First of all, I write this text with great enthusiasm, but also with
great care. I would not want these lines to be understood as an academicexercise in any way, but rather as an attempt to ask questions, share
doubts and reflect together. Even what I seem to affirm categorically
should not be understood dogmatically. To use an expression by Antonin
Artaud, I am burning with questions. Also, before starting, I would like
to thank my friend Marina Acero for her careful and critical reading of
this article and for the conversations that this topic has sparked. - So
let's get to the point.
Problem areas of feminisms
When we talk about some of the problems posed by feminism - in general,
although I know it is more correct to speak of feminisms in the plural -
we usually refer to three particularly evident issues: on the one hand,
there is the epistemological trap of looking at the world through what
are called purple glasses; that is, through a gender perspective - or
sex-gender , all together. The epistemological pitfall is that if you
look at the entire world through a purple filter, you end up seeing
sexual gender everywhere. And if sex-gender issues are transversal, they
are not the only reason that explains many realities - in addition to
the fact that forcing the gaze to see sex-gender everywhere and at all
times puts at risk the recognition of societies and communities that are
not specifically articulated according to a concept such as sex-gender.
The metaphor of the glasses with the purple filter does not seem to be
the best, because it diminishes our sensitivity rather than enhancing
it. On the other hand, there is the issue of colonialism, racism and
classism exercised by a white, Western, bourgeois feminism that serves
as the norm for feminism. Finally, there is the great schism between
radical feminism on the one hand and transfeminism and queer feminism on
the other. This schism also manifests itself in conflict over other
issues, such as prostitution, pornography or the way consent is understood.
It is from this last problem that I mentioned that a very specific
danger arises: that of the spread of a punitive culture justified by
some feminist postulates - not only aligned with a specific current of
thought.
The Culture of Punitive Feminism: Against the Slogan "Fear Will Change
Perspective"
Currently, consent is understood in two main ways. That of "no is no"
and that of "only yes is yes". Clara Serra, in her book El sentido de
consentir (The Sense of Consent), does a synthesis exercise to highlight
the consequences of these two positions. The "no is no" paradigm
conceives the sexual relationship as a space of encounter between people
in conditions of mutual vulnerability, in which the no must be possible
and binding, and must completely transform what is happening - in the
case in which the no cannot be said (due to a situation of intimidation)
or in the case in which, once said, it is not respected, we would be
faced with a case of sexual violence.
On the contrary, the "only yes is yes" paradigm defines the sexual
relationship as a place of constant danger inevitably crossed by logics
of domination and, therefore, only an explicit and freely expressed yes
from the dominated party - that is, the woman - prevents the encounter
from being a violation by the dominant party - that is, the man. Since
this paradigm conceives the sexual sphere as a battlefield, it invokes
the intervention of the law to save women from the system, denying them
any autonomous capacity for action and any self-responsibility.
This "only yes is yes" approach, Serra explains, implies several things:
first, the obligation for the woman to know her own desire and her own
limits before any encounter - it is also necessary that desire always
coincide with will if one wants to practice the purest and truest of
consents, which is, as they say, enthusiastic consent; second, that the
woman expresses her desire in an obligatory and appropriate way during
sexual intercourse following the dictates of a contractualist morality;
third, that man and woman are understood as fixed positions in a
hierarchy of power that annuls all freedom of the dominated subject -
that is, the woman; and, fourth, that one chooses to deliberately ignore
the circumstantial characteristics in which concrete sexual encounters
occur, that is, the context - since it is understood that every context
in which sexual intercourse occurs is already tainted by violence: there
are no concrete encounters, but only serial reproductions of the same
general sexual encounter: rape.
The feminism of "only yes is yes", paradoxically, defends consent in a
contractualist key as a rational, clear and fair exercise that must
serve to resolve the sexual encounter, but, at the same time, conceives
the world as that space devastated by relations of domination in which
no freedom is possible - neither the freedom to say no, nor the freedom
to say yes.
But desire, says Clara Serra, and with her other authors such as
Katherine Angel - in El buen sexo mañana - or Lucía González Mendiondo -
in El género y los sexos -, is not always known nor does it always
coincide with will. There are desires and limits that are discovered
during encounters with other people: desire is not always clear in
advance. On the other hand, sexual relations do not always go well ,
without this necessarily meaning that there is violence or lack of consent.
We do not always do what we want, nor do we always want what we do.
We do not always intend to do what we desire, nor do we always desire to
do what we want. The fact that there is a correspondence between desire
and consent - that is, between desire and will - may be a situation to
which we aspire, but this correspondence cannot become a moral or legal
obligation.
The big problem with the "only yes is yes" model, in addition to those
already mentioned, is that it tends to understand any discomfort,
sadness, damage, pain or inconsistency between desire and will felt,
perceived and verified in a sexual relationship as violence - which is,
in turn, the result of the materialization of the hierarchy of power -
and as a crime, and it appeals to the law to intervene to transform
society through punishment. The iron application of the law, feminist
revenge, actually overturns fear. But is this what we expected? To go
from victims to executioners under the pretext of the need for
"security"? Isn't the demand for "security" an argument used in too many
dirty campaigns in recent history? Is institutional justice the one that
will save us?
Forms of punitivism of liberated spaces
Punitivism is practiced by law and prison. But this does not mean that
it cannot choose other forms of expression. In the so-called liberated
spaces, other methods of punishment exist: the most well-known are the
communiqué and the veto . It is sometimes argued that both the
communiqué and the veto are the mechanisms that, within liberated
spaces, have been designed to produce a form of self-managed justice
that allows conflicts to be resolved in a non-punitivist way, without
involving the State, without calling the police and without resorting to
the law.
But the truth is that both the statement and the veto impose a social
sanction - and it is the social space where freedom is played out.
In the case of sexual assault, the statement is the document through
which a person is openly reported - labeled as an aggressor - and his
reprehensible acts are described to the rest of the self-managed
community - or to a part of it - to which the aggressor - and often his
victim - belongs. The veto, on the other hand, is an instrument that
sometimes accompanies the statement and that would serve as a
condemnation derived from the acts committed and described in the
statement - which, in turn, would become a sort of sentence. The veto
limits the movement of the aggressor in certain spaces - for example
self-managed social centers - and with a more or less broad radius of
action, and therefore limits his participation in the community or
eliminates it directly.
More than a few voices in the same liberated spaces have expressed their
reticence about the supposed liberating and emancipatory character of
these self-managed mechanisms for imparting justice, freeing them from
any punitivism. However, it is also true that on more than a few
occasions we reach the impotence of "what else could we do" in this
case? When calling the police or relying on the criminal justice system
is not an option - whether due to political conviction or vulnerability
- and when transformative or restorative efforts seem exhausted, what to
do? I believe that thinking about justice in a non-punitivist way also
implies freeing ourselves from the idea of justice as a tool for
resolution. There are conflicts that are never resolved. What to do
then, resort to eternal mediation?
The scene of eternal mediation seems exhausting in advance. But only
because we think that we are constantly mediating throughout our lives.
What is mediation if not deciding how to relate to the particular world
we inhabit at any given moment? What is mediation if not being sensitive
to the context we are part of in order to make decisions about it?
Perhaps we should abandon the idea of mediation as a task that can be
delimited in time, as a temporary intervention that has these or those
formal characteristics. Mediation is about the perception of the world
that changes. An unresolved conflict can evolve along its trajectory,
acquiring different nuances, consistencies and intensities, and the way
we experience and accompany this conflict as a collective will also
vary. The resolution of a conflict is not its end and its total
dissolution, but its development. Mediating, therefore, means listening
to what the relationship between aggressor and victim needs at any given
moment, so as not to perpetuate the damage or make transformation
impossible. That is, neither re-victimizing the victim nor
re-victimizing the aggressor through punishment, and not promoting the
immovable identification of one and the other as victim and aggressor .
Finally, to conclude, I would like to ask once again whether the
statement and the veto are so far from punitivism. Isn't it rather
punitivism itself, but exercised by other means? As you see, I cannot
clearly answer these questions. Just as I do not know how one can
develop a truly antipu -
nitivist, which exorcises punishment from its entrails in an absolute
way. Perhaps anti-punitivism is a constant and daily effort to free
oneself from punitivism, not a self-satisfied result.
Forms of punitive feminism in liberated spaces
Knowing that punitivism, in some way, also takes root in liberated
spaces, it is worth asking what its scope is and what the relationship
is between these mechanisms of punishment and the use that feminism is
making of them in these spaces.
To begin with, we must recognize that the culture of punitive feminism
is present daily even in liberated spaces. This is demonstrated by the
fact that non-mixed events are obviously conceived as safe spaces . It
is common, that in the posters that inform of the celebration of a
non-mixed event, for example, the promise is added that this non-mixed
space will be, by definition, a safe space, as if the non-presence of
men were an absolute guarantee of the non-existence of violence - and as
if saying that the space is safe magically makes it safe. This way of
conceiving the question is not far from that of the feminism of
domination described in the second section of this text: the one that
conceives the world as crossed by a system and by dynamics of power that
oblige those who occupy dominant positions - who are always men,
regardless of their particular situations - to exercise violence against
those who are dominated - who are always women, regardless of their
particular situations. Positions of power are essentialized - the woman
is defined as the subject who occupies the position of the dominated and
the man that of the dominator - and interpersonal relationships are
reduced to a power game whose outcome is completely distorted from the
beginning. Faced with this order of things, the temptation to resort to
the mechanism of punishment is strong, because it becomes necessary to
have a way of dealing with the other in a space that is thought to be
violent in itself and in which women and dissident identities are always
victimized - including self-victimization.
The idea that spaces without men are necessarily safe spaces has at
least three problems: it makes it more difficult to identify the
violence perpetrated in these types of spaces - since they are
practically inconceivable; it favors the infantilization of women and
people with dissident identities, who, being constantly subjectivized as
victims, are deprived of the capacity to take responsibility for the
violence they perpetrate - it should be remembered that a person who is
a victim of something can also be a perpetrator in another context -,
and it prevents the recognition of the violence that women and people
with dissident identities can perpetrate against men - because it is
believed that the system of domination is so little plastic that it
allows, on the one hand, the circulation of violence from top to bottom,
that is, from dominant males to dominated women, and, on the other, that
men and women always occupy the same position at the origin of power,
regardless of the specific circumstances.
Power does not necessarily imply the exercise of violence: in favor of
the motto "not all men"
Judith Butler, in an interview given to the magazine Vacarme in 2003 -
entitled "Une éthique de la sexualité" - speaks of freedom as something
that is not free - even in a redundant way - from bonds or limitations.
To conceive that a space is possible that is entirely free from its
systemic and structural part, in this case patriarchal - that is, one
hundred percent safe - is as naive as to consider possible a social
space that is bound and well bound from beginning to end, in which it is
not possible to make any decisions. In some contexts, the systemic and
the structural can manifest themselves in a more suffocating way than in
others, and freedom can enjoy greater or lesser freedom of movement.
Therefore, to affirm that there is a system of unequal distribution of
power, such as patriarchy, is not equivalent to affirming that life is
already nullified and that men are violent and women are victims.
It is by analyzing concrete events, taking into account both the
systemic characteristics that run through them and the particular ones
that are conjunctural to them, that one could advance - I believe -
towards the imagination of a type of justice that does not require the
intervention of the punitive as a possible solution. This way of
thinking about the world would also allow one to participate in
non-mixed spaces without thinking that they are the definitive solution
and without mythologizing them, but rather knowing that they are a tool
- false - among other possible ones - with their limits, their
potential, their advantages and their disadvantages.
The slogan " not all men ," while it may seem like a silly expression,
actually reveals an uncomfortable truth for punitive feminism: that, in
fact, not all people are always patriarchal transmission belts - not
even men - and, at the same time, that all people are at some point.
Just as there is re-proposition, there is also subversion in everyone.
New masculinities will be accompanied by new femininities, or they will
not be at all.
* Published in issue no. 50 of the magazine Ekintza Zuzena, a
libertarian publication born in 1988 in Bilbao
Olga Blazquez Sánchez Madrid 1989 Degree in Arabic Philology from the
Autonomous University of Madrid
http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
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