A-Infos (en) France, OCL: FEMINISMS IN SPAIN -- The hegemony of the middle classes in the 2016-2020 cycle of feminist mobilizations (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

In Spain, would feminists have obtained much, through their strikes and 
mobilizations, from the Spanish State which would have been able to 
respond, like few other States in Europe, to their demands? ---- A 
text[1]from the Cantoneras Collective shows that the results of these 
struggles primarily benefited middle-class feminism which has been 
hegemonic in the mobilizations of recent decades. ---- We publish large 
extracts from this text written by class and transformation feminists 
(Madrid)[2]
"We consider that feminisms are plural, with positions and political 
projects carried by very diverse actors and responding to different or 
even antagonistic class interests. Class feminism implies that it is 
only within the framework of an anti-capitalist social transformation 
that the situation of women and the most materially and symbolically 
deprived people can be improved. And in this sense, in recent years, 
there has been no significant progress in the redistribution of income 
and property, in the de-commodification of living conditions, nor in the 
field of wage labor or social reproduction[3], one of the central 
elements of feminist demands.

2016-2020. The rise of feminist mobilizations
The extraordinary feminist emergence of recent years began in Poland at 
the end of 2016 (strike for abortion). Then, the murder of a young woman 
in Argentina mobilized thousands of people - demonstrations called by Ni 
Una Menos (Not One Less) (2015 and 2016) - against sexist violence and 
femicide. The fight for sexual and reproductive rights and the fight 
against violence against women and for sexual freedom define this wave 
of international mobilization.

On March 8, 2017, the first global feminist strike was launched (more 
than thirty countries participated), which had significant aftershocks 
in 2018-19. These massive and intergenerational mobilizations shook 
their respective societies on an unprecedented scale. The strike also 
helped generate a kind of "common feminist identity" or a common 
anti-sexist sentiment. It was important in transforming the cultural 
elements of the relationship between the genders, claiming rights that 
have yet to be won, and strengthening women's capacity for struggle and 
autonomy. It is worth mentioning the visibility of feminists in all 
cultural domains: an increase in the number of people in positions of 
power who claim to be feminists; numerous feminist debates in 
traditional media and the increased influence of feminist paradigms in 
struggles and practices of social transformation - Rojava being one of 
the most striking examples.
In Spain, as in regions of Latin America, during these mobilizations and 
strikes, feminisms have managed to "overcome" the sexual question, or at 
least not remain prisoners of victimization and a position of requesting 
protection from the State. They have been able to link the fight against 
sexist violence to other institutional violence, poverty, prison, 
work... Thus, they have made patriarchal violence appear not only as 
attacks by "men" against "women", but as a consequence of the 
relationship of structural domination that places feminized bodies[4]in 
a position of subordination on the scale of the whole society; just as 
they have made visible the impact of the sexual division of labor on the 
material conditions of life[5].

Subjective transformations brought about by these mobilizations have 
also produced material improvements: awareness of the increase in one's 
powers and capacities for struggle; social support thanks to feminisms; 
emancipatory change in daily gestures... However, these tools have, it 
seems, been useful mainly to women benefiting from privileged social 
conditions. For those in situations of economic, social and cultural 
precariousness, material change requires a much greater collective and 
structural approach. Individual empowerment is not enough.

Any sexual act without explicit consent is recognized as rape, since a 
"law of complete guarantee of sexual freedom" (nicknamed "only a yes is 
a yes"), a measure voted in August 2022, and still a minority in Europe.
Until then, the notion of violence or intimidation was necessary to 
qualify a rape. This question had been at the heart of the so-called 
"Meute" affair, the gang rape in 2016 of a young woman during the 
festivals in Pamplona (Navarre) by five men who had been sentenced in 
2018 to nine years in prison, not for rape but for "sexual abuse"; an 
offense and not a crime, which carries less severe sentences.
At the time of the trial, the sentence had mobilized tens of thousands 
of women across Spain, shouting "I believe you, my sister", to demand a 
strengthening of the penal code. Faced with these outraged reactions, 
the Spanish Supreme Court finally reclassified the facts as "gang rape" 
in June 2019 and increased the sentences to fifteen years in prison. The 
socialist government of Sánchez had promised to pass a law on explicit 
consent, as soon as it came to power in June 2018.

We see three main limits to the deployment of a transformative feminism
First limit:
The class question; the hegemony of the middle classes
Feminism in Spain presents itself as interclassist, masking the 
differences in interests between women; but within it there is a 
hegemony defined by the interests and agenda of middle-class women - as 
is the case in other movements.
However, a long tradition of feminisms demonstrates that gender 
subordinations cannot be fought outside of their constitution with class 
and race.
It is precisely because they suffer less oppression in the relations of 
production that bourgeois women consider gender subordination as their 
main problem. They seek equality with the men of their class and 
identify machismo as a limit to their social advancement, while 
generalizing their interests as if they were those of everyone. The 
result is the mystification of a homogenized subject "women", not exempt 
from biological essentialism.

If we analyze the measures and political content that most occupy the 
media and social space, we see that what are considered the main 
feminist achievements of this 2018-20 cycle have focused on the concerns 
of middle and upper class women. Two of the central elements have been 
the issues of representativeness and the glass ceiling, that is, what 
aims to facilitate the equality of the best placed women socially with 
the men of their class, instead of favoring a distribution of wealth 
capable of improving the living conditions of the most precarious women: 
thus, for example, as a flagship measure in the paradigm of positive 
discrimination, the PSOE (socialist) bill on parity, which establishes 
quotas for women in boards of directors, professional associations, 
governments and electoral lists.

Other measures such as sick leave for painful periods or the extension 
of parental leave, while they may be interesting and useful, only 
benefit women with stable and guaranteed employment contracts, and those 
whose sexual-affective relationships are regulated by the family order 
and legally recognized. For many of them, the main problem is not the 
inequality that exists with men of their class, but exploitation, racism 
or existential precariousness.

Certainly, there have been some advances such as the extension of 
parental leave for men, the approval of new authorisations to care for 
minors or dependents and slight improvements to the law on 
dependency[6]. However, the generalisation and free provision of nursery 
schools, access to housing, the improvement of working conditions in 
feminised professions have been forgotten by hegemonic feminism. If the 
emphasis has been placed on sick leave due to painful periods, the 
recognition of the many occupational diseases specific to these sectors 
would be essential.

The defense of the interests of middle-class feminism
In recent decades, the presence of educated women in intermediate and 
high positions in professional hierarchies has increased 
uninterruptedly. This social composition of middle- and upper-class 
women places their priorities at the center of the feminist agenda.
However, this fight for gender equality does not change the lives of the 
majority of women, especially those who do not have the possibility of 
considering a professional career. Furthermore, the fact that there are 
more women in the highest positions has no impact on the structural 
changes necessary to improve the material living conditions of 
working-class women. Nor does it have an impact on reducing the 
inequalities generated by the sexual division of labor: women leave the 
home for their profession, leaving their place to other women. From the 
perspective of a class or transformation feminism, the power needed to 
change things is not on the side of the command - capitalist or state - 
but in the construction of a proper capacity that allows us to fight 
against the production and reproduction of inequalities.
In this sense, hegemonic feminism not only instrumentalizes the 
representation of mobilizations in favor of its own interests, but also 
makes invisible, or even blocks, the conflicts led by other women.

The pacification of the care crisis
The government has responded to another of the demands of hegemonic 
feminism with a policy of "family conciliation"; it has set up an 
allowance aimed at making it less expensive for employers to hire 
domestic workers, often of foreign origin[7]. Through public money, the 
"liberation" of middle-class women who do not want to substantially 
change their family balance and their consumption standards is done at 
the expense of others who are exploited in the tasks of social reproduction.
From the point of view of a class feminism, we must ask ourselves how 
to fight for the socialization of reproductive tasks - and their 
de-feminization - while fighting against the sexual and international 
division of labor.

Second limit:
the centrality of sexual violence and the punitive drift
The cycle of feminist mobilizations 2018-20 was partly driven by the 
denunciation of violence against feminized bodies and especially those 
of a sexual nature. The debates on the issue as well as the cultural 
change that resulted from them constitute perhaps the greatest success 
of these struggles. However, their legislative translation, based on the 
feeling of concern aroused by the media, had as its most obvious 
consequence a punitive-repressive drift: in the social imagination, it 
ended up being established that criminal prosecution and prison can be 
solutions to attacks, even the most minor, and that punishment is the 
best way to protect women.

Thus, although the debate on consent and its meaning was fundamental to 
cultural change, as soon as it was brought to the field of criminal law, 
the repressive police and judicial system emerged strengthened in the 
name of the fight against sexist violence and feminism. Thus
each reform in this penal field systematically hardens the responses and 
brings them dangerously close to the exceptional measures applied to 
terrorist crimes. The penalties for sexual offenses are already very 
harsh, much higher than in neighboring countries. Thus, for example, the 
same sentence (15 years) can be handed down for homicide and for rape. 
However, more imprisonment does not serve to prevent crimes, because 
their main function is to punish, and in particular to punish the poor.

From a class feminist perspective, we should question the increases in 
sentences that occur in our name and the approval of laws that go 
against our goals. We should also ask ourselves whether it makes sense 
to highlight sexual violence over other violence (evictions from 
housing; authoritarian placement of children because they do not have a 
home...), or why access to so-called universal rights should be 
conditioned on being categorized as a victim first.

Punitivism is linked to middle-class feminism in its way of conceiving 
and legitimizing the state and its repressive apparatuses. Yet it is 
easier for governments to offer penal reform as a solution than to 
intervene on the causes of behaviors classified as criminal, inseparable 
from the economic, political and social factors that generate inequalities.

We know that sexual violence has the function of subjecting women to 
established roles. In this sense, a feminism that places this issue 
alone at the center - as important as it is to fight against all 
manifestations of this violence - and that forgets economic inequalities 
or other violence that results from it, will never be an emancipatory 
feminism. Many women do not expect protection from the police or 
reparation in the courts for the patriarchal violence they suffer. In 
fact, for many of them, this same State is the main source of violence 
they are victims of.

This representation of sexual violence as the greatest violence 
experienced by women - as a whole - is also linked to the social 
extension of homogenized and polarized female/male identities and their 
correlative roles of victims/aggressors, which naturalizes the cultural 
construction of gender positions, transforming patriarchal hierarchies 
into a problem of interpersonal relations.

Class feminism should support actions for the abolition of prisons, 
taking into account that they disproportionately imprison racialized and 
poor men, and that they seriously harm women in their family and 
community environment. The penal system is still detrimental to those at 
the bottom. In fact, there is a grassroots feminism in Spain that has 
been working on an anti-punitive line for years; but there is still a 
long way to go to imagine and build other logics, to manage to introduce 
into the public debate issues such as feminist justice - transformative 
or restorative[8]- and how to avoid strengthening the penal system in 
the name of feminism.

Third limit:
a new wave of institutionalization of feminisms
Institutionalization is the process of integrating people and the 
demands of social movements into governmental institutions, as well as 
the instrumentalization of these movements to legitimize governments, 
leaders or policies of all kinds. Institutionalization also includes the 
assumption, by grassroots movements or organizations, of the 
institutional - and media - agenda as well as the state and legislative 
sphere as privileged spaces towards which they end up directing their 
efforts.

During the last legislature (2019-2023), we have seen how the 
"progressive government" has relied on feminism to legitimize its 
policies, claiming to be "the most feminist government in history", 
making extensive use of feminist rhetoric and highlighting the large 
number of women ministers[9]. There have been many partisan conflicts 
between the PSOE and Podemos to gain political capital from feminist 
mobilizations. Furthermore, the attacks launched by the far-right party 
Vox have polarized the political spectrum and made it very difficult to 
articulate a discourse of its own, outside of institutional politics. 
Hence the abandonment of the field of criticism against the government 
"in order not to give weapons to the enemy".

Feminist movements have thus been trapped in state demands and in the 
production of laws, to the point of considering this approach as the 
primary or almost unique form of social transformation and possible 
action; this instead of worrying about the capacity to organize and 
generate conflicts that allow conquests thanks to the strength of 
mobilization, as in 2018-19. This inability has ended up leading to a 
withdrawal into institutional times, into scheduled events (March 8, ...).
The identification of the government with feminism and the 
identification of feminist movements with the government agenda have 
allowed their discourses to be recuperated and thus their sense of 
protest and their political power to disappear.

To continue the debate
We advocate a "class" feminism, that is, anti-capitalist, universalist, 
a feminism of and by those below and that questions the entire social 
organization. For example, we do not want quotas in the boards of 
directors, but rather to put an end to radical differences in wages and 
working conditions, and, ultimately, to abolish wage labor and private 
property. Only from a "situated feminism" in concrete conflicts - in 
social unionism, in housing struggles, in business struggles, etc. - can 
we preserve our autonomy as a movement, stop working for hegemonic 
feminism and adopt our own agenda; this in order to build, from the 
position of subordination of women, an emancipatory proposal associated 
with a project of universal scope that can also make our struggle stronger.

Kris,
for the translation and selection of excerpts,
May 16, 2024

Notes
[1]The hegemony of the media class in the ultimate feminist cycle

[2]This text is written from Madrid and therefore cannot and does not 
claim to reflect the different processes of institutionalization of 
feminist movements that may occur in different parts of the State, nor 
the processes of resistance of popular movements.

[3]By social reproduction we refer to unpaid work and the significant 
improvement and strengthening of public services capable of socializing 
these tasks.

[4]We consider that the feminine position in the gender order can be 
occupied by both cis and trans women, and sometimes also by certain 
expressions of sexual dissidence.

[5]Care strikes and gendered organization of social reproduction; 
workers' strikes and feminization of precariousness, glass ceilings; 
consumer strikes and commodification of ever more spheres of life; 
strikes in education for a public, secular and non-heteronormative school

[6]Regarding government measures, we would like to highlight some 
advances such as the Gender Self-Determination Law or the Trans Law or 
the new Abortion Law which includes improvements in sexual and 
reproductive health, such as reducing the age to 16 to decide to have an 
abortion.

[7]An example: the Community of Madrid has approved direct aid of up to 
4,000 euros to cover the labor costs of domestic workers.

[8]Restorative justice is a form of conflict resolution based on 
dialogue, agreement and reparation for the harm caused. Beyond that, it 
seeks to target the conditions (material and symbolic, cultural, social, 
political, economic, etc.) that made violence possible, in order to 
transform them.

[9]Among these women ministers, Irene Montero, in the Ministry of 
Equality, one of the leaders of Podemos, which, despite presenting 
itself as the great party of protest against the two-party system, 
joined the first coalition government with the PSOE (2020-2023)

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4227
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