The long march for common sense: it is not so easy to dismantle the beliefs that justify patriarchal dominance. Even less, other topics such as those that arise from racist classifications or from market society and that make our subjectivity the task around merchandise. It is not simple and yet, when a candidate for deputy said that men had the right to renounce paternity because they were poor dupes subjected to women’s deception tactics, those statements were no longer credible. They remained outside of political reason, because anyone, faced with those ideological statements, could appeal to the forcefulness of the majority behaviors: women who raise children alone, abandoned parents, reluctant to pass on food and take charge. But what emerges from an experience is not always systematized as knowledge, knowledge and political affirmation. It happens if there are militancy, activism, agency of many people. Also if there are legislators and journalists, if there are those who combine this knowledge and show its relevance.
The same with the right to abortion for every pregnant woman and the right to retirement for those who did not work under salary relationships but worked throughout their lives. Without the effort to name domestic and care tasks as work, these retirements were associated with mere and gratuitous waste.. Without perseverance in thinking about autonomy and desire, abortion remained clandestine for everyone and at risk of life for many. Today they seem to be agreements that have already been sustained, except for the hard core of the ultra-right., but those consensuses were built. They were amassed in the now pluri Meetings and in infinite political meetings, they were dispersed in works, they chatted over mates and beers, they became poetry and document, journalistic article and television intervention. The polyglot, multitudinous, contradictory, quarrelsome feminisms, those who are in the State and in Parliament, those who distance themselves from all institutionality, those who imagine dissidence, those who do not want to be womanly, those who do, those who agitate in publications underground and those that reign in the mainstream, in that disparate and conflictive coexistence, have modified the common sense of this society. We know that common sense is not a single and coherent totality, but in that shared set of ideas and beliefs, there are many marks of feminist struggles. Many.
Let’s think about an obvious one: the denaturalization of abuse, the breaking of silent tolerances with intra-familial abuse, which has been producing Comprehensive sexual education. An education that requires the close cooperation of teachers in each classroom, but also ministerial decisions and a broad legislative will. Feminisms shine in her marching street, but hers is more about the long term. Even when we seem silent, the work continues. That of thousands and thousands. The tenacity of each of those acts. That saying no that cannot be avoided. That name the desire that does not give up. Going beyond today’s consensus to fight for future ones: the efforts of anti-punitivist and anti-racist feminisms, those who refuse to let common goods be thought of as resources, those who want to go beyond neoliberal subjectivation. I don’t know if there are other movements in which the swing between agreements and dissent is so mobile, where the minimum levels of agreement are preserved even with the willingness to deal with other conflictive nuclei.
The ultra-right chose Peronism and feminism as its enemies. To Peronism as the language of rights, the great modulator of popular beliefs and ideas in Argentina, as a state articulator. To feminisms, because in this way it challenged a social base of young men who believed themselves damaged and excluded, who had seen political enthusiasm pass by – that of the girls of the green and fuchsia tide -, but also because feminisms , in that multiple language that they are deploying-, they build a dispute against neoliberalism at the level of common sense.
Feminisms plot and elaborate a discussion against the commodification of living things and a determined adversity against the ways of considering parts of the populations disposable. But these two features are what, dramatically, configure the current moment of capital. For this reason, the less timid spoke of organ sales or the commercial exchange of children. The poor could now use not only their labor force to enter the market but also the parts of their anatomy or their offspring. Thus, if – as Marx wrote – the worker under capitalism is free in the double sense of being able to hire his labor force and in the ironic meaning of being free from ownership of the means of production to be able to work independently, for the extreme right He is also free to alienate his body, fragmented and heavy. An obscene argument circulated: if someone has a sick child and needs money to afford treatment, why not sell a kidney to do so. What is fundamental is suppressed in the example: the existence of a public health system that meets the needs of anyone. Of everyone. Total commodification is the definition of the line between disposable and careable lives.
The appropriations, confrontations and recodings of the extreme right are here to stay. Even if they finally lose the presidential election, there is a current of social opinion, a youthful enthusiasm, a hostility mobilized by these political speeches and a strong parliamentary bloc. Somehow, they already earned a place. They harbor that hatred, in a society in which there are many impulses towards cruelty. It’s about taking that apart., to generate antibodies, to search for words and images in which we not only confront that cruelty that has become a political program but also the way in which it persists in the social dynamic itself, under other political projects. Think about and dismantle the punitive dimension of our feminisms, because if we do not manage to speak critically about prison as a mode of punishment, There is a specific and everyday form of cruelty in the face of which we choose silence.. Just as we explored, in this thinking and acting multiplication, the question of the care of life and the recognition of work, the denaturalization of abuses and the legalization of abortion, the denunciation of debt and the expansion of the presence of women in leadership positions in parliaments, parties, unions; just as a common body was made around the transvestite trans labor quota and the public conversation about sex work is housed; In the same way, feminisms are the territory of a possible imagination of other, less bloody ways of life, where cruelty is under discussion. Denaturalize cruelty as a path to anti-punitivism. That’s what it’s about. Because in that knot, In that hateful and hostile affectivity, in that shortcut that seeks to resolve conflicts with punishments, and difference with violence, the program of the extreme right is inscribed., but also from the right defeated in the first round. Didn’t the words extermination, annihilation, or the phrase: we’re going to make them run on their asses resonate loudly in this campaign? Wasn’t it a campaign promise to create the largest prison in the world? Dismantling the substrate that makes it possible, we can only do from other desiring images, but also by constructing a new sense of the common.