He was born in 1975 at the Tucumán Maternity Hospital, where his mother was taken to give birth from the Police Headquarters, a clandestine detention center, one of the hundreds set up by the Argentine dictatorship. Then they both returned to that center and Carolina Meloni spent the first year and a half of her life with the sons and daughters of the inmates of the prisons through which her mother was transferred. Although she has no memories of her own, she told him how all the decisions came through assembly, after discussion and debate. She now believes that, perhaps, much of her thinking about a common cause of feminism has to do with having spent the first year of her life in prison, political and common wards. She also with her exiles, two, both to Spain: when her mother was freed, and another in the early nineties, in the first great neoliberal crisis after the dictatorship. They did not return from the second. That is why this philosopher does not have a Tucumán accent and she speaks of being a “hybrid subject.” Her thinking is also: there are no black and whites, no dichotomies, and no generalization possible in a conversation with her.
In this moment of political and social polarization—almost extreme at times and which has also affected feminism—, the theoretical framework of this specialist in contemporary politics, feminism and gender from philosophy is a kind of calm room where anyone is allowed to pass. if it is leaving the door open for whoever comes behind. Her latest book, from 2021, was titled Border feminisms. Mestizas, abjects and bitches (Kaotica), a journey through the last century to analyze the present; in Critical encyclopedia of the genre (Arpa, 2023), a mastodon with more than 50 authors that reviews the current configuration of the genre, she coordinates the chapter of Sexualities. She wants to start by “fine-tuning” the word “feminism.”
Ask. Because not doing so, he has said before, is a “broad brush.”
Answer. Yes, a distinction must be made between a European, academic feminism, and intersectional feminisms, of grassroots social movements that are taking place, for example, in Latin America. Without them we would not be able to understand many of the realities. I think of Argentina, of Milei, that whole reaction of an ultra-conservative wave, connected precisely with the anti-systemic, anti-capitalist and ecological struggle of community feminisms.
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Q. Are they the most connected to the street?
R. Fully. It is what [la psicóloga y activista] María Galindo calls intuitive feminism, a brutal concept, outside of academia and books. And then there is feminism with capital letters, which may be that which we unfortunately reproduce, which we can call white, European and hegemonic and which is losing contact with reality, that pulse with the social and political struggles, which are outside that very sphere. closed that sometimes the academy is.
Q. Do you think that feminism, the white, European and hegemonic one, has failed to put theory into practice?
R. I always remember bell hooks and its pedagogy. In Feminism is for everyone makes a brutal criticism of the academics, writers or feminist activists themselves about how they had remained locked in a jargon that was not understandable for many people who, for example, come from social struggles. Knowledge is also built there, outside of that entire area of epistemic monopoly that is the academy, and which turns it around a thousand times.
“We have to carry out a process of democratization of feminist knowledge”
Q. You teach at the University of Alcalá, but you have done so at the University of Zaragoza, at the Blaise Pascal in France or at the University of Buenos Aires. Do you see that gap there too?
R. It is present. For example, it is said that to read Judith Butler you must have first read 30 philosophers. And not everyone has those tools. We have to carry out a process, as pointed out in the Women Creating feminist movement, in Bolivia, of democratization of feminist knowledge. The academy has to open to the street and the street has to take over the academy. We do not have to be afraid of theory, we have to reappropriate it. It is closely related to a specific way of thinking and writing, very masculine, very phallic. We must think that knowledge is not a male heritage, we must depatriarchize knowledge, language, theory and our own struggles.
Q. Gabriela Wiener, who wrote the epilogue in Border feminismsCan she be an example of a translator of theory into language understandable to anyone?
R. Totally, she shows how to weave critical journalism and literature, poetry, migration wounds, anti-racist theory. With much. We owe a large part of that work to all these mestizo and Chicana authors, the first who began to lower that theory into our guts, into our bodies.
Q. That which has sometimes become a criticism and has been pejoratively called women’s literature?
R. Quite simple and machirula, the criticism. Let’s talk about the personal, what author hasn’t done it? What does Freud do in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which is a whole theory about the death drive, mourning? Well, his daughter just died. We feminists are accused of doing embodied theory, as if not everything were embodied. Everything is situated, as Donna Haraway tells us [la autora expuso en Ciencia, cyborgs y mujeres. La reinvención de la naturaleza, de 1991, que cualquier cuestión no está aislada de su contexto ni de la subjetividad de quien la hace]. The personal is political, and it is radical: there is no writing that is not crossed by our social condition, class, gender, everything.
Q. This criticism of feminism is common from certain male spaces, but for some time now there have been other clashes within feminism. Sometimes even not constructive but verbally violent, mostly because of the trans issue.
R. I can’t stop thinking about that. I have always defended that one of the riches of the feminist movement is precisely its heterogeneity and antagonism. But we had not experienced this level of violence and we are bringing it into the very house of feminism. It’s paradoxical.
“How is it possible that we return to ultrabiological logic in which women are only defined by biological issues?”
Q. Why do you think it happens?
R. One of my theories is that a certain feminism has had a hegemony of discourse, of subject, of class and of origin. Spain has experienced a process of porosity in its brutal society and that feminism no longer holds hegemony. The subject of feminism has been opened to the point that there are numerous: racialized, migrant, trans, voices so multiple and different that they have generated this polarization and violence. Can the subaltern speak? Spivak wondered. [la filósofa india Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak]. Well it seems not. And when she speaks, the hegemonic ear does not want to listen to her. Feminism, like any inclusive, systemic political movement, is not exempt from being engulfed by power and the logic of power.
Q. And now?
R. Here we are, talking about almost 50 years of struggles that feminism has gone through so that now people put their hands on their heads. But reality is much richer than theory.
Q. Will reality pass him by?
R. It is doing. How can we be returning to ultrabiological logic in which being a woman is defined exclusively by biological issues?
Q. Both feminists and right-wing and far-right politicians do it.
R. It is something that we should think about a lot: these alliances of feminism with absolutely conservative forces are antagonistic to feminism itself.
Q. Imagine that you have a blank sheet of paper to plan a route from now on, what would it be?
R. With maps. An author that I really like and who has helped me think is María Lugones, an Argentine philosopher who talks about maps. She says that it can be the strongest exercise of power, because it draws borders, dichotomies, establishes where the north is, the south, where each one is. And that forces you to analyze your own privileges. She says “let’s think about epistemologies more of intersection than of fragmentation,” because there is a series of dualisms that have been creeping into us since the beginnings of Western thought: north, south, good, bad, white, black. Let’s make a map in which those dualisms, those peripheries do not exist.
Q.Do you have something in mind?
R.The word warp, a tight, intricate network, a variegated weave. Less maps, less hierarchies. More warps.
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