when someone asks me feminist readings I always advise starting with the referents who laid the pillars of the movement. In order not to fall into readings that sell what feminism is not. Within feminist academics there is everything. None is a bible to follow, but the sum. But that is not carte blanche to overlook the importance of being clear about the genesis of the movement, its goals and its red lines. Not everything goes.
These days, Judith Butler has collected the XIII Catalunya International Prize. For many people, she is a philosopher of reference who has even answered questions in their lives. But within the field in which I, as a journalist, have been, that of women abused by gender and sexual violencehis post-structuralist philosophy, where almost everything is relative, does not provide answers to the needs that they pose.
For the award ceremony, the “civic and political commitment to combat all types of violence” has been emphasized. I have read several of your interviews these days and just does not condemn two types of violence. Butler is considered one of the theoreticians of an integrative feminism, but I have missed mentions of a feminism that don’t forget the most vulnerablefrom the girls raped in Colombia to the girls sold in forced marriages in Afghanistan or the trafficking of women in the midst of the war in Ukraine.
In one of her interviews in ‘El País’, the journalist asks Butler about the “rental” of women to gestate. She replies that this and prostitution are ways of “earning a living & rdquor; and that “why do we care so much about what others do?” The journalist asks again if she doesn’t believe that her assessment supposes increase inequality for the poorest women, to which the philosopher replies: “It may be that I have not thought enough about this matter. But it does not produce the same horror to me as to others & rdquor ;.
Each person has their perspective but, after the experiences I have heard over the years, such frivolous statements give me the creeps. The horror is that because you are poor you conceive a baby for others, a war comes and you cannot flee the country because a company expects you to give birth and cares nothing about your life. Horror is that every day some slobbers penetrate you wherever they want, under threat from your pimps, with whom you have contracted a debt. Horror is teaching generations that women are bought.
Lerner said in ‘The origin of patriarchy’ that it starts with the creation of the first states, with the exploitation of the reproductive and sexual capacity of women. Women as second class people. Even later centuries have not changed that mentality. Judith Butler’s words are more reminiscent of Milton Friedman’s liberal theses than those of the feminist Josephine Butler. The feminist historical memory is there and from suffragism it was clear that prostitution was not sexual freedom.
Related news
Butler says that we are connected and that is why feminism does not encourage individualism. Where do we frame, then, the phrase “why do we care so much what others do”? Of course it matters, because we are not isolated entities. Our decisions impact others. It is not a question of morality, but of ethics and rights. Doing business with slavery, the sale of organs, prostitution or wombs for hire is to condemn hundreds of women, children and the most vulnerable people to give themselves up in order to survive, if they succeed. Legitimizing this criminal industry extorts the free future of thousands of poor women who are not given other starting conditions. The Supreme Court itself stated thathe slavery of the 21st century is in the hostess clubs. There are issues that are not relative but material and unquestionable.
In his speech, moreover, Butler always focuses on women, but not in man’s demand. Where is that integrative feminism that here does not recognize class or race as factors that condemn women who are not talked about? All this is one more example of how a feminist, anti-capitalist or anti-colonial discourse can be sold but, in the end, is very reminiscent of what the patriarchy has been saying for centuries.