For International Women’s Day, artist-activist Ana Tijoux published a powerful opinion piece on Chile’s Radio Villa Francia, calling for a reclaiming and re-empowerment of feminism, one that incorporates its inextricable connection to anti-capitalism and anti-racism. In the essay, Tijoux, whose parents were jailed and later fled Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship, recounts the struggles of women she’s met in her travels around the world. Check out these key quotes translated in English:
The speed of the market not only seems to consume the essence of humanity… but also provokes the tremendous barbarism of a genocide perpetuated for centuries against women…
I have the privilege of traveling for my work and observe, listen, collaborate…however, there is no trip where gender violence does not challenge my conscience, from [Mexican] forensic anthropologists who carry out the meticulous work to identify the bones of thousands of murdered women, to the daughter of Berta Cáceres, cruelly assassinated in Honduras, whom I met during a trip to Spain while she was interviewing the multinational companies guilty of murdering her mother, or hearing the story of Rut, an Ecuadorian companion, whose 11-year-old daughter was brutally raped and murdered at her school, and reading the stories of the comrades killed in Wallmapu, Macarena Valdés, hanging by an apparent suicide, while fighting against a hydroelectric plant to be installed in Tranguil, Panguipulli.
And the key question is: When do we talk about feminism? Because this cannot be subject to a frivolous model that only seeks to remove the essence of its strength, making t-shirts for chain stores because this fight is much bigger…
We cannot think of a feminism, an antipatriarchy, without an anti-capitalism, without an antifascism, without an anti-racism and without a class struggle, all these struggles, are one struggle and require a historical political push… We are tasked with re-empowering the concept of feminism…
Because feminism is liberation, and therefore we must free ourselves from the oppression of capital, because another feminism is not a slogan, it is daily action, simple but strong, it is transformation, it is community, it is freedom.
