POSITIONS, SITUATIONS,
SHORT-CIRCUITS: LA ESKALERA KARAKOLA, A DELIBERATE SPACE.
Maria Serrano,
La Eskalera Karakola, Madrid; Silvia López, La Eskalera Karakola,
Madrid.
Presented at
Gender and Power in the New Europe, the 5th European Feminist Research
Conference. August 20-24, 2003
Lund University, Sweden
POSITIONS, SITUATIONS,
SHORT-CIRCUITS.
«Life in this society
being, at best, an utter bore, and no aspect of this society being in any way
relevant to queers, there remains to the civic-minded, responsible and
thrill-seeking queer only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money
system, institute complete automation and destroy compulsive heterosexuality.»
(SCUM Manifesto, sort of. Valerie
Solanas, 1967. Adaptation from Karakola)
The sexual uprising of Stonewall
has reached its turning point in the reordering of habits, spaces and bodies
under I.W.C. (Integrated World Capitalism). Once-abject sexualities are every
day more presented as an inconsequential option in the free market, a prefab
bedroom set (pink or blue?) with which to redecorate the lack of a intense,
joyful political life free to all.
In a democracy defined by free
choice, when free choice is defined by consumption, our sexualities and our
bodies--with all their critical potency for challenging the institutions which
administer affections and resources-- have become tidy packages on the shelves
of the global boutique.
Existing norms and classifications
again and again provide raw materials for capitalism. What is really obscene
these days is to be queer and poor, woman and restless, others and
uncontrolled...
The image of the queers, the
freaks, the wild ones, the cyborgs, the hysterics, the truck-drivers, the
frigid ones and the loose ones, the ones in broken high-heels and the barefoot
ones assaulting the supermarket of the world, the privatized garden and the
wedding ceremony is our most cherished dream. To be divine is to always push
the limits, experiment with the loss of composure which exposes the sexual
discipline of Home and Crust; it is to disorganize anew all classifications.
Rights are a useful but
insufficient charity, perverse in their disciplinary capacity. Now that capital
has been embodied in us with hushed and persistent violence: (re)productive
body, consumer body, clean and disinfected body which has repressed the ghost
of stigma and death, versatile and accelerated body, it is time to ask: Is a
different body possible?
It must be, because here we are.
We occupy. We occupy and we talk
about territories. We situate ourselves as a node crossed by thousands of
circuits. Circuits and accelerated currents. We are in the very mouth of the
monster. We move, we decide, we talk politics. We situate ourselves and unmask
our own bodies, our own lives, our own inhabiting of this city, this
neighborhood, this social center.
While the vertiginous current of
global capitalism impregnates every nook and cranny of our existance,
submitting it to the virtual display window of the market-world, to the state
of permanent global war, to the complete precarization of our lives, to the
abysmal technocracy of the bureaucratic aparatus, to the privatization of
services and of social and public goods, to isolation and solitude, to politics
which can only be concieved in terms either of parties or else of super-hip
politicking like that of the NGOs, to boredom and to being
‘entertained’, to the appropriation of our knowledge and to
copyrights, to compulsory heterosexuality, euphoric and erroneous…
But we shortcircuit, we move the
currents into our own bodies; we have situated ourselves. In the same way we
situate ourselves in urban space. We situate ourselves and we begin to speak
about precarious work, about the wild ones and the dangerous ones, the
housewives and the agitators, the frigid ones, the lesbians, the transexuals,
the married ones and the single ones, those that come and go, the whores and
the queers and the feminists assaulting the global display-market in open
revolt, subverting normalized ‘life-styles.’ We situate ourselves
because the personal is political. Because we want to launch ourselves into the
open insurrection of our lives. Social centers and public spaces are
indespensable for the expression and the constant experimentation of a new way
of ‘doing city’ which is not considered in the diplomatic agenda of
the scenic capital. Because we are part of these territories we daily struggle
to construct them and reorganize them. Plastic designs of the world we want.
Brutal expansion of constrained desires. Legitimate reappropriation of our own
living space, our city, our world…
For this we occupy, for this the
social centers…
The point of departure, of
encounter, of crossing paths of which we speak is in the neighborhood of
Lavapies, Calle Embajadores number 40. A feminist social center occupied there
in 1996. In these almost sevens years la Karakola has been a daily experiment
in constant creation and action, and with its comings and goings, with its
limitations and its changes, it has housed an infinitude of projects: we speak
about work and precariousness, about war and globalization, about ‘making
city’ and urbanism, about sexist aggressions and the abuse of women,
about autonomy and selfmanagement among women, about cooperation and the
circulation of knowledge, about lesbian visibility and identities, about
migration and borders… Meetings, assemblies, workshops, encounters,
movies, videos, talks, actions…, but above all a gamble made, a bet
placed decisively upon the collective, upon cooperation and subversion of the
established lifestyles which bind us, which must be again resituated, again
disemboweled in order to be able to begin, perhaps, to reinvent nature.
INTRODUCTION
SPACES FOR DAILY LIFE
La Eskalera Karakola is a
women’s occupied house in a multiethnic working class neighborhood in the
center of Madrid. For almost seven years, la Karakola has served as a
convergeance point and a point of departure for feminist thought and political
action both in the neighborhood and in the far-flung feminist networks in which
we participate. An open and changing collective of women --mostly young, some
not so young, of various sexualities, nationalities, class and educational
backgrounds-- maintain the house as a public space for feminism, and from this
space we generate projects which extend beyond the house itself.
The Karakola has housed projects
investigating the working conditions and urban experience of migrant women,
debates about the transformations of the LGBT movement, lesbian marriage and
the ‘pink market’, discussions about the feminist grounding for
antimilitarist interventions. We have introduced the workshop ‘Tools
against Racism’ into local social movements, encouraging ourselves to
constantly investigate our own discourses. We have initiated an ongoing
campaign against violence against women which insists upon looking at the many
and complex ways in which ‘violence’ and ‘security’ are
constructed. We participate in a neighborhood network proposing socially
inclusive urbanistic alternatives to the ‘rehabilitation’ currently
under way. We have participated actively and critically in the lock-ins of
‘sin papeles’ in Madrid. These and hundreds of other
investigations, mobilizations, discussions and publications have arisen from
the crucible that is the Karakola. We insist that all these apparently diverse
concerns are intimately related, and we attempt to trace the lines of their
relationship, articulating them within the feminist and the global resistance
movements, refusing to separate the academic from the activist, the local
struggle from the global context.
We propose to maintain and improve
a self-managed feminist space by and for women in the neighborhood of Lavapies.
But what is a feminist space?
Urban space hides itself in an
opaque neutrality. We move through it so naturally that it is difficult for us
to see that this space is not neutral at all, but rather the product of
decisions and policies, struggles and demands, an accumulation of history and
an incarnation of power. It forms us and transforms us; we are molded by the
spaces through which we move, which structure our daily life, which determine
whom we encounter and in what terms. Thus the space we live in is something
intimate which constitutes our subjectivities at the same time that urban space
–the streets, the squares– are “the public” par
excellance, precisely that which is recognized as political.
To make explicit this unity, this
non-differentiation, between “the public” and “the
personal” and to insist that it is in this complex environment that ‘politics’
is done, is, like so many feminist struggles, a matter of making visible the
invisible, of denaturalizing what passes for ‘natural,’ just as is
revealing the hidden economy of domestic work or the concealed anguish of sexual
violence. To speak about space as a feminist is a question of valuing and
politicizing the quotidian; recognizing that that which each one of us
experiences --instability, violence, little annoyances, isolation– is
that from which the productive and reproductive order is created, and also that
from which resistance arises. Creating our own spaces is a matter of insisting
that citizenship is a daily practice collectively built through the active and
conscientious habitation of space.
Thus when we speak of a feminist
space, we speak of a space in which the quotidian is recognized and approached
as political, and where the political shows itself to be a daily matter:
brought down from the heights, from the abstraction and the alienation, and
occupied as a living space. Politicizing daily life –relationships, work,
neighborhoods– requires a space from which to develop knowledge
collectively, from which to reflect and think, from which to organize and
experiment with new forms, new interventions.
Living life as political is a
potent challenge, taking up the spirit of so many feminist, anti-racist and
anti-homophobic struggles which have insisted in NOT accepting violence,
exclusion or annoyances as “normal.” If these struggles have
achieved important changes in society it is thanks to many years of fighting
and wagering on the collective. But lets not fool ourselves; much remains to be
done, it is not time to rest on our laurels.
We find ourselves facing
innumerable problems, among them employment which is less and less secure, life
which is more and more expensive, the privatization of social services and of
public spaces. Well we know that women suffer disproportionately the effects of
these ills, overburdened with multiple part-time employment and the domestic
and caretaking tasks which, after decades of feminist struggle, are still
almost exclusively women’s turf. Women, precarious people and immigrants
bear the weight of each social cut-back. Housing, thanks to wide-spread
speculation, is expensive. Employment is scarce and precarious and requires
special training which is also expensive. Health care is minimal and its
purveyors are overwhelmed. There are barely any daycare services much less
services for the elderly. And for those who have time for such things, leisure
activity is limited, for lack of public spaces, to consumerism, which is also
expensive not to mention boring and condescending. Institutions and advertising
invite us to think of this whole situation as a series of problems for each
individual to manage as she can.
This is not so. We must insist
again: in this daily life resides the political. But that it may be recognized
as such, that we may build bridges and break our isolation, that this may be
conceived as the practice of citizenship, there must be spaces for us to meet
each other, see each other, recognize each other. They must be public spaces
open to all from which to continue the thrilling labor of forming bonds and
relations between different people. They must be common spaces because the
social fabric is woven upon the loom of what is shared. And the better equipped
these spaces are, the less their users will be obliged to battle the walls
which fall down around them.
The Eskalera Karakola has
maintained itself as such a space since november 1996, but in a situation of
physical insecurity which irremediably limits our inventive capacities. Now we
are proposing a project to demand the expropriation, re- habilitit and the
cession to the collective Eskalera karakola. That, would augment the functions
and possibilities of a social space continually in construction. It is a bid to
equip more infrastructures and thus to create an ever wider community which
uses and maintains them. An auditorium, a library, a computer center: besides
being urgent necessities in this neighborhood, these are also things which in
diverse ways create community through their use.
And why do we insist that there be
a space only for women? One response is that it brings us joy, strength and
inspiration to be, create, speak among ourselves: we are comfortable, which is
important in an often unfriendly world. But that’s not the whole story.
We are also restless, agitated, upset. We fight our bid for collectivity, its
difficulties and its limits. We stretch ourselves, mobilizing and pushing ourselves,
daring ourselves to share our concerns and express our desires. We are many,
different, each one with her story; the alliance is neither natural nor a
priori but rather a continuous process of recognition and communication into
which we launch ourselves again and again, committed to a strategy of uniting
ourselves.To maintain a space where women can cultivate this kind of alliance
is necessary because the general lack of meeting spaces is especially acute in
the case of women, who either because we are between several precarious jobs or
because we are confined to our houses and domestic tasks, because we feel
threatened in the street or because we are marginalized within political
organizations, have fewer opportunities to create the networks of support and
solidarity which we need. It permits us a space from which to think through the
multiple singularities of our lives, to create strategies and tools to
politicize them, to explore new ways to express ourselves and relate to each
other. A space for women is a deliberate space, a space which, because it
situates itself outside the ‘normal,’ may function as a laboratory
of social, political and artistic relationships.
In order that this space may
maintain its function as a laboratory it must continue to be self-managed. This
is not a social service center; there already are some of those, if not enough.
Nor is it a cultural center in the strict sense. It is rather a necessary space
in which each may express her fantasy and realize her project, creating political
potency in the confluence of projects which this space houses.
Many projects of investigation and
feminist study meet in the Eskalera Karakola. The house’s unique position
as a self-managed feminist space makes it an important convergence point between
the feminist movement and feminist thought, which in other environments are
often divorced from each other by institutional policies which habitually
separate the ‘active’ from the ‘reflective.’ The
breadth and flexibility which self-management permits has also permitted
stunningly diverse projects to arise out of the Karakola, and has permitted the
cultivation of far-flung networks of feminist cooperation. The capacity to fit
all these projects and concerns under one roof has produced a rich process of
recombination and mutual feedback which transforms and strengthens all. This
flux of knowledges, this collectivity of abilities determines the projects
which arise from the Karakola and the political forms in which they take to the
street.
This flow of knowledge and
abilities also contributes to the management and maintenance of the house
itself. In the six years which we have occupied the Karakola we have made
innumerable reforms, big and small, of the roof and the rafters, the plumbing
and the electricity. We learn among ourselves, each one bringing what she
knows, collectivizing our abilities and knowledge and leaving the neighbors
quite surprised: ‘Those girls!’
Our project is a bid for public
and self-managed spaces in general and also a bid for this house in particular,
for its history and its structure, and for this neighborhood of Lavapies with
all the specific problems it faces at this historic moment. Lavapies, faces a
process of ‘rehabilitation’ which denies the active participation of
the residents and turns its back on the urgent necessities of the
neighborhood’s present inhabitants, opting instead for a transformation
of the neighborhood which will imply expulsion and homogenization of its
population. Innumerable urban investigations show that the homogenization of
neighborhoods, that is, the reduction of diversity both of population and of
use of space, impedes the formation of social density and leaves even more
vulnerable all those who are not young, mobile, male heterosexual natives with
steady employment. Women, precarious workers, migrants, handicapped people and
elderly people prosper in environments in which we can all live, where all can
cover our needs nearby and at decent prices, where there are sufficient social
infrastructures like clinics, daycare centers and parks, where there are spaces
for meeting and for organizing, where it might be possible to create a social
fabric of mutual care and social cooperation and not of police control. We are
talking about spaces in which an active, participative citizenship might be
constructed.
Too many policies attempt to
resolve the social needs of women through endowments for the family. These
endowments are important and would that there be more of them, but in no way do
they resolve the need which women have for our own spaces of encounter,
creation and political and social organization. Not all women are mothers and
all women are much more than mothers. The problems of family management are
just some of the many which we face. The generalized flight of women from the
traditional family and from reproduction makes ever more absurd this kind of
attempt to speak of the necessities of women as if they were identical to those
of reproduction in the bosom of the family. This practice constitutes an effort
to deny and invisibilise the tremendous diversity among women, we who are young
and old, who are singles, lesbians, transsexuals, migrants, students,
precarious workers and so much more.
From this diversity, which is not
merely a display of pretty colors but a convergence of intimate experiences, a
complex and uncontrollable multitude, a yet imminent alliance, we throw down
this challenge to whomever would invisibilise or pathologise us: here we are.
We will make spaces for ourselves.
TERRITORIES.
1. IN URBAN SPACE:
The processes which configure the
space where we move, the space we inhabit, are processes saturated with power
relationships. Urban space is configured through multiple transformations and
political, social and economic negotiations. Urban space, then, is a
non-neutral territory. In this territory the stamp of the global capitalist
order is inscribed, but it is from here, also, from these micro-spaces (from
the cities, from the suburbs, from the social centres, from the Karakola),
where people constantly battle and renegotiate the configuration of
territories. Different desires, different necessities or concerns, political
practice, victories and defeats configure the terrain through which
we move. That is why the streets
we walk around, the town squares we fill, the market, the pavement, the trees,
the houses we live in, are the result of certain politics, of the replies or
acceptance they get, of private interests or neighbourhood and social struggle,
of new techniques of
capitalist accumulation (for
example, the real state market), and of techniques of contestation and recovery
of urban space (for instance, social centres).
The Karakola inserts itself in
this complex map, and far from declaring itself outside this frame of power
relationships, it extends a constant invitation to think ourselves and situate
ourselves as political subjects capable of decision and action within our
environment and within our own lives.
This territory emerges then as the
urban space where we recognize ourselves, where we place ourselves, a physical
and symbolic space we re-assign ourselves. This space is located in the centre
of Madrid, in the neighbourhood of Lavapiés. The borrough is unique due
to its social,
urban and economic
characteristics. Its population comes in large part from different countries
such as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Nigeria, Senegal, Pakistan, India, China,
Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, etc. This social composition is in part new and in part
established: among the Moroccans there are two and even three generations here.
Lavapiés has historically been a working-class area, poor, but with a
great folkloric tradition which is starting to give way to multi-ethnic
cohabitation. It is a privileged enclave because of its social composition and
because of its tradition of neighbourhood organizing and social movements in
general (social centres, squatted houses, support networks, solidarity shops,
fair commerce, self-employment cooperatives, women’s groups,
distributors, media projects such as ‘Madrid wireless’, ‘Tele
pies’, or ‘Deyaví’, and a diversity of other powerful
initiatives). On the other hand, it is one of the poorest areas of Madrid,
marked by exclusion, precariousness, marginality, lack of social resources,
infrastructure, equipment, green areas, meeting points, pavement for
pedestrians, car parks, schools,
nurseries, clinics. We can say
Lavapiés is an area lacking in all kinds of social resources and urban
plans related to the necessities and the desires of its inhabitants. This is
not unintentional. It forms part of a chain of policies which consistently
attend to individual and private property interests above social and public
interests. Lavapiés is a
privileged area for real estate speculation. Its current re-building and the
commercialisation of a young, bohemian, alternative, different, multicultural
imaginary, are weapons capitalism is beginning to use to sell the area as one
of the hippest and most in-demand in Madrid. Thus we confront an urban
rebuilding process directed to young and wealthy people, and a process of
(impossible) segregation of the poorest, oldest, migrant, illegal and otherwise
marginal people. A lot of residents with old rents are barred from their own
houses by real state companies that sell their apartments at inaccessible
prices. Conditions for those who are able to stay, are equally hair-raising: 12
square metre flats with no bathroom inside; whole buildings supported by props
and in constant danger of collapse; humid flats with no smoke outlet or
ventilation. All these apartments were the ones that, with the 1997
Lavapiés Plan of Restoration, began to be recognized as sub-standard
housing. The Plan promised to eliminate these houses and relocate their
inhabitants. To date, none of the sub-standard housing has been eliminated nor
has any resident be relocated. The inhabitants cannot pay the restorations
imposed upon them and the houses meant to relocate them stand empty. None of
the equipment promised for the area has been built (not even the much-desired
and long-promised clinic).
This is the territory in which the
Karakola inscribes itself. To us, the lack of public spaces where women can
meet, the lack of decent homes, the savage speculation, are points from which
the urbanistic side of our project can be understood. This is why we are
bidding for the expropriation of buildings such as the Karakola, abandoned for
decades. Our bid is about valuing use above profit, about questioning the
policies of an administration which protects private property at any social
cost. Expropriation is a juridical tool which the administration has in its
hands, to be used when the duty of preservation is not fulfilled by
land-owners. The persistant non-use of this tool demonstrates the links between
private and speculative interests, which only survive thanks to protectionist
policies. This leaves us in the position of arguing that the law be applied
properly: if it were the Karakola would have been expropriated and made a
public good years ago.
We also want to remark upon the necessity
of creating public spaces for women where we can experiment, participate,
decide, act, from relation which is not one of assistance or charity. The
present conformation of the urban terrain totally denies this desire, banishes
it before it may even arise, so we have not only an urban
space hostile to women, but are
inhibited from any kind of creative initiative proposing other ways to inhabit
the city from our own point of view, with autonomy and as valid political
interlocutors.
But none of these configurations
of power is definitive. Other ways of relating and the praxis of resistance are
plotted within its bosom. Territories are reorganised and power structures are
questioned. The Karakola is an operation to confront the hetero-patriarchal order
and the greedy process of global capitalism, creating a space where other kinds
of politics can take shape.
2. TERRITORIES OF CITIZENSHIP
Going from a map to a territory
has to do with the physical and symbolic re-appropriation of the space we
inhabit. Because when we stop thinking about our environment as neutral and
understand it as a space saturated with power relationships in which we
participate and in which we move around, the map blurs and our capacity to draw
the lines again, to deconstruct the limits, to mark the terrains that can be
real settings for political action is born again.
Women have historically been
excluded from political activities. The myth of eternal devotion to private or
domestic space disappears, nevertheless, if we keep insisting that “the
personal is political.” Our
environment, our way of inhabiting, our daily life, cannot be understood
without taking into account the power relationships which
configure them. The dichotomy between public and
private then becomes meaningless; there is no foreign land of the social on one
hand, and a private setting that would keep or lives and our bodies isolated on
the other. Thus we can reorient and relocate ourselves, land ourselves and put
the body in the centre. A body in which inside and outside cannot be
distinguished, in which the marks of public and private use are blurred, and in
which the incapacity to understand each other outside of the political
framework invites us to a make a vital gamble for the constant and creative
politization of our lives.
To us, squatting has to do with
all these things: that the personal is political also means that power is
inscribed within the most mundane of daily actions. It becomes a
body, forms desire and saturates
pleasure. Squatting is a bid to stop understanding politics as something apart
from life. To make daily life, the smallest thing, a constant re-invention, a
constant problematization, a constant daily creation which breaks with old
conceptions of traditional politics.
In this sense self-management is
essential, a point upon which we will accept no compromise. Self-management is
to make this political bid real through constant experimentation, and above all, from an active and collective
participation. The Karakola is an invitation to break with the relationships of
passivity and patronage created and sustained by assistential institutions. It
is an invitation to put into action the creative capacity of the collective, to
invent real cooperation that often has inspired us to generate real political
tools.
From here, from ‘the
personal is political’, from the insertion of a new conception of the
political in daily life, from self-management and the collective, from this
position we insist on a new way of ‘doing city’.
Political processes are not
unfamiliar to us; for this reason, we search for ways to promote participation
in them, capacity of decision, of action, of transformation, in what we could
call the formation of an active, public and participative citizenship. This is
not something we can take for granted, especially as women who have seen the
possibility of making decisions
about our lives, our environment, our city, our world always restricted. This
is then a question of generating
collective links that can transmit, fluctuate, create new techniques of
intervention and construction arising from ourselves, techniques that can
really conform the city and the world we want and desire. Because we are part
of this terrain we decide and fight daily to construct and organise it. Plastic
designs of the world we want. Brutal expansions of constricted
designs. Legitimate
re-appropriation of our living space, of our bodies, of our boroughs, of our
world.
3. TERRITORIES FROM THE KARAKOLA
To speak about territories is then
to situate ourselves. And to situate ourselves means to reveal the intertwined
relationships which configure us and which we configure, it is to deepen in the
necessity of understanding each other not as stable subjects (not from the
essentialist perspective of being women), but as a constant process that can
more or less be located in spite of the complexity of the social composition
and the new world order. Situating ourselves, understanding each other from a
partial position but not an indefinable nor an insufficient one, thousands of
questions are raised and we consider it is important to face them. Some of the interests we raise from
the Karakola are:
1/ Investigation, analysis and
reflection upon the processes of transformation of work. We depart from the hypothesis
that while work was once centred in the Fordist factory and assembly line
production, this model has changed into
a growing intensification of the
productive process that on one hand has exceeded the old factory to reach the
most unexpected corners of life in all its dimensions and, on the other hand,
has meant the end of work as we knew it and the birth of a series of
multi-formed activities
denominated
‘precarious’. For us it is important to emphasize the impossibility
of separating such analysis from the question of the feminisation of labour.
This has to do with the transformation of power that goes from the social to
the most intimate and vice versa (the characteristic of this power is in its
production and in its reproduction, it is not a one-directional power:
it’s circular, with no defined origin) which places the body as a
privileged enclave from whence to read and where political practices are
inscribed, such as expropriation by capitalism for its central production of
qualities historically defined as ‘feminine’.
Questions such as care in general
terms, affective capacity, relationship components, unstability, invisibility
and vulnerability, have become not only the support, but also the requirement
and a key in the new systems of production inaugurated global capitalism. To
transit through this question of the feminisation of labour means to think that
this model of work is not new but an extension of the typically feminine work
that women have been doing within the ‘private sphere’. Thus we do
not define precariousness as a new model of work but -being totally intertwined with life and
indistinguishable from it- we’d rather talk about the precarisation of
existence. Precarisation of existence and feminisation of labour are then the
key points of departure in order to begin to understand the new political and
social scenery and to be able to articulate general hypotheses and thereby to
invent new acts of subversion and destabilisation of the imposed order.
As part of the restless intellegence
we consider fundamental to be able to fight today’s social complex, two
projects have come out in the Karakola: Sex,
Lies and Precariousness
explores the new circuits of work, taking as a hub the textile multinational
Inditex, in the production innovations of which exploitation of women’s
work is key. Moreover, subjects such as women’s representation or body
normalization become real mechanisms in the production of bodies and of the feminine
body: how does a Zara shop assistant change her uniform when she takes it home?
Where are the boundaries between work/not work? What is produced is bodies:
normalized, regularized, controlled ways of life, and here the body of a woman
has a lot to say. Sex, Lies and Precariousness culminated in an action in a Zara shop where more or less
100 women took over the shop to denounce labor exploitation, precarious
contracts, the normalized and standardized size of clothes which promote
anorexic ideals and reproduce stereotypes of what a woman should be: again and
again the same models of subjection to the hetero-patriarchal order.
On the other hand, Precarias a la deriva,
(Precarious Women Adrift) is a project which started from one proposal: to
drift through the circuits of work, physical and symbolic, in different
sectors: the work of women innkeepers, workers in immaterial work (translators,
teachers, copy editors), women phone operators,
women nurses, women audiovisual
workers (radio and television) and women sex workers. These are the drifts that
have been done this year and that depart from the idea that differentiation
between subject and object of study is impossible. Recognising this, the
perspective of the project is one of partial analysis, located, fragmented, but
not because of that less real. The question raised here is the
possibility of doing common
re-writings, seeking relationship nodes, points of inflection and common names
which allow us to draw a more or less clear map, and the possibility of
articulating a potent rebellious
political discourse.
2/ Understanding and intervening
in permanent global war and the quotidian war which surrounds us. The new world order begun after
September 11th and the Genoa events has established a logic of war that reduces
the world to two sides- terrorists and non-terrorists, violent people and
non-violent people- and these have become structures for the legitimisation of
the imposed order and for the criminalizing of social movements. To break these
dichotomies, to seek new means of expression that will really allow us to
subvert these simplifying and oppressive models, in short, to insist upon
another perspective capable of confusing these simple categories and rupturing
the duality of this war empire.
Mobilisations against the invasion of Iraq were full of fascinating
efforts to break with this discourse. For us the question was how to place
ourselves within the demonstrations: to be part of the spontaneity and the flow
in the streets during those days while at the same time placing ourselves in a
non-neutral way, expressing our concern about the sexist and homophobic chants
and slogans, placing our bodies as complex marks impossible to subject to the
simplifying, divisional and criminalizing violent/non violent discourse, while
at the same time expressing the need to broaden the discourse against the war.
The war, we said, does not start nor end in Iraq. Women’s bodies are used
as battlefields in war; but they are also where the weight of the hidden
economy is borne, whether a country is in war or not. Poverty produces wars:
global war also has to do with the hetero-patriarchal order. Global war, we
said, is also the daily war we suffer, fight against and negotiate daily. These
processes cannot be separated from the social and immediate reality of our
existence, from the
militarization of our life with
mortifying discourses of control and legality, from the precarization of
existence, the interruption of human rights, exploitation, marginality, misery.
With these questions in mind, we
created a mechanism that went beyond the Karakola, and a great diversity of
people joined us: Operation Pink and its weapon of choice, the para-war , a pink
umbrella with which to make fun of police repression, take it out of context
and ridiculize it and thereby to fight the criminalizing of social movements.
But it was also a weapon to open before the sexist and homophobic chants. We
made up watchwords, we
talked about differences, we
placed our irreducible bodies in the centre, we talked about a creative,
active, public politics. About citizen participation and the crisis of
representation. We went around the streets dressed in pink to shout: las
calles de rosa son otra cosa, to put an
end to dualistic systems, to speak about sexuality, about our subversive
bodies, to display the para-war against
military logic, to take back the
living spaces that have been sold away from us: the pink way, we said, walks
freely around our cities, recognizes no borders and asks to be
appropriated. It gets out of the
imposed normalized circuits and places itself directly above the bodies that
struggle to make other logics real.
3/ About differences and their
visibility: the question of visibility of other sexualities.
This has been crucial for us: on
one hand to understand the social order as an order ruled by the empire of the
heterosexual, which has been essential in sustaining the logic of capitalism.
An ahistoric, immobile notion of sexuality that rigidly maintains gender roles.
But also and furthermore, to understand gender as a social and political
construction and sex as a powerful technology through which social
relationships are normalized, bonds are sowed, bodies made and
institutionalised, and borders drawn. To think then about the space of
subjection
as the line which normalises and
establishes sex/gender and desire. The proliferation of other sexualities
demands the denaturalisation and shifting of the sex/gender/desire system.
Nevertheless, we are witnessing a process through which the proliferation of
gay and lesbian sexualities is
constantly being absorbed and
recaptured by capitalism. Desire becomes a product that capitalism redesigns in
the most attractive way, demonstrating once again its stunning
capacity to reappropriate and
reestablish its normalizing discourse in the daily practices of life by drawing
new and more complex boundaries of exclusion. To us, breaking with the
normalizing discourse, with the claims of ‘equality’, with the creation
of stereotypes and the growing gay market, to make the sexualities that are
‘out’ visible, are prime questions in making a political criticism
of the hetero-patriarchal order. Proposals such as “bollo no es una marca,
es un desorden global” (“dyke
is not a brand name; it’s a global disorder”) went in that
direction. On the one hand, we insist on the denaturalisation of sex (including
both heterosexual and homosexual identities), and on the other insist that our
sexuality is irreducible to capitalism. It is always excessive, an excess that
opens and makes possible the constant subversions and resistances against
capitalism.
We also look to proposals such as
that which arose from the group Rhetorics of Gender: for this year’s
pride parade they planned a deconstruction of national ID cards, paying
attention to other differences, not only sexual, but also in country of origin,
race, ethnicity: crucial questions
in the configuration of identities. In these documents, everything was changed
in such a way that they showed the subjectivity of such categories and their
political and social construction.
This is a small sketch of the
terrains of the Karakola. These questions, the precarization of existence, the
global war and the deconstruction of the sex/gender/desire system, are
questions that constantly converge, join and support each other. They articulate common discursive
practices. Other questions such as violence against women appear constantly in
our daily work, our thinking and our interventions.
MAKING PROBLEMATIC
How can we think, then, how can we
shape the feminist political contribution as a long-term proposal capable of
generating, strengthening and channelling energies able to put a strain on the
enclosures? How can we craft feminism as a powerful mechanism that pushes and
forces the boundaries which tie and restrict us, with the aim of making room
around us for broader relations and spaces of freedom? This is a main concern
for the Eskalera Karakola.
Since we understand power not as a
site but as a series of symbolic and material practices and relationships, we
believe our own conception of “the personal is political” must
include “the quotidian is political.” The feminist gamble, thus,
must be one that brings politics into daily life as well as daily life into
politics. It has to take into account flows and daily power relationships and
get involved in their transformations. To conceive the places of institutional
condensation of these relationships as absolute actors, as causes rather than
as crystallizations engraved in the circuits where flows of power pass, can
only confuse our analysis and disorientate our practices.
Of course these places of
institutional condensation vary greatly in magnitude and in strength, from
governmental institutions, supra-governmental, transnational and
non-governmental organizations, to trade unions, neighbours’
associations, the academy, cultural and other pressure groups and social
collectives… but what is important is our process of cartography placing
them in the same multi-relational sphere more than in a hierarchical system of one
or two directions. This way, the object of political transformation is the
wider field of power relationships which participate in these crystallizations.
When, on the other hand, one of them is placed throughout the whole political
horizon, there is little space for real transformation since often proximity,
concealing the complex plot existing outside our approach, allows us to only articulate
a reactive politics of refusal and denial of one or several of these
institutional condensations, or else a confusing and undetermined amalgam of
them, which pretends to find an uncontaminated‘outside’ as a way of
escaping those relational flows-, or a normalizing politic in search of an
inside of some of these manifestations of crystallisation
in which be able to fit as an
assimilated element.
These approaches diminish
our vision and reduce our range, making, in both cases, from the place of condensation
an undifferentiated absolute of the very plot of influences in which it shows.
In the case of refusal-as-denial the condensed manifestation of practices is
mistaken both with the origin and the cause of themselves, and it is this
sliding that allows the imagination an ‘outside’ when it puts in
the same level
the
‘outside’ of the institution and the ‘outside’ power
relations. In the case of refusal-as-insertion, they are conceived as possible
only in an axis of verticality instead of as a multiform net in which diverse actors
mutually able to be influenced according to the magnitude of
their capacity, understanding
capacity here as possibility and will. Conceiving, in other ways, the political
transformation articulated in the refusal-as-reversion allows us to take into
account not only flows and relations but also the places of their
crystallisation. It allows us to recognise ourselves as saturated and pierced
bodies without dismissing the possibility of their emancipation, without robbing
us of the capacity to place ourselves critically and deconstructively within
these relations. Reversion is an effective type of subversion, a practice which
allows us to deviate the course, using our own bodies to de-contextualize
them, getting them to signify in a
new and change(d/ing) context, deconstructing them, linking them or breaking
them, dyeing them with our own filters.
For us, this is a bid to make a
political project of each life, a project of transformation of relationships
that can only be carried out within a collective. With all its limits and its
clumsiness, this is a bid for social centres in general and the Karakola in
particular: a women’s project arising from the need to experience
ourselves, to relate and to invent ourselves, to communicate and break the
mechanisms of production of a heterosexual normalizing state, and of rigid
marking of the imposed gender roles. A women’s collective that tries to
constantly question the world and ourselves from a feminist stance, which means
to confront the world from an analysis crossed by a complexity of structures,
the very ones that comprise us, never innocent and always complex, the very
ones that strain us and call us to understand ourselves as rooted in a certain
sex-gender-desire system, in a certain socioeconomic class, in a certain age,
in a certain ethnic group... in a certain space and time.
This is how we occupy and inhabit
the Eskalera Karakola. Squatting as re-apropriation of physical space but also
as re-apropriation of our own life-time, our own desires and emotions, our own
bodies. The coherence and survival of a project like this requires us to
formulate and build a feminist space as a field of connectivity which allows us
to get down to the complex plot of socio-economic, ideological, cultural, and
psychic hubs of domination which arise from dynamics of alienation, coercion,
exploitation, prohibition and invisibility, act upon ours conforming our bodies
and the space of constant transformation in which they act and are acted upon.
If we all effect and are effected by practices and relationships in which we
develop, if this is the only possible inside of. An effective political
practice would try to negotiate the kind of practices we are going to allow
with other actors. We claim this capacity of negotiation of our lives as one of
the main prerogatives of the conformation --always collective-- of the
political subject.
We must get down to negotiation
with potency and responsibility, which means, again, situating ourselves and mapping
efficiently the territory- local-global, symbolic-material -where we play
(ourselves). To equip ourselves with means for this negotiation, to be able to
establish powerful alliances which allow us to redirect these relationships and
practices towards a different place from that of domination and imposition,
will depend above all on the cartographic tools with which we choose to equip
ourselves.
For decades now the voices of innumerable women, most of them
women of the third world and women of colour from the Anglo-Saxon world, remind
us that the possibilities of alliance-through-difference is an indispensable
requirement for the conformation of feminism in an space of powerful
connectivity.
This task is by no means evident,
as one of the participants in
Operation Pink expressed: “I know which rhetorical figures I am
willing to assume, but I am not that sure if some men, who, for instance, I
have seen in marches dressed in pink, are willing to do it, unless those of
straight lesbian-lover man and I don’t think we are ready to fit them in
the queer catalogue, I won’t accept an octopus as a pet.”
And several days later:
“How can we articulate
this cyborg-queer alliance against the sadian subject, for example? What
alliances are possible with those women who want to still be goddesses and not
cyborgs? What will they want with us? Will they want any? What about us/them
men? What we are risking
here is the limits of a difference which kills my difference, the possibility
that our well-meant analyses hide from us
that the alliances cannot be
established towards any of the versions of what we’ve called
institutional condensation, in a voluntary way from one of the sides that would
become the dependent and assisted part, but that all the actors have to
recognize the principles of the alliance-through-difference if they want to
avoid the reproduction of the domination relationships we want to transform.
Besides experimenting with the
building of a connectivity field where differences not only coexist, but
contaminate and empower each other as transformational agents, in the Eskalera
Karakola we wonder daily how to maintain our transforming power as
non-normalized bodies, being inserted as we are within the wide and perverse
movable nets of influence. That is, how can we maintain performativity as
something more than mere theatre and
acting? How can we avoid being
devoured by the over saturated black hole where the relational hubs of the
governmental, the consumer, and the spectacular, cross and are spit out a mere
hologram, lacking of the depth of what we once were, marketed as a souvenir?
One of the participants of the
Operation Pink pointed out:
“Pink cannot be a colour,
I also don’t want it to mean more or less diffuse words such as
‘difference’ or… I don’t know…I get tired with
meta-linguistics. Pink should articulate a more elaborate discourse about daily
wars. Pink as a connectivity field: and this is not dykes here talking about
their things, the no-global there talking about
whatever, whores there and
precarious women, whatever… and Pink as a symbol of that which is
despised because its weak, because its funny, because it’s a sideshow,
etc.. It has to become a dangerous weapon which establishes
powerful connections between
questions such as sexualities-exploitations-consumer rules and size 36- the
dispositions of flexible reproduction and so on and so forth.”
And another one affirmed:
“I still don’t know
how to say no to war with our own bodies, when I think our own bodies have been
built from a saturation of identities, desires and powers of war. Why
don’t we think, parting from that, how to evolve into cyborgs, how to
constitute ourselves into real war machines? I still don’t understand how it is so easy to
repossess our own lives and walk around public and private spaces, go out the
streets, take back territories, misadjust them, short-circuit them, etc., just
because we are carrying a pink paintbrush in our hands.”
Which is like saying
“only because we are capable of naming it.” The
analysis, the investigation, must be tensed and tested by its practical
articulation. Being able to imagine feminism as an ideal space of negotiated
coexistence doesn’t mean we are going to be able to build this space. The
transformation of our life conditions cannot remain in the world of ideas, it
must be articulated in movement. Political action is configured as a laboratory
of theory-practice. A laboratory where failure, defeat, are always an
opportunity for improvement and astuteness.
When we name our bodies as
political bodies, agent bodies, bodies pierced by power and producers of it,
denied bodies, exploited, torn apart, technological bodies that ring the alarms
of the border security lines, airports, ministries, supermarkets; bodies full
of a complexity too big for the tiny sizes of the anorexic normalization of
global capitalism; imperfect
bodies, polluted, full of misery, subjection and contradiction, lacking of all
politeness and ready to be rude and rebel. When we name our bodies as bodies
full of oppositional and transforming potency, we are assuming the responsibility
of not turning into a simulacrum, accepting the challenge so clearly raised in
the words of another Pink operator:
“Why not burst into that
public space as real obscene furies showing the parody of what we are? The challenge of collectivity and
connectively turning into an ungovernable incarnation, empowered for restless
negociation,plucking the plugs out of their sockets and deflecting them to
wherever we choose, articulating a new concept of negociation that casts aside
masculinist images of battle and victory-or-death where no space is left for
learning, cunning or being more clever the second, third, nth time, but only
for absolute annihilation. An articulation of negociation that makes it
anything but harmless. Imagining social contestation in the simple terms of a
confrontation infested with dichotomies us/them, victory/defeat,
inside/outside, cause/effect-- is not possible anymore; instead we should
imagine it as a fierce discussion of multiple voices, although on occasions it
is possible for some of these voices to sing the same chord.”
This leaves us in a difficult and
slippery ground where our very identity can be kidnapped and turned into
something unrecognizable, ejecting us out onto even more dangerous and
difficult landscapes. Such are the threats of normalization when the struggle
is to explode the very figures of normality and must arise from its fissures.
When our bodies become a mere
consumer object-subject, when they are expropriated from us and eviscerated of
all their power and complexity to be projected like another cathode-ray phantom
on the family screen; what we get back is not much more than an alienated and
lobotomized image that turns us into something thrown at the back of that
image, to the realm of the intolerable.
A body whose difference, whose
sensibilities and whose possibility of breaking the normalized is turned into
an ornament in a shelf, into a neutralized, polished and disinfected consumer
object, cleared of all its complexity to make it fit into the narrow shelves of
the supermarket, is a body whose capacity for subversion and rebellion has been
tethered, an
easy-to-govern-and-manage body.
We feminists ought be vigilant of
these mechanisms, asking ourselves constantly what kind of images and relations
we are to reproduce.
Thus, the task opened from and for
social movements in general and feminism in particular has to do with the three
questions we have raised in this article:
a) The need to reactivate a sense
of politics that foregrounds the personal, the quotidian, bodies and
sexualities, that puts life itself at its centre. The need to think and create
spaces that make these political practices feasible and that take into account
the task of generating real and powerful conectivities in ways that facilitate
a coming together and allow the articulation of political hypotheses.
b) The need to think about the
tools with which we provide ourselves for the generation of such
connectivities; what their possibilities and limits are, what are the real
practices and alliances that they allow. In this sense, to commit ourselves not
to a politics that locates us either in an "ouside" or an "inside"
- immaculate, pure outside: institutional, neutral inside- but to a constant
negotiation which allows us to push out in multiple directions.
c) And last, how to be able to
effect real displacements and shifts in the very matrix of power. On the one
hand, as we have noted, it is of crucial importance to address the issue of
normalization or standarization upon which capital is nourished, visibilizing
the new borders of exclusion and marginality. We need a political imagination
beyond normalization, capable of articulating speech not from an alien "outside".
On the other hand we must conceive ourselves as situated, colonized,
power-saturated subjects able to provoke real break-downs and destabilizations
from there. In this sense we know that such break-downs, with their emphasis on
the body and the quotidian at the centre cannot depend upon individual,
isolated choices; they require a collective prectice. The point for us is how
to generate real collective agency inscribed in daily practices which do not
suppress differences but are able to deconstruct and dislocate processes of normalization.
How to build up a discourse that, from a sense of partiality, of the local and
the fragmentary, can account for the multiple conections of the new global
network.
These are the major questions that
we asking lately. For the moment we keep insisting: lets make of our bodies,
our sexuality, our desires, our emotions a global disorder!
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