Why Feminism is the Answer to Urban Challenges in the Americas
Inés Isaurralde. “Conservar el fuego” Oil on canvas, 2016.
Natalia Andrea Garicia Dopazo ‘23
Artwork by Inés Isaurralde*
March is International Women’s Month; every year offers a new opportunity to broaden a conversation on how the feminist perspective can bring solutions to the most urgent causes. When discussing gender inequalities with an intersectional approach, we address that the human rights of the vast majority of the world’s population are undermined. Societal relationships assign each of us specific roles with opportunities and many restrictions because of our gender identity (women and LGBTTTQ+ people), sexual orientation, skin color, ethnicity, nationality, mobility, or class. As the late sociologist Anibal Quijano and the feminist philosopher María Lugones have pointed out, among other thinkers, these restrictions are caused by colonial, patriarchal, and racist principles. Latin America, like other territories, can’t be explained without them. Throughout an enormous effort, feminist researchers, activists, and politicians have developed a conceptual corpus that relates the core of this structural principle with almost every topic you can think about. In this article, I will try to connect feminist struggles in Latin America as an opportunity to find new collective answers for the region in the context of humanitarian and climate crises.
Staying with the trouble
Why do we organize our world in this way? Is it inevitable to live ilke this? Coming from Latin America, we know it is not. Our everyday relationship with our indigenous communities reminds us of the historic and violent conditions that left us in this position, with restricted access to our land, imposed cultural practices, and a continuous struggle to determine our future. Furthermore, the impositions on our production systems have shaped cities, institutions, and political systems, leaving us in unstable situations. As the feminist anthropologist Rita Segato explained many times, these forms of domination have been based on a Eurocentric, patriarchal structure that measures progress by the values of a generic Western, white, hetero-cis male point of view. Linked to these perspectives, the nuclear family, the division of labor by sex, and the public and private spheres have been designed. Dichotomies were unnatural and had to be imposed by force, and women of color had the worst conditions.
Inés Isaurralde. "Encuentro nacional”, oil on canvas, 2019
The binary paradigm divides our thinking into arbitrary oppositions: men/women, culture/nature, public/private, formal/informal, urban/rural, science/spirituality, rationality/emotionality, cardinal grid/chaos, development/backwardness, and communism/capitalism, among others. Usually, we get trapped by infertile dilemmas that don’t respond to our actual challenges, address our current specific problems, and leave us in dark alleys. Fortunately, the indigenous epistemologies and queer perspectives have taught us that the Western paradigm is only one option over others. It is essential to notice that when we talk about ideas and world thinking, we are not targeting specific people, communities, or white European men. In feminist theory, everyone in the system is oppressed, and no one is free, so feminism is not just about women. We are oppressed because we are fixed in a position that doesn’t allow us to think beyond those categories, and if we do so, that will probably have costs. Sometimes that cost is one’s life. Gender and racial violence are unrelated to income; we find it in wealthy and poor communities. It is about other things, and that violence has spread to everyone. That is why men have a lower life expectancy, some territories get polluted, some people have to migrate involuntarily, or others can’t access water.
From my point of view, one of the biggest things I learned from the non-binary perspective is trying to get out of the narrow alley. After many years of political and theoretical effort, we can embrace and reimagine self-imposed dilemmas in a broader sense. The ability to think about multiple and diverse options is not just related to gender and identity choices; it is an opportunity to innovate in public policy and development models. Furthermore, care as a paradigm benefits everyone because it opens new ways of being. Finally, this perspective tackles the process of doing things, not just the outcome.
Care theories of knowledge to tackle climate change
Inés Isaurralde. Luna y Niña, Oil on canvas, 2020
International Organizations and the feminist critical theory have demonstrated that women assume unseen and underpaid jobs, the burden of care activities, representing the core labor to reproduce society. Women also represent 10% to 30% of land owners in rural areas, with the worst farming conditions. In urban areas, female caregivers in working-class neighborhoods who lack access to essential services earn 47% less than their peers in more affluent communities, interrupting their educational trajectory. Only 47% of them have a paid job. 70% of the 1.3 billion people in the world are women; UN reports already reflect that they are the most vulnerable population facing climate change. These tasks, which in Latin America represent an unrecognized 20% of the GDP, present a new paradigm to approach social challenges. To focus on care as the central paradigm for our political, institutional, and decision-making process is a radical and non-violent approach for the future. Care as a framework is a superior improvement to deal with the limited solutions we are presented with as a continent. Because care, the right to be taken care of, care for others, and self-care create a broad perspective that changes the logic and values of what matters to society.
Feminist economic theory has explained how these social organizations left women with unequal conditions, leading to statistics on poverty and victims of violence that, because of the magnitude and scale of the phenomenon, it is not only about casualties. Unfortunately, things are normal and natural in these arenas. We can understand that to reproduce this accumulation system, some bodies, and territories must be sacrificed and exploited. In each context, these forms of extractivism have their unique configuration. Because women’s bodies are the first territory of conquest, and then this domination goes over land, ecofeminist perspectives can be linked to the reproductive justice struggles and land-return processes claimed by indigenous communities.
The mainstream gender agenda for public policy has left us with a collection of simple actions focused on women. For example, we encourage parity as a working team principle, celebrate the political participation of women and other identities in the political sphere, and push forward when administration budgets are presented with the gender perspective. However, this is not enough, and in many cases, it resembles a pink-washing strategy, similar to green-washing the extractivist actions we constantly encounter.
In the context of climate change, we are often invited to rethink our collective choices. After the latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports, we know that accountability for the environmental damage has to be pointed towards the global north, that our region is filled with reservoirs of water, food, and energy production and is the place that contains one of the more significant inequality indexes. Also, we host many of the most violent cities, migration crises, and poor territories. In these conditions, why is the feminist perspective an opportunity?
Because it is a non-violent approach to change that takes everyone into account. Because it is the most robust theoretical framework we haven’t tried yet and is an opportunity to heal– acknowledging where we come from and where we want to go. It offers us the possibility of multiple destinies, leaving behind the monolithic discourse of fatality, tragedy, and destruction. We deserve better, and we can make it happen.
Inés Isaurralde. “La hora mágica” Oil on canvas, 2018
*Inés Isaurralde (Buenos Aires, 1984) is a visual artist (UNA) with a Literature degree from the University of Buenos Aires. Her work explores the relationship between painting and poetry, building fertile crossings between both languages. She is a member of the collective of painters "Las muchas".