"We have anger. Anger against millennial oppression. Anger against historical impunity. Anger and fear of being attacked, killed, forgotten."
Read the first chapter of the book-manifesto “Quemando el miedo” by the Chilean feminist collective, LASTESIS , known in 2019 for the performance “A rapist in your path” , replicated by women from different countries.
LASTESIS is an interdisciplinary collective of women composed of Daffne Valdés Vargas, Paula Cometa Stange, Lea Cáceres Díaz and Sibila Sotomayor Van Rysseghem. The four are on Time magazine's list of the 100 Most Influential People for turning their art into a relentless denunciation of the injustices of sexism.
cap 1.
“They steal everything from us, except anger”
Rabies, in the animal kingdom, can be transmitted when one animal sinks its teeth into the body of another. The virus travels from where the injury occurred to the brain. First, it causes inflammation and then death. But to this inherent deadly ability to spread incurable disease, we could add another kind of rage. One that has been without a cure for centuries. An atavistic and obsolete system that also attacks the body. Our bodies. It hurts us, immobilizes us and kills us.
We have anger. Rage against millennial oppression. Rage against historical impunity. Anger and fear of being attacked, killed, forgotten.
Patriarchy pulsates in the veins of Governments and the powerful, the media, the police. It crosses the different socioeconomic sectors. It infiltrates courts of justice. It goes underground ―and sometimes so visibly―through the State. It becomes the expression of the fury of drug traffickers and Central American gangs who use women as a shield and as revenge booty, a nefarious ancestral tradition that lasts until today. Everything the patriarchy touches turns to rage.
We have anger. Anger at the constant invisibility of our abuses. Why is it that almost every woman you know has been abused and men don't know a single abuser? Because they don't see it. Because in your privilege our blood is invisible.
When we were girls, we were touched many times in the street and we experienced unpunished harassment in our own flesh. They grabbed our asses, rubbed our penises on a bus. They kissed us forcibly. They demeaned us. We were abused when we were girls, young people and then adults; drunk and sober. Once, while we were walking through Valparaiso, a guy came out of the bush and shouted: “You like to be put in a hole. Run, bitch!” And there was no alternative but to run. And this harassment, which is invisible to many, we experience every day without being able to report it.
Our testimony is always in doubt, it is always questionable, doubtful, it is never enough. The presumption of innocence undermines our truth. The impunity of abuse and rape is normalized and constant revictimization is unbearable. Yet they hate us when we come out en masse to tell them that we no longer tolerate their mistreatment, violence and torture.
When we created 'A rapist in your path', we received a lot of threats through digital social networks. It bothered, and the first reaction of many people was to defend themselves with a “not all of us are like that”. Some even said, "Why do they call me a rapist if I'm not?" When obviously it is a staging, a performance that points to a condemnation to which we are exposed. It's an artistic way of saying we're not safe. But it's hard for them to see, see themselves, deconstruct themselves. They know that nobody is saved, or almost nobody. Your father or your grandfather or your brother is not saved. Neither does the boyfriend who claims to be “supportive” and promises you eternal love. Nor the companion of ballads who, if you delve into his life, will find more than one story of mistreatment in which he was the author or accomplice of contempt. Because many have abused a woman and/or a sexual dissidence in one way or another.
They hurt, emotionally punished, minimized, tried to explain work or school situations to someone as if they were inferior. They perpetuated the wage gap. They mocked and denied the subjectivities and identities that do not correspond to the patriarchal binarism; as if gender were limited only to men and women. They abused their privileges. They raped.
Patriarchy is a judge who judges us for being born. To be born with or without a vulva, to be born a dissident in the widest and smallest of senses, fatally links us to brutality. Everything patriarchy touches turns to brutality. And we know they can keep inventing even crueler ways to kill us.
Lucía Pérez, a 16-year-old Argentine girl who was raped, impaled, drugged and tortured to death, learned about it. Justice convicted the accused of his murder only for selling drugs and ruled out any sexual assault on their part.
Jesica Tejeda found out when she was 34 years old. Juan César Augusto Huaripata, her partner, killed her with 30 stab wounds in Rosales, Peru. But not only Jesica knew it, but her whole neighborhood, because when they went to ask for help at the police station, which was only 200 meters away, the police took an hour to arrive. They murdered Jesica and also her 15-year-old son. The feminicide set fire to the house to try to erase the tracks.
Brenda Micaela Gordillo, 24, was killed by her partner, Naim Vera, in Catamarca, Argentina, just because she was pregnant. So that no one would discover the crime, he roasted Brenda's remains on the barbecue.
Nicole Saavedra, a lesbian, found out in Limache, Chile. She was 23 when Víctor Pulgar kidnapped, raped, tortured and murdered her, living with impunity for more than three years thanks to indifference and judicial negligence.
Ámbar Cornejo learned it in Villa Alemana, Chile. He was 16 years old and his mother's partner, Hugo Bustamante, raped, murdered, and dismembered his body to later bury under the house; a man who had previously murdered another woman and her child. However, Justice released him 17 years before serving that first sentence.
All women in the world know this, because we don't walk the streets calmly. Because if they rape us, they point us as guilty. Because justice systems are inoperative and the precarious protection measures they offer against an aggressor are never enough. Because candidates to preside over Governments fill their mouths with slogans about equality, but do not propose State solutions to prevent feminicides.
Because it's a lie that they protect us. Because it's a lie that they want us alive. We see this when they reject comprehensive sex education. We see this when they reject the sociocultural and political change we need to abolish gender oppression and violence.
They rob us of everything but anger, and our anger makes them uneasy. They want us to stay in our homes as if nothing is happening. It bothers them that we go out with a blindfold on our eyes, dressed in light, nocturnal and suggestive clothes to sing that they are the rapists. But we don't get tired of screaming. Until that anger turns into revolution. And they feel insulted, enraged, when they see that we are tired of waiting for changes in their policies and that we organize ourselves in an independent and self-managed way. They are insulted that we trust feminist organizations and groups rather than their patriarchal and colonial institutions. They feel insulted that we resort to them when we are victims of violence, or that we have abortions together in our homes; illegal, clandestine. They boil inside that we shit on their State policies, because the police don't take care of us, our friends take care of us.
All the women we mention have died or been tried in the last two years and are just examples of the barbarism that runs through this system; numbers that the patriarchal society refuses to withhold, because it is not difficult to read if we only look at the year 2019. Mexico: 916 deaths. Peru: 168 femicides. Brazil: 1,314. In Honduras, 55 women were murdered in the first six months of confinement by covid-19.
Want to talk about a virus that spreads without a cure? They are killing us.
It was discovered by Ingrid Escamilla, a 25-year-old Mexican woman who was murdered and skinned by her partner, Érick Robledo. His mutilated body was exposed in the media and a video with the report of his femicide helped to victimize him. The press has not yet learned to report how they murder us. The photos further dishonored his departure and other men went to the trouble of posting under the images of his mutilated body: "What a beautiful consummated hatred, what a beauty of images, what a delight of murder".
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El País translation.
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chest.me
@putapeita
/bitch
