónimos” (Segato 2018: 44)

Although the punk scene questioned authority, injustice and social conventions, it disciplined unacceptable behaviours sneakily with jokes and paternalistic attitudes, or overtly with physical aggression. María T-ta´s lyrics dealing humorously with women’s desire “infuriated” male punks who verbally and physically abused her while she performed. “The macho” was brought out when punks saw a woman who wanted to take command on the stage.

María T-ta awakened the demons of many people, who considered her “a woman out of control,” who did not know “her place.” So it became necessary to ensue the mandate of masculinity to exercise violence. Attackers would jump on the stage, and some thought their intention was “to make her disappear.” Or as Rita Segato would put it, she was violently disciplined by the patriarchal forces imposed on all of those who [must continue to] inhabit that margin of politics (Segato 2017: 96).

Paradoxically, a scene that considered itself libertarian, denouncing conservative values associated with the authority of the family, the Church and the State, rested on a patriarchal system demanding “sobriety” and “seriousness” as parameters of what was considered to be an “appropriate” punk. Women’s participation was tolerated only so long as it was subordinated to the mandate of masculinity and respected the division between the public and private spheres.

To be continued…

Works Cited:

Segato, Rita. “Contra-pedagogías de la crueldad: Clase I.” From Contra-pedagogías de la crueldad (2018).
Segato, Rita. “Patriarcado: Del borde al centro. Disciplinamiento, territorialidad y crueldad en la fase apocalíptica del capital.” From La guerra contra las mujeres (2017).

María T-ta y el Empujón Brutal, “El amor es gratis” (1986)

Y me dice mi mamá, “no te quites el disfraz ya verás que al matrimonio llegarás y por la avenida Arequipa no andarás”
Y me dice mi papá, “a tu cama sola y temprano regresarás
Y a la calle sin tu hermano no saldrás”
Me comenta mi abuelita, en los tiempos de Pepita, “así no eran las putitas”
Ya las primas y las tías, chismoseando a las vecinas se preguntan todo el día“¿En qué andará metida?”
Y mis amigas me marginan, con sus celos y su envidia
Ni siquiera se imaginan qué es tener vagina
En cuclillas y a escondidas, para gozar de la vida con mi costillo, confundida
¡Ya nos duelen las rodillas!
Ya sé lo que quiero, ya sé lo que quiero, ya sé lo que quiero,
¡no cuesta dinero y no da dolor ajeno!
Le contesto a mi mamá, en moto prefiero andar
Aunque me deje el vestido roto y me golpee el poto
Papá, “con quien te acostarás que no sea mi mamá
Mientras ella en la cocina no se enterará”
Abuelita, si solterita me voy a quedar
A viejita no quiero llegar, sin saber lo que es el manjar
Y si mover la lengua quieren mis vecinas y mis tías que vengan a conmigo un día
Que a moverla mejor yo les puedo enseñar
Y si vagina no conocen mis amigas, sin dolores de barriga que me acompañen un día
Y conocerán hasta lo que es mandinga
Yo y mi chico nos cansamos, de que para besarnos y agarrarnos
El pantalón no podemos bajarnos ¡y hasta de miedo podemos cagarnos!
Yo sé lo que quiero, yo sé lo que quiero, yo sé lo que quiero,
no cuesta dinero y no da dolor ajeno.
Y eso a ti no te debe doler y si te duele, ¡Sóbate!

June 17, 2020June 19, 2020

Cuerpo y fuego

“Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego” de Mariana Enríquez

Por Olga Albarrán
PhD en Estudios Hispánicos de la Universidad de Columbia Británica (University of British Columbia)

El fuego, en muchas tradiciones originarias, no pertenecía a los mortales, tuvo que ser robado a los dioses. El tlacuache, en algunos mitos prehispánicos, fue el encargado de hacerlo. Para los griegos, fue Prometeo. Y gracias al fuego, nació la civilización… Y la inmolación. El fuego purifica por medio de la destrucción, uniendo principio y fin en una misma llamarada. Quizá por ello provoca a un tiempo terror y fascinación: permite acabar con todo en cuestión de segundos ofreciendo la oportunidad de un nuevo comienzo.

En “Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego,” Mariana Enríquez relata también otra historia del robo del fuego a los que se creyeron en algún momento dioses. Su cuento narra cómo un grupo de mujeres decidieron auto-inmolarse para carbonizar toda huella de feminidad, la principal culpable de la furia machista, con la esperanza de acabar así con el mundo viejo y encender uno nuevo en donde sus cuerpos no sean calcinados a causa de su misma corporalidad.

El cuerpo de la mujer, como sabemos, ha sido identificado con la naturaleza en la tradición humanista occidental (la cual ha naturalizado asimismo sus propias construcciones), mientras que el del hombre ha sido equiparado al reino de la razón. Cuerpo y mente, dos extraños entre sí que mantienen una relación desigual. Y la mente, dicen, es la que debe mantener al cuerpo (ese gran enigma) bajo control.

Al igual que a la naturaleza.

En el campo, por ejemplo, se realiza periódicamente una quema de rastrojos para regenerar el terreno y poder cultivarlo. O, históricamente, se ha venido incendiando algunos cuerpos de mujeres para “beneficio” del campo social. Como recuerda una mujer en el cuento: “siempre nos quemaron,” evocando la quema de brujas que durante siglos bien servía de escarmiento y advertencia para toda (potencial) desviación.

Tras arder, sin embargo, la regeneración puede ser simplemente una copia de lo anterior, como el Ave Fénix. O no, como sugiere la chica del subte del cuento: arde y resurge a una nueva vida en que su sensualidad y belleza han sido completamente calcinadas a manos de su marido. Ahora es un monstruo que provoca compasión y rechazo, pero también, como el cuento insinúa, la chispa de la rebelión.

Y el contagio.

El fuego sigue acabando con la vida de otras mujeres: sus parejas (y padres) las rocían con alcohol y queman vivas. Como una “epidemia” que se va propagando por la ciudad, los crímenes contra las mujeres se reproducen rápidamente. Hasta que, en el relato, llega el contraataque y un grupo de mujeres se apropia de los modos incendiarios de sus agresores y empiezan a auto-infligirse quemaduras en hogueras rituales. Su plan es crear una nueva realidad de “hombres y monstruas,” escapando así a la mirada que al ser mujer las convertía en presa, adquiriendo, en un doble sentido, “anti-cuerpos.”

Ese nuevo mundo que propone el relato es, no obstante, perturbador. Un mundo que, como a la amiga anoréxica, si bien le permite tomar el control, le conduce a la muerte. Las alternativas que hace plantearnos el relato de Enríquez para erradicar la violencia machista tan presente en nuestras sociedades apuntarían entonces hacia otras líneas de acción, pues son demasiadas las cosas que podríamos perder en el fuego.

Nuestra tarea es ahora imaginarlas.

June 17, 2020

“Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego”

Cross-posted from Posthegemony.

Femininity is all too often defined by the image (and so by the male gaze). Women are reduced to appearance, and judged in terms of the extent to which they measure up to some mythical ideal. Mariana Enríquez’s short story, “Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego” (“Things We Lost in the Fire”), presents a surreal and disturbing counter-mythology that explores what happens when that image is subject to attack, not least by women themselves.

It all starts with a woman who is compelled to support herself by begging on the Buenos Aires subway, after a jealous husband inflicts on her horrific burns that destroy her arms and face, leaving her with only one eye and a slit for a mouth, her lips burnt off. As she seeks contributions from subway passengers, she tells her story: that her husband threw alcohol on her face while she was asleep, setting her alight to “ruin” her, so she wouldn’t belong to anybody else. In the hospital, when everyone expected her to die and she couldn’t speak for herself, he said that she had done this to herself, a tragic accident after a fight. Now that she has recovered her voice, the woman on the subway reclaims her narrative and names the perpetrator. She knows, however, that she will never recover her appearance; her image was lost in the fire.

But perhaps it doesn’t all start there. As another character comments later, referring to a history of witch-hunts but also much more, “They’ve always burned women, they’ve been burning us for four centuries!” No doubt this is why the woman on the subway’s story starts to resonate so much with others.

First, it inspires copy-cat crimes: a model, who seems truly to incarnate that idealized image of femininity, is burnt by her footballer boyfriend in much the same way that the woman on the subway had been attacked. And he, too, blames her for what happened. As if it is only in death (the model does not survive her injuries) that women are granted agency, much like the famous if perhaps apocryphal witch-trials by water, in which only the drowned were presumed innocent.

Then, as Enríquez’s story progresses, small groups of Argentine women start to reclaim their agency while still alive, albeit by anticipating the torture inflicted on them by men. They begin to set light to themselves. Some do so alone, perhaps intending suicide. But, in the face of official disapproval, others form shadowy networks of “Burning Women” to aid and abet ritual ceremonies of self-immolation, complete with clandestine hospitals to ensure recovery thereafter. Because the point is to survive, and to put that survival on display. As one woman puts it: “They have always burned us. Now we are burning ourselves. But we’re not going to die: we’re going to flaunt our scars.”

The notion here is a kind of immunization: if women burn themselves, then they also rid themselves of the idealized image, the fetish that justifies men burning them. Moreover, they show that they cannot be reduced to appearances, albeit by paradoxically revelling in the way in which their new, “monstrous” appearance repels the male gaze. As the woman from the subway puts it, “Men are going to have to get used to us. Soon most women are going to look like me, if they don’t die. And wouldn’t that be nice? A new kind of beauty.” Laying claim to deformity, they challenge the gendered scopic regime of representation and power.

Yet this sacrificial logic is disturbing, and not only to men. The story is told from the perspective of a young woman, Silvina, whose mother is one of the first to throw herself into the campaign. It ends as she overhears her mother and a friend talking about her as a possible candidate for a burning: “Silvinita, oh, when Silvina burned it would be beautiful, she’d be a true flower of fire.” Here, the vision is (almost literally) of the Revolution eating its children, of a new image that ends up as horrific and coercive as the old one. The “ideal world of men and monsters” is no more (or perhaps no less) ideal than our own.

There are obvious resonances here with debates over the tactics of militant groups during Argentina’s Dirty War. There is also an explicit comparison to anorexia, which is also as much a self-destructive as a subversive mode of (re)claiming female agency. Perhaps, too, we might think of our contemporary immunological paradigm, and the price we are called upon to pay to confront all manner of diseases (metaphorical and otherwise). Fire both purifies and corrupts. Without nostalgia, and without any easy judgements, Enríquez compels us to think in new ways about what gets lost when we turn the tools that oppress us into weapons for liberation.