Wars are the greatest exponent of culture, of the patriarchal system. They are the only way to “solve” conflicts are still accepted and legitimized, unfortunately, today by our society. Without learning from what we have already experienced as a human species, we repeat ourselves in an endless spiral. An humanitarian disaster in all the armed conflicts that currently exist in the world. Seeking a feminist transformation also means breaking with all the logic of violence.
The ukrainian war is not an exception and, because it is more visible in the media and takes place in Europe, it disturbs us more. In the face of this war, which we can follow almost minute by minute, we can see that right from the start, a distribution by gender roles that places each one in their supposed role, leaving aside personal situations or conditioning factors. It is evident that geopolitics and the distribution of power also have a reading from a feminist perspective. In both causes and the testosteronic, dominant and violent leadership of Putin. But in this reflection I want to focus on the situation that men and women have had to live through in that war.
On the one hand, the men have been forced to stay in the country. To defend a homeland with their bodies and through violence. Regardless of whether that homeland is the priority for them. It is taken for granted – as in all wars experienced before throughout the history of mankind – that all men called up will be brave and willing to die for their country. as ordered the epic of hegemonic masculinity that it is so harmful to the men who inhabit it (voluntarily or involuntarily). There is no room for weakness, for fear, care, the will to prioritize life over the country. It starts from the simple and widespread idea that all men are “cut from the same cloth”. As marked by the gender norm. Many men die and will die at the hands of other men too called to destroy as gender mandate from which there is no escape. It’s about winning at any price.
And the women? Women are relegated to being the guardians of families, they are considered vulnerable and, at the same time, they have the task of caring for vulnerable people (children and the elderly). In short, to preserve life while men are forced to wreak destruction. An impossible assignment when they are devoid of everything, They must leave their homes, their jobs, the men in their families, everything. In the case of women, there is not even an explicit request “for the country”; the ability to exercise care, parenting in any circumstance is so socially naturalized that it is taken for granted and that is how it is invisible. In war theaters, women, children and other people must leave the public space. The battlefield is understood as the place where the important issues are played, those that will later appear in the textbooks and will be visible as triumphs or failures and they (because we are not the ones who watch from a screen) will not be remembered as heroines despite sustaining the lives of the Ukrainian people.
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But women also experience violence for being women in wars. In Ukraine, as well as in all previous wars throughout history, women’s bodies are a weapon of war. Also here are raped as a symbolic and real way of exercising domination over the Ukrainian population and also in their migratory traffic, they run the risk of being trafficked –women and girls especially– among other situations they experience. These are the most obvious types of violence, but also in their long journey they can be exploited at work, they can suffer sexual violence, they can be questioned in the exercise of care, among others.
It is no coincidence that we observe all gender stereotypes at the same time. We see how the patriarchal machinery unfolds to make it fit in with a world that can no longer continue to rely on violence to keep power in the hands of the usual as a form of domination. Today is Ukraine and tomorrow we will see. Either we change the world or we destroy ourselves.