What to do with the victims? Women, it is a fact, often suffer violence at the hands of men, and feminism has spent decades questioning the pre-victim status that women acquire by the mere fact of being born. Amanda Mauri (Barcelona, ??1995), researcher in Gender Studies, had also participated in these debates, while studying in Liverpool and London and moving between the Academy and activism. But when he considered writing his first essay, Museum of the Absentees (Paidós), about the political uses of mourning, he realized that he could also speak from another place, that of the victim who literally escaped his death.
When he was a teenager, on a high school trip to the Greek island of Naxos, he encountered a large group of young men armed with a baseball bat from which he managed to escape. As she fled, she heard clearly in her head the voices of women who would refer to her in the past tense, talking about her to her mother (“poor thing, poor thing”). “If she had died in Naxos, suspicion would seep into the lamentations for my absence, a shadow of admonishment – ??“what was she doing there?, what was she thinking?, How did she come to her mind?” Didn’t she know what world we live in? – But she would cry anyway. She would be susceptible to turning me into a good victim, worthy of mourning.” In the book, she talks about the fascination with young dead women, the interesting practices that art has made with that undeniable obsession, and her idea of ??reformulating feminism so that it does not only serve to talk about “women’s things.” .
The book starts with that traumatic memory…
I had no intention of writing about that. It was something that had been very hidden in previous years. At times it hit me, but not so much the conscious memory but rather a very physical response, I knew I had something there that I had left unresolved. I had never thought about relating the dead women of theory and my literary production with memory. In a conversation with my mother [the writer and journalist Emma Riverola], who is very important in the book, she told me: what if you talked about this? My first reaction was: who cares?
Did it feel bad for you to appropriate that pain, because you didn’t suffer any aggression?
Of course, I thought: “with all the misfortunes that happen, and the people who write about these misfortunes…”. My mother always throws bombs at me and leaves them there. Little by little, I became clear that what I was interested in explaining about violence and grief was the process I had done to overcome that. And what interested me about my experience is that nothing happened, but I knew exactly what was going to happen. Although I had never encountered anything like this, I felt like I was in a familiar situation.
Because all women have internalized that horror story?
That was the conclusion. Then I was 18 years old, I had not started reading feminist theory, I had no training to give words to what was happening to me, but I had an instant recognition of the inheritance of fear, of knowing oneself vulnerable to violence. Knowing that somehow, even if we don’t die, women are already a little dead. We are ghosts.
While I was running, I heard that “poor thing.”
What struck me most about the situation was the hallucination of what is happening. My body knew how to react in a very animalistic way, with a mobility unrelated to consciousness, as if it were thinking “my body is taking me out of here,” and what impacted me the most was thinking about the pain that my absence would cause my mother. I heard those women’s voices, not as a fabulation. They were there, I remember imagining them pointing. That made me get out of there. From here that gave me the basis to theorize, that even if things don’t happen, in some way they have happened. We have already digested death. I want to explore what to do with this fear. When a social struggle is built between life and death, mourning is always present, mourning for all the women who have been murdered is a political necessity. It seemed to me that this experience could be useful. The book has helped me to fix things, but above all I have served the book.
A ‘leitmotif’ of the essay is the striped shorts he was wearing that day. The clothes women wear on the day they are murdered often become iconic, the media becomes obsessed with it. I thought about Diana Quer’s pink shorts, which she talked about again and again when she disappeared.
Or the torn blouse of Sarah Ann Otten, the University of Iowa student who used the artist Ana Mendieta for her work Rape Scene. The newspapers had a lot of emphasis on that, giving morbid clues. They have an erotic point, as if giving more weight to the sexual part of the violence. I thought a lot about my striped shorts because they were childish. That was a journey of transition, from girl to adult. I imagined myself on that shoulder and thought: what were you doing there alone?, and I thought about my legs coming out of my shorts.
Just a week ago the Carlos Vermut case broke out. Almost unanimous support has been extended to the victims but we have heard again: why didn’t they report it? Why didn’t they speak then? Also: why did any of them sleep with him again? Has the discourse around victims of sexual violence evolved?
It’s as if there were a whole range of excuses, of buts that we resort to. The insistence is suspicious. In the case of Carlos Vermut, it must be taken into account that sexual violence operates on several levels. It may not be true, but that doesn’t matter now. We will have to support the victims, avoid lynching him, etc., but there is a collective dimension. Ana Mendieta fell to her death from 30 floors, with every indication that her husband, Carl Andre, was guilty. In the end they declared him innocent. Do we know what happened? No, he was found innocent. The fact that things happen systematically already gives a narrative. At the level of social reparation, which is a space that still has to be worked on. We need calm and not using the victims as a throwing weapon, for tension and the pouring of hatred, and not turning them into passive entities. The aggressor is not the center of the matter. We have to ask ourselves what responses we give to the testimonies that arise and why many did not report them to justice. I think there has been a social evolution in that, many people no longer make the parallel “no complaint equals no truth.”
You write: “I fear that writing about dead women will kill us even more.”
I ask myself this question, yes, if writing about dead women is solidifying the stereotype of the dead woman, of the ghost woman. After writing the book, I’m not so wary of writing about fear and death. I have learned to reconcile with both things, with fear and with death.
It talks about rape fantasies, which many women have. She says you don’t have to fight them, but you do have to ask yourself where they come from.
Now there is a derivative of wanting to solve everything, of wanting to have a yes or no on many issues that cannot be resolved. With rape fantasies we have to ask ourselves where they come from and see if we come to the conclusion that they come from having been regurgitating a series of very violent and coercive norms for women…
…or from the porn imaginary
Also. But that doesn’t mean we say “okay, I can’t have them.” Fantasy may have a patriarchal origin but it does not mean that I, as a body that inhabits that fantasy, cannot be used for other things. The self that fantasizes is the author, it is victim and executioner at the same time. Mona Chollet says a very interesting thing in her book How Patriarchy Boycotts Heterosexual Relationships: how we can have more imagination and not stick to preconceived stereotypes. She says maybe sometimes we need to become “pretty little pigs who roll happily in the mud of male domination, because it’s too exhausting to keep trying to avoid the splashes all the time.” That changes the imagination a lot, you go from being a beautiful white being to a slutty pig that gets splashed. If she is having a good time, she breaks the stereotype of patriarchal oppression.
Since you’re talking about it, is heterosexuality hopeless? We live in the era of heteropessimism and the gap is growing.
I am in a moment of finding a lot of light within pessimism. It is one thing to have a male partner and be a woman and another to live in a mold of a recalcitrant and toxic heterosexuality that is not questioned. Yes, there is a reflection in the book about what type of relationships I have had, both good and bad. Within the pessimism and disenchantment, I am now in a relationship with a man in which we are very good and these questions of the boundaries of violence or fear are part of the conversation. There is pessimism but there is hope.
What do you miss in generalist feminist discourse?
I think feminism can benefit from a certain irony. There is a lack of hooliganism in the social perception of feminism. Feminism is very thuggish. There is a feminism that sells poorly, that is not marketable, and that is the most interesting. I have gotten a lot of fun out of feminism. It is important to know how to laugh at ourselves, laugh at the pain in order to continue with the question. In the end you can get angry with someone and do a lot of teaching and explain to them why what they said is stupid or you can laugh at them making a joke and with that you break the bubble of masculinity.
Researcher Nerea Barjola has written very eloquently about how some victims serve as a cautionary tale. For example, those of Alcàsser were for an entire generation. Who are his victims? What crimes marked him?
I remember Marta del Castillo a lot. It is a name that is even difficult for me to pronounce. I was little when her disappearance happened, but the process lasted years. It is mixed with child abductions, like that of Madeleine McCann. It was part of the same diffuse fear. As a child I wasn’t exposed to this type of reality as much, partly because I think my parents wanted to make a lot of effort to try to raise us in a utopia in which this didn’t happen. But they came to me in silence, from conversations between adults. It doesn’t seem like it’s part of your life, because you’re growing up with the refrain of “boys and girls are already equal,” but as a teenager I began to create this archive, for example with the femicides in Ciudad Juárez. That marked me a lot, these chain murders in mass production.
Where do you stand in the debate about consent?
It is a very complicated issue and we would make a mistake if we wanted to establish an immovable position. Here the first dissociation arises, between law and morality. Laws do not allow ambiguity and cannot be the tool with which society is changed, they have to respond to social demands. You cannot change a paradigm starting with the law and that has perhaps been one of the errors of the Law of Yes is Yes, this idea that the law would change everything. I like what Clara Serra [author of the book The Sense of Consent, Anagrama] says about the ambiguity and the paradigm of “no means no” versus “yes means yes”, that women do not collapse into the identity of the victim, to be condemned to suffer violent relationships.
I think that on a social level is where we lack conversation and questions. Both in punitivist anti-sex feminism, which sees sex as something inherently violent, and in feminist derivatives that see sex as something positive and women’s sex as something pure. Both make the mistake of including sex in morality and seeing it as a goal for good or evil. Just in the context of my life, I have already seen a brutal evolution since I started having sex until now. I see many teenagers who consider having sexual relations and who do so with a desire for dialogue. In the paradigm of sexual violence there is a lot of misunderstanding and there is a lot of female performance, due to the education that women have received to suffer and remain silent, and the male performance of saying: “I have to do it, I don’t know if I like it, but I do it.” I have to do”. Let’s assume that neither of us understands, and through dialogue and exploration we can reach brutal and groundbreaking places. When Carlos Vermut talks about rough sex it means that he has not understood anything, where is the dialogue that makes something morbid, if you are subduing someone who does not have any type of power? Where is the game? I think there is a lot of sexual pedagogy missing. This is not about advocating for boring vanilla sex. Nobody gets hurt there, but where’s the fun?
Do you think we are experiencing a moment of anti-feminist reaction?
I think there is a great ultra, far-right, anti-democratic, anti-feminist reaction. Judith Butler talks about this, not so much as a reaction to advances in legislation and civil rights, but as a project of restoration of the past, in which the white man had all the privileges. It’s all more complicated than thinking: “men feel threatened and need to have the upper hand again.” It responds to a feeling of loss, fear and uncertainty. Also the loss, depending on the context, can be a breeding ground for nostalgia that feeds this ultra reaction. These speeches that speak to them of a better past in which they had power, and give them a community, are very seductive to them. Neoliberalism has a lot to do with this ultra reaction, it is a breeding ground for loneliness and disengagement, uncertainty and fear.
Furthermore, as a generation, we see ourselves plummeting, knowing that we will not perpetuate this bonanza. Having to deal with a past that looks very dark is very scary. And that creates individuals who are cannons for the ultra discourses that recruit them. But it depends a lot on the body you have and the precariousness you inhabit. For women and queer people it is easier for it to come together as a collective movement, like when many women march alone on 8M and occupy the street, a place that can sometimes be scary. And on the other hand, for other people, white men above all, who can buy the discourse of victimization, these discourses can penetrate. But it is important to disentangle feminism from the place where the mainstream puts it, which says: it is okay, but only to talk about women’s things. Feminism can offer a response to major crises, it is a unifying basis for alliances.
