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"I CAN'T BELIEVE I WAS THE ONE WHO DID ALL THIS.”
Ana Clerici |
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Our
aim in this paper is to analyse the generation relationship and the role
of women, in a space of political participation where it is possible to
find an interplay of the public and the private.To achieve this aim we will
work with Otilia’s case.One of the paper authors is her grandaughter and works with
her at the “Asociación Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo” Grandmothers of May’s Square Association). Another one is the
daughter of a woman shooted during the military dictatorship and a current
member of H.I.J.O.S.. Finally, the third one is a teacher and works in a
rural community. We consider that it is important to work with Otilia’s
case, because it is one of the many existing examples of
latin-american women who questioned their traditional roles and
initiated, from their pain,a
political struggle which transformed those roles and its social
representations. Otilia is an eighty-year-old-woman, born in Santiago del Estero in 1914. As many other women of her generation she went to school, married at nineteen years old, had five children (three girls and two boys), became a widow, and later on, got married again. In the seventies the military dictatorship added six victims to her family: two sons and a grandson missing. We feel marked by this story at which women had played a fundamental role. “It would be good to remember that the drama of missing children in our country, República Argentina, constitutes just another aspect of the National Security Doctrine, implemented by the military dictatorship which devastated our country from 1976 to 1983. For the grandmothers, these creatures are the children of their children; also missing. Many of them were kidnapped with their parents; some of them after their parents were killed, and other ones were born in concentration camps where their young mothers, arrested at different stages of pregnancy, had been conducted. While trying to find them, their grandmothers started gathering together and they finally originated in 1977 the “Asociación Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo”, specifically dedicated to claiming, investigating and searching for their missing children. As mothers, their search is double, because they claim for their grandchildren while they also search desperately for the parents of the child: their children (Seminario Internacional Filiación, Identidad, Restitución, 15 años de lucha de Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo,1992.) “In the beginning I was an active member in the “Familiares” and then in “Abuelas” (Grandmothers). The “grandmothers” in Buenos Aires invited us to form a group in Córdoba, since it was difficult to travel there every month. In Buenos Aires, it was formed in 1977 and here in 1978. There they were bothered by the military, but here we were not.Fear exists. But in the case of “grandmothers” and “mothers”, the fear made us fight. My life changed because of the pain that I have now. Before, we used to go out of school, everyone happy, as happy as clams. After everything that has happened to me laughter is over. But we decided to change tears for fight. We decided not to stay crying under the bed. We Mothers and grandmothers filled the Cathedral. When I tell you this, I can’t believe that I did all this. It was dangerous and we were scared, but when we started the search we defeated fear.” (Otilia) In our country, the Human Rights movements have had women participation as one of its main features. In the context of the last military dictatorship, when the privatisation of conflicts was heightened, women were the ones who manage to put in the public territory the conflicts that they were living.These women named themselves after what society considered the most representative feature of their female function: “mothers” and “grand mothers”. It is of great importance in this movements the polisemic and strategic meanings that these terms acquire. They put power under strain, because these women put themselves in their traditional female roles, and from there question and claim. This supposedly a-political place ( for the chauvinist ideology of the military), that position allows them to enterin the politic territory without being repressed (at least in some cases). The public and politic character of their fight is what makes impossible to easily classify them as "subversive", the adjective that the military usually applied to the dictatorship’s opponents. That is why repression of these women was justified by accusing them of “madness” and “irrationality”. “The majority of “grandmothers” did not have a political formation. In the beginnings we didn’t know that we were doing politics. After twenty years we begin to find out and to become proud of our children’s fight. Nobody questioned our being politically active because of being women, with the exception of some ignorant people who told us to go back home. The fact that we were mothers gave us the space to be politically active without being so questioned, but they called us “the crazy women of the square...” This passage is interesting because it shows us,that beyond the results of that practices, the possibility of questioning the power’s structures and the situations of inequality and subordination exists. From what we have said earlier, we can conclude that the “Asociación de Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo” can be classified as what Teresita Barbieri calls "women movements” when she says: “Women movements are collective actions with numeric predominance of feminist problems, bur they are not necessarily constructed around identity and gender's demands.” (De Barbieri, 1991) In Latin-America, there are two elements responsible for the peculiarity of these movements: the circumstances of socio-economic crisis and the socio-political processes that we have been trough. These two aspects are closely related, since the dictatorial processes have been accompanied by the implementation of neo-liberal politics. The combination of these two factors has risen to concrete forms of women’s participation. Generally, it this sector, there have prevailed women movements rather than feminism, which is probably due to mainly to the context of socio-economical crisis and the strategies women have developed in order to face it.This situation has impelled them to fight for the acquisition of their social rights, which in our “Third World” are not often respected.Women movements have had an important protagonism in the demands for these rights, but they have not taken a distinctive feminist approach, since circumstances and needs have linked them to other sort of social movements. In the Argentine case there is a notorious presence of women in the movement of D.D.H.H. Their claims are not specifically centred in gender topics but in the dynamic of these processes these subjects eventually come up. “All that time argentine and latinamerican women had to face the situation by being very close fellows and, above everything else, by being mothers. They had to confront social prejudices, especially from the traditional women who were only housewives and nothing else.Here, entering University was very hard, but they did it anyway, raising children, working.We are more affectionate but that doesn’t mean that we spend the whole day washing. We are more homeloving, but that doesn’t make us less capable. They (women) were opening new spaces as they went along. And now we take it as something natural, we don’t value it. Looking from fifty years earlier to now all the conquest achieved can be seen.” Historically women have been, due to the sex-gender system and the activities that were consequently assigned to them (related to reproduction), relegated to the private spaces, their homes. From this conception of women a narrative, which legitimates their exclusion from public spheres, is constructed. This sort of argumentation has been perpetuated by the continuity of the patriarchal system, which has allowed certain “ideological inertia” This explains the force which still enjoys the “myth of women inferiority”, in spite of the scientific development, the political conquests, and the construction and enlargement of participation’s spaces. Which political conception underlies this exclusion of women from politic and public spheres and their relegation to private-domestic fields? “The politics had developed in opposition to the private, understood as the domestic; it has never been defined as the space in which collective goals coming from the private get fixed, it has always been the place of the public and its expressions. “ (Azcarate 1997) This conception of politics is the one that women movements have had to deconstruct, impugn, and re-signify. They politicise daily life and try to revert the domination relationships at home as well as outside it. Grandmothers, when positioning themselves strategically in the traditional role of women, manage to enter in the public scene and politicise their fight. This place is later re-signified by them, when they realise of the wide-scope and real dimensions of their struggle and movements. Re-signifying the political constitutes and attempt to unify the spheres of the private and the public, in opposition to the hegemonic discourse which circumscribes the political to the public spheres where only men (and even only some men) are allowed. The feminist slogan: “the personal is political” is born from the negation of the division between public and private spheres. There is a need to politicise the private because there is an unequal power at home end every aspect of our lives needs to be democratised. But “the personal is political” refers also to the inverse movement: that of making public those situations of injustice, submission, subordination, all in all, of power and all the possibilities of physical and symbolic violence, to face them collectively and try to make them become a problem of everyone and not only of women. In the case of “grandmothers”, their getting together allow them to turn their individual problems into communal ones. Later on, with the consolidation of the association they became aware of the increasing force of their claims, and of how they revealed the strong social conflicts that were lived in those years. “As citizens, as women particularly, they have been able to give a public-political dimension to a drama which in principle and traditionally should have remained private-afective.” (Fernández 1992) Now: How do women get included in the public-politics? Feminist movement, as well as women movement, propose different ways of making politics based in pluralism and heterogeneity, starting from a characterisation of civil society and public space as something heterogeneous conformed by different actors with different needs and capacities.In their search for their children and grandchildren, “grandmothers” constitutes themselves as political subjects, protagonists of the cultural and social changes, and they present proposals for the construction of a new social order and a better-integrated society. Otilia has told us her life story. It is obvious that the violence of the military dictatorship has broken her, but along the interview she interweaves some subjects like love, sexuality, the children, her grand children, the religion.We could see through her story continuity and lack of continuity of her moral and sentimental values since her participation in “Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo”. One constant value in her story: the strength , the emotional strength which she thinks what describes the Latin American woman.She talks about “the conquest” of the women since 1950 to now a days, when the women make some works and take jobs that were for them before, not giving up their“traditional roles” being “very good partners and mothers”, “homeloving, but not less capable”. Otilia considers the emotional subject as one of the main values, something very feminine, but also a real and strong “engine” in the politics struggles, transforming their own emotional and affective affair in a public affairs. “The men are very hard, very tough to some fights; in the affective subject women are stronger. Through the love for our children and grand children, our searching to find them, make fears to disappear”.In another hand, the changes in the relationships first with their children, and now with their grand children, there is one “before” and “now”. And these changes are seen like positive by Otilia: she says: “the relationship with my daughters were good, but now, seeing you as my grand-daughters I think I was ignorant. I had a lot of “taboos”. I think you really face the truth”. Along her story she considers the need to accept changes, to know, to understand, being the ignorance of disagreement misunderstanding and lack of tolerance. She says: “I impose on my self to understand you...” “The grandmothers have to understand”.... Truth, sincerity, are positive values for young people: “I think they act as they believe, as they feel. In the past we hare to consider what parents or brothers wanted we to do, if they allowed to do something or not.We did what they wanted or what they allowed us to do. We lived with hypocrisy, hiding sexual desires, pretending things we did not feel, and this made you hypocrite.” Otilia thinks is negative the excess of freedom of young people nowadays (being bed too late, changing couples constantly) but she has changed a lot, and likes young couples sharing much more things than they did in the past. We hope that in the future Otilia´ story and ours, could be useful, as a bridge that helps to think and feel as women, and as a part of a long story that still continues. Litterature De Barbieri, Teresita; en Vargas Valente, Virginia; “Género, clase y raza en America Latina”; en Luna, Lola (comp.); Seminario Inetrdisciplinar “Mujeres y Sociedad”; Universidad de Barcelona; 1991. Azcárate, Teresa; “La diferencia de los sexos como diferencia política”; en “Programa de educación para el desarrollo y participación de la mujer”; Fundación servicio universitario mundial; 1997. Fernández, Ana; en Seminario Internacional Filiación, Identidad, Restitución, 15 años de lucha de Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo,1992. Rodigou, Maite; Falú, Ana y Domínguez, Alejandra; “Construyendo ciudadanía”; ESSIP; Córdoba; Argentina; 1997. Phillips, Anne; “Género y Teoría democrática”; Universidad Autónoma de México; 1996. |
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