Against the Incarceration of Female Bodies
Colectivo LASTESIS’ practice of speech on the streets and stages
It is not enough to be an anti-capitalist to disarm patriarchal, outdated hierarchies. A good starting point – as author, curator, and editor of the newspaper «Arts of the Working Class» María Inés Plaza Lazo suggests in her essay – is to imagine more precisely what an alliance against the resurgence of neoliberal and far-right rollbacks in the world might look like. As a second step, she suggests becoming a decolonial feminist to realise what the outdated, racist, colonial power structures are doing to the majority of people on our planet and to look for ways to help each other. Another measure, according to the author, would be to understand the new leftist currents and protest movements that have emerged in Latin America and, moreover, to support and empower them. What seems like a daunting task, the feminist collective LASTESIS – consisting of Daffne Valdés Vargas, Paula Cometa Stange, Lea Cáceres Díaz and Sibila Sotomayor Van Rysseghem – treat as unavoidable and imperative.
Colectivo LASTESIS is powered by a passionate will to disseminate feminist theory through performance, and an interdisciplinary language that combines sound, graphic and textile design, history and social sciences, sonorous and corporal stimuli, configuring a device for multiple audiences, and their bodies. In a «TIME» article, Pussy Riot member Nadya Tolokonnikova describes colectivo LASTESIS’ performances in public spaces as the epitome of how today’s art can be about changing the world rather than just entertainment. She writes: «Victim blaming and slut-shaming are the deeply ideological assumptions that are built into our brains, education and legal systems globally. It has to be changed. The 21st century is the century of sisterhood.»
The collective’s viral feminist practice was born in Chile, and is well connected to the pursuits of the country's new president Gabriel Boric: a feminist leftist with a thirst for real, socially driven change, willing to abdicate the constitution to deliver a magna carta. Meanwhile, the colectivo LASTESIS holds workshops in international networks of resistance in places like Zurich's Theater Spektakel, as the group's performative practices also relate to protest marches directed against police brutality, genocides, femicides, and femigenocides in all cultures of our modernist, global society.
For colectivo LATESIS’ critique of structural violence perpetrated by the state embedded in their performance «Un Violador en tu Camino» («A Rapist in Your Path»), one can recur to Françoise Vergès’ latest book «A Feminist Theory of Violence», where she explains how oppression is a structural problem. On the basis of Vergès’s remarks, «Un Violador en tu Camino» can be assigned a place among the records of those political positions that are critical of state-sanctioned forms of protection and justice in a culture of white supremacy. Thus, these forms are still what constitute the logic and infrastructure of carcerality, such as dysfunctional prisons, domestic violence, abusive behaviour towards anyone who is not identified a white cis-male, hate speech. These old forms are colliding with new cries for justice.
Research against Control
Everywhere you look protests are increasing. And the more violent, the more desperate they are, the less impact they seem to have. Chile appears to be the exception. The intergenerational solidarity and the almost unwavering cheerfulness comes to mind with which the people of Chile came together to protest against the rising prices of public transport in 2019, despite the completely disproportionate violence of the police and military «El que baila pasa» (Only those who dance may pass) was one of their slogans. Ex-president Sebastian Piñera declared a state of emergency on television and sent out tanks and the military, while musicians, choirs, and entire symphony orchestras gathered in front of historic places like the government palace La Moneda or on Plaza Italia in Santiago, and sang day after day. Peacefully and solemnly like an unshakable mantra one could hear the song «El derecho de vivir en paz» (The right to live in peace) by Victor Jara, one of the great heroes of the Chilean resistance, who died violently under Pinochet's dictatorship. Around that time, colectivo LASTESIS premiered their first work, «Patriarchy and Capital is Criminal Alliance»; a small-format staged performance in Valparaíso, based on the book «Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation», by Italian-American feminist cultural theorist Silvia Federici.
Their name already reveals their premise: Colectivo LASTESIS («The Theses Collective») brings academic theories onto more accessible platforms, compromising a process of translation and understanding beyond pedagogical projection. The translation from an academic space into a popular one is not easy. It is not easy to protest against femicides in the absence of the womxn that were unjustly murdered. It is not easy because we live thinking about the suffering they had to experience. That’s why colectivo LASTESIS took the writings of Argentine anthropologist Rita Segato and spun a thread between her theoretical work and the streets. This resulted in the performance «El Violador eres Tú» («The Rapist is You»), renamed to the above-mentioned «Un Violador en tu Camino», which has been replicated in more than 50 countries until today. Segato’s independent thinking and historical revisions are crucial to understand colectivo LASTESIS’ works: She is equally opposed to the fixation of many intellectuals on Europe, political correctness of US provenance or too short-sighted analyses of violence against women. Segato combines her precise knowledge of the barbaric conditions in Brazilian prisons or the murders of womxn in Tijuana with a rousing optimism of will. Moreover, she is firmly convinced that the feminist mass movement in southern Latinoamérica is in the process of permanently shifting the political coordinate systems.
Dance against Violence
«Hasta que la dignidad se haga costumbre!» (Until dignity becomes a habit again!): Chilean demonstrators proclaimed this with grim determination against the price increase of subway tickets. The fact that almost 70 percent of the population pays European prices for basic food with the income of a so-called «Third World» country, that health insurance and pension coverage apply only to a privileged few, and that students are now paying off the high fees of privatised universities like a home loan, was never mentioned in Sebastian Piñera’s narrative about South America’s (supposedly) exceptional country. The members of colectivo LASTESIS are well versed the intersectional struggle of class, race, and gender in this context, as the rhetorics taken from Rita Segato are very much connected to the politics of exhaustion Françoise Vergès writes about in her most recent book, «A Feminist Theory of Violence», which quotes colectivo LASTESIS in its introduction. As a public educator and activist with a PhD in Political Science, Vergès writes about carceral feminism, about the injustices to the female body and the thirst for revenge that needs to be questioned. She acknowledges that feeling, but insists that this is not the solution.
In 2022, the Argentine average is one femicide every 30 hours. In Mexico, ten womxn are murdered every 24 hours. In Chile, considering a much smaller population, the official number is eleven womxn per day, although the minister of Women’s Affairs, Antonia Orellana, points to the underreporting of violence. At 32, Antonia Orellana is the youngest in the Chilean cabinet and one of President Gabriel Boric’s most trusted people. Like Boric, Orellana comes from the student movements. Her office is one of those located inside the Palacio de la Moneda as part of the political committee: the areas that the government defines as priorities in management.
«Un Violador en Tu Camino» was chanted and performed in Chile before Boric, Orellana and their allies came to power, while thousands of womxn took to the streets, demanding justice for Antonia Barra, a survivor of sexual assault. The members of colectivo LASTESIS emphasise that they hope feminism will continue to be influential for many more years as we advance towards a more just, diverse and feminist society. Meanwhile, the group is being targeted with hate speech and trolls on social media who wish rape upon them; others denounce them to the police for «inciting violence through their performance».
What kind of violence is meant here? The performance excludes any kind of physical interaction among the members, while a beat sets the tone. Techno is chanted, and legs squat and open to show the audience that vulvas are activated and to be feared. Those who fear them, fear the truth about the carceral gaze imbued in patriarchal structures. Happily, it seems that nothing will stop the ripple effect that colectivo LASTESIS has already made across the world, the performance being translated into several languages, and performed in several cities, such as Barcelona, London, Paris, Quito and Guayaquil.
Besides the unforgivable, unsolidary actions conducted by protestors, destroying goods, foods and affecting supply chains between the coastal region and highlands, there is a core message coming from this year's national strike in Ecuador that needs to be heard and that is organised in meaningful ways, too. Especially while the conservative and neoliberal administration of Guillermo Lasso has been paralysed in front of cartels and generations of corruption since taking office last year. Womxn, feminists and dissidents from the countryside and the city, joined the national strike led by the Indigenous population in Ecuador this June to sustain it from the community pots, care work, mobilisation in the streets and to prevent repression in the front line. Their demands are even more elemental than those of colectivo LASTESIS: that the government stops raising the prices of basic goods, pleading for the poverty that the majority of racialised communities face to become acknowledged.
Resistance against Protection
With chants, banners, slogans and batucadas (drumming), the march advanced to the center of Quito. «My voice, the one that goes screaming, my dream, the one that goes on unfragmented, knows that I only die if you give up, because those who died fighting live on in every comrade, compañera and compañere» were one of the chants heard during the sixteenth day of the national strike on June 28th – International LGBTIQ+ Pride Day. Lasso did not attend the dialogue nor did anyone from the executive sector. Instead, the government's hatred towards the Indigenous leader Leonidas Iza was reinforced. Womxn and sexual dissidents carried out an energetic march that started from the Tribuna del Sur and headed towards the center of the city. When the march passed through the colonial quarter, the residents of the neighbourhoods joined in with slogans such as: «See, see, see. What a beautiful thing. Womxn and queers fighting for life.»
The chants of colectivo LASTESIS in Chile, Pussy Riot in Russia, or the Asamblea de Mujeres y Disidentes in Ecuador are heard all over the world and crystallised the many discussions on violence against womxn that keep obscuring the fundamental violence perpetrated by the racial capitalocene carried out by the state. The chants unmask the social causes of the interpersonal violence that affect womxn, including their ideas of «protecting» women wrapped in «feminist» language only to further a carceral state. Françoise Vergès supports the work against the punitive obsession of the state – and sometimes protesters, too – in favour of restorative justice and communitarian labor. The question of incarceration and criminalisation today is formulated through an anti-racist, feminist struggle. Peace is its objective. Peace, not only as a moment between two, but as a long-term condition in these countries – as well as in Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, and the list goes on: A notion, not a paper, for a collective agreement, re-appropriated by the womxn from the global south.
It’s hard to imagine an abolitionist, pacifist status quo in a world that is increasingly polarising, and intolerant. Especially with gender role designation within the racial capitalocene; capital destroys any kind of leadership we need in terms of finding ways to resist violence, its vocabularies, its performativity. Patriarchy manifests in any form, desire, and joy of oppression. Is a structure of domination that is being called out in order to imagine a world without sexism, racism and capitalism. Is peace a possibility without violence? Fighting against violence is currently a state of permanent war. The example of colectivo LASTESIS is one which makes protests today so meaningful and tricky at the same time. Resistance is not only reacting to, but also escaping violence. As we are resisting, we need to be aware of what we are building while doing so. We have to organise our struggle over and over again, protecting ourselves from the embittering violence, that still shapes the allowance for murder, corruption, lies, greed. With a collective resilience to these forms of violence, another life cannot only be imagined. This hard work will never exploit us, but lead us to poetry – to dance back again.
The colectivo LASTESIS performs "RESISTENCIA" together with more than 30 local workshop participants on Friday, 26 Aug at 10pm on the Zentralbühne stage. Further information.
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References
Abiuso, Marina: Antonia Orellana, ministra de la Mujer: «En Chile vivimos una salida del clóset del aborto», published on April 7, 2022 in Nodal AM
Mantuano, Mishell: Del campo y la ciudad: las demandas de las mujeres y disidencias en el Paro, published on July 12, 2022 in Wambra.ec
Meredith, Shannon: Historias Poderosas sobre femicidios y crímenes de odio contra personas LGBTTQI+ en Ecuador, report published on August 23, 2021 in Chicas Poderosas Feminist Blog
Red Chilena contra la Violencia hacia las Mujeres
Solnit, Rebecca, Men Explain Things to Me, published on Aug 20, 2012 in: Guernica Magazine
Vera Mendiu, Cristina: El Hombre, Kommentar zur Kandidatur Cynthia Viteris, published on September 26, 2016 in GKill City
Vergès, Françoise: A Feminist Theory of Violence. A Decolonial Perspective. Translated by Melissa Thackway, Pluto Press 2022
Vergès, Françoise: In conversation with Aviah Sarah Day and Shanice Octavia McBean for Pluto Press, published on July 12, 2022