Gender social structure is the fancy name given to the unequal system in which we live. We know what your face looks like: patriarchal, cisheteronormative and capitalist. A complex of relationships, hierarchies, powers, ideologies, hegemonies, processes and bureaucracies. A combo of rules translated through culture, knowledge and laws that underpin the status-quo, keeping safe the interests of a minority - of a small group of people. This minority, in turn - and obviously - protects the social structure tooth and nail.
In other words, it's that (against) logic that we didn't know how to explain very well when we were children, watching our brother sit on the sofa with our father while we went to the kitchen to help our mother with the dishes.
Or the unproven but universally held premise that men are more rational and women are more careful. It is the doctrine rooted in our subconscious that the public space belongs to the male gender (white, straight, cis), while the family sphere is the responsibility of the female gender. A paradigm that feeds on the idea of the girl who washes the dishes and becomes delicate, which is nourished from a binary tangle of emotions: love and hate, praise and embarrassment. In this web, oppression, violence and inequality materialize in their deepest intersectionalities.
Then we ask ourselves: is there a way to break this structure, if the books we read, the theories we learned, the philosophies about our existence, were dictated by the owners of the public space? If our bodies are controlled and our genders suffocated by the same subjects? If our stories were told from someone else's perspective? If what we know about protagonism is what comes from this other? What if all that knowledge, that power, that heritage, serves a system that doesn't serve us?
Well, after listening to Mulamba's lyrics, Marielle's speeches, learning with bell hooks and witnessing the growth of our sapasbis projects; after the arduous achievements of the indigenous movement, observing how the struggle to reverse this situation has been gaining strength, I would say that the answer is yes. Very yes. There is a way to break up with her.
Uncertain times like the one we face are also disruptive times.
It's time to exchange the old European and American references for our own, Brazilian things. To replace the outworn convictions of Avenida Paulista with ancestral indigenous knowledge. Listening to women from the periphery, who have been screaming for centuries. More: it's time to run after megaphones, to use our different places to sing in chorus to these voices. Echo them in all spaces.
Gender social structure is the fancy name given to the result of the millennial mutism imposed on those who, from this order, bleed. And in the unique timbre of each silenced voice is the club to break the chains and crush the teeth and nails of the status-quo. It is a time to listen, and it is also a time to speak. To understand that we all have something important to say and that we need to be heard. You, who are a woman, black, indigenous, trans, lesbian, bisexual. Who is from the favela, who is a mother, who is from a traditional community. You who don't suit beauty standards - and don't even want to. The time has come to wield your voice.
Cássia is a collective of hearts that was born to transform shame into power, loneliness and fear into belonging, silence into voice.
Therefore, this space belongs to you. So, to follow together, tell us: what does your heart say?
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Marina Sperafico is a Master's student in Gender, Development and Globalization at LSE, a Chevening Scholar and member of Coletivo Cássia, a lesbian and bisexual (cis or trans) women's collective of Grupo Dignidade , the first NGO in Paraná and the second oldest in Brazil, which It has been active since 1992 in the defense and promotion of LGBTI+ rights. Coletivo Cássia are our partners in the phrase I'm with her.
