Violence: Feminist Struggles Against Victimization to Set Fear on Fire

TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH BY LIZ MASON DEESE

The concept of violence is regularly used in our discourses around political struggles, but often without being questioned ethically and politically. In this text, Verónica Gago takes on the term by describing how feminist movements in “Améfrica Ladina” have engaged new forces in understanding the patriarchal, extractivist, and exploitative violence they are facing, and how to organize against it.

The Ni Una Menos (Not One Woman Less) movement emerged in response to the multiple and specific forms of violence faced by women, lesbians, trans, travestis, and non-binary people. By occupying the streets at a mass scale, in Argentina and in Abya Yala more broadly, the question of violence has escaped from its enclosure under the concept of “domestic violence” and the modes of its domestication through the responses attempted by institutions, NGOs, and philanthropic and paternalistic forms of management.

The strikes launched in Poland and Argentina in 2016 were tied to mobilizations that had only recently started, such as Ni Una Menos, which had begun in 2015, and gave them a greater push.

In this way, it challenged neoliberalism in the household and on the streets. This was how, in many countries, the feminist strike expanded, diversified and adapted to the needs of stopping and sabotaging different realities of oppression and exploitation.

The feminist strike, as a political process, was used as an act of disobedience to explain why certain jobs did not count because they had been made subaltern in the sexual and racial division of labor. It also reveals that today, class and race are experienced very concretely through sexist violences because those forms of patriarchal power are related to and directly articulated with types of work and remuneration, access to justice, housing, and forms of criminalization, especially in the most precarious economies. From the feminist struggles, we can build a transnational cartography that connects with historical debates about the “popular” (the “people”) and the subaltern, about class, race and gender, in Abya Yala or “Améfrica Ladina,” as black feminist Leila Gonzalez named this geography. It is this practical diagnosis that makes a movement, mapping the connections between different forms of violence without being solely an analytical discourse. It is that practical diagnosis in the streets that produces a strategic displacement: an escape from the figure of the victim and the construction of an embodied sense of freedom in being together.

These shifts in the experience of gender violence enable us to reframe neoliberal violence as colonial, more specifically, patriarchal violence. Organizing demonstrations, sharing assemblies, fighting for abortion rights and against austerity policies over these years have unfolded a constellation of concepts and practices that enable us to produce a sense of what is going on. I borrow the term constellation as a powerful method of connections that allows for a systematic reading of neoliberal violence without being abstract. This is a collective understanding, capable of changing how violence is experienced at the everyday level. It was made possible because the demonstrations, the strikes and the assemblies became a source of strength, desire, and enjoyment that was able to directly confront violence.

The everyday is not synonymous with the small, but rather relaunches a critique that deepens our understanding of the current moment of capitalist depredation. This requires pushing forward in the perspective of an anti-colonial feminist praxis in order to produce a concrete analysis of relations and situations that involve violence. That means a conjunctural and structural political reading that focuses on the conditions of political action. The most virulent attacks have also been unleashed against this constellation: the murder of the afro-brazilian feminist leader Marielle Franco was a turning point in this sense. This cognitive and organizational “accumulation” of the political process of demonstrations, strikes and assemblies is an achievement of the feminist movement. It is something that has pushed and disseminated and that today translates into forms of politicization of struggles in social reproduction.

One useful framework seems to me to be that of Maria Mies and her insistence on showing that there is no capitalism without colonial patriarchy. In any case, her question is why the colonial and patriarchal dimension needs to be the invisibilized part of the capitalist regime. In her argument, the capital always needs to produce colonies as a mechanism to distinguish zones for the application of differential violence. Following this train of thought, Silvia Federici argues that, in capitalism, violence became a principal productive force, which is repeatedly updated as a scene of “primitive accumulation” where violence becomes direct, without mediation.

We can connect that with the notion of “total violence” developed by Denise Ferreira da Silva, to explain the absolute logic of expropriation of wealth and land extraction. Her refusal of “separability” as a conceptual premise of modern rationality is central to understanding the processes of violent separation that produce division as the order of the world. It is in this sense that feminist anti colonial praxis develops a popular pedagogy against the (cognitive and political) effect of “separability”: the impact of violence as an everyday experience—from sexual violence to debt violence, from labor exploitation to evictions, to name a few—has a lot to do with the expansion of a feminist sensibility that names, denounces, and produces comprehension from below about its root causes. That is primarily because this feminist praxis allows for confronting violence and not only suffering from it. Organizing to fight for better incomes, for housing, to overturn repressive legislation, against the precaritization of lives, or against institutional racism, are concrete forms of mapping this network of different forms of violence and defining tactics in territories where that violence is condensed and reinforced.

Barely emerging from the Covid pandemic, we can notice that levels of violence have increased especially in areas of reproduction. If, at one time, a set of institutions had managed a certain degree of pacification (the patriarchy of the wage, the maternal mandate, etc.), today, to the contrary, we can identify them as arenas of everyday war. Feminist perspectives have recentered an analysis of war in their collective understanding, enabling a systemic characterization of contemporary violence—those of Silvia Federici, Rita Segato, and Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, for example. In fact, one of the most important contributions made by feminist debates has been repositioning the term war, talking about a “state of permanent war” against certain bodies and certain territories as a definition of contemporary neoliberalism.

It has been feminist thought in alliance with anti-extractivist struggles and feminist struggles against austerity that have brought back the interpretative key of war for thinking about contemporary violence. They have done so by conceptualizing a war against women, lesbians, trans, travestis, non-binary people, indigenous, migrants, and racialized populations as a war against specific bodies and territories and, from there, building a framework for analyzing new types of war. Thus, this analysis also makes it possible to read other wars. There are two fundamental characteristics of that analysis: 1) it shifts the notion of war to another grammar of conflictivity and 2) it renews the need for a theory of violence without being demobilizing or victimizing.

My argument is that anti-extractivist struggles in alliance with anti-austerity struggles, both in a feminist framework, make visible what capitalist violence wants to hide: that the most violent forms of appropriation today are practiced against the forms of reproduction of the majorities (no longer guaranteed by sufficient wages) and for the extractivist intensification (of nature’s resources). This double orientation of capital is what remains hidden when we only speak of the financial hegemony of capital. That characterization seems to follow capital’s self-proposed narrative as becoming more and more abstract and less in need of land and labor.

This recognition of capitals’ double orientation allows us to understand a form of neoliberal violence that becomes authoritarian because it has not been successful in pacifying subalternized populations, because it has been contested and resisted. Thus, this highlights the need to renew our vocabulary and articulate a strategic notion of war that describes a situation which is no longer defined by two clearly identifiable sides in a single arena of conflict (even if this feminist debate was the precursor to the arena of war of 2022). If the pandemic has functioned as a laboratory for reconfiguring relations in a patriarchal and family-based register, the feminist movement has opposed it with support networks, infrastructure of collective provision, and a wager on de-domesticating care. This cycle of mass feminism has made it so that feminist practices are constituted as a way of extending the contours of a body that is linked to the territory, inventing a language that speaks of body-territories to think about the connection between the ecological crisis and possibilities for other types of non-property-based sovereignties—I am referring, for example, to “food sovereignty,” a historical demand of peasant movements.

The feminist contestation of possessive individualism as a way of understanding the world has had an enormous force in experiences of organization, mobilization, and the subversion of the everyday. It was important for rethinking care, for example, by saying “The police don’t take care of me, my friends take care of me” for understanding the expansion of the body’s sensibility by declaring “if they touch one of us, we all respond,” on making it clear that “we are not going to pay for the crisis with our bodies and territories.” These are all examples in which, in a simple and powerful way, that collective experience becomes knowledge and desire for struggle. ■