BULLETIN NO. 12

The Feminist Party on the Beach: 8th Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encounter

by
Francesca Gargallo

I always doubted that all that about the verbal violence in the Feminist Meeting in Chile was true. Today after seeing the militarized federal police invade the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), when some 900 students are in jail and some journalists say that now the university can go back to "normal", I doubt it even more. Violence will always exist where there is no dialogue. It doesn't matter what the motives are, or the forms where communication doesn't happen. Violence exists when people pretend to talk, when the possibilities of understanding are simply shut down, and when the contents of words are dispersed, people pretend that concepts have many and incomprehensible meanings, music silences the words and people end up not meeting at all.

Today, while the students who only wanted to show us that the neoliberal system is unfair with youth who lack resources in a world of money that is reproduced in a very few hands, I think that the 7th Latin-American and Caribbean Feminist Encounter held in Chile in 1996 was a lot less violent that the absolutely frivolous Eighth meeting, held in the Dominican Republic last November.

In Juan Dolio, we met in a beach resort with four and five star hotels and plenty of places for the neurons to "rest" and for us to lose weight dancing merengue (careful, two addictions of our times in which we women easily fall). Those of us women who met to rethink, recreate, reanimate our feminisms after all the strong, aggressive, desperate, tender dialogues, speeches, words, confrontations and ideas expressed in the poor Chilean beach resort of Cartagena, could not speak among ourselves. There was a brutal aggression against our communication, imposed and hidden by a supposed wellbeing. There were no serious plenary sessions because the organizers did not think about a space for us and limited themselves to renting rooms for two hours. There were technicians who signaled to each other to cut off the microphones because it was time for us to vacate the space. There were workshops where our words lost out in competition with the loud speakers of the aerobics session at the poolside. One-two-three-turn-around, and our ideas about a bisexualized world, our debates on the violence that is a kind of domestic violence that we use to put each other down, our position on the autonomy of the movement and its meanings in a world that some people (both men and women) want to see globalized and with one single voice…. all this disappeared in the noise of a mind-numbing tourism.

Of course, none of us ever felt attacked, as I felt in Chile, for the desperation of not being able to communicate in peace with our life companions) yes, that´s what other feminists are for me). We wandered however from hotel to hotel looking for meetings and workshops that didn't happen because nobody arrived on time, nobody knew where they would be held, noone was sure they had seen the posters announcing the workshops because the waiters had taken down our posters on the pretext that they made the place look ugly.

In Juan Dolio we did not meet each other because we didn't communicate, and thus we were aggressive with each other without even realizing it.

Two months ago I was sure that the Encuentro Dominican was so badly organized because the motive really was to demobilize us rather than organize a meeting. Libertarian women in dialogue with each other are dangerous for the system, dangerous for the economy of the bodies, for the politics of imposition of models, for the new distribution of power and the neocolonization of agricultural, intellectual and industrial production.

Today I am still more radical: in Juan Dolio we were aggressive with each other as never before: we simply didn't speak with each other.

True of course, some of us did communicate. The private space always exists when the public space escapes from our hands. But feminism was the first movement that revindicated its intrinsic unity. It is also true that friends separated by too expensive plane tickets and too low salaries, met in their party of bodies, wine (it was free to drink in the package tours "all paid for" in which we were included, and exchanges of products, kisses, affections and information.

I think the Encounter as such was reduced to the March held on Nov. 25, 1999, Latin American Day against violence against women. Nearly 1,000 feminists who went to the Dominican Republic met in the streets of a Santo Domingo that witnessed the murder (on Nov. 25, 1960) of the Mirabal sisters by the Trujillo dictatorship, while less than two kilometers away the presidents of the world in development were meeting. The nuns of a convent in America's most ancient Spanish city came out on their balconies to greet us. Speeches, music, desires and art, explanations of the racism behind many migrations, sisterhood with the women of Afghanistan, mothers telling how machismo is still killing their daughters through the domestic violence that is allowed to exist by the economy and the family structure, youths telling how they have freed themselves from the chains of marriage and family, all met so that the Plaza de España became the setting for a party. A party that took place instead of the Encounter.

Why was none of us able to convert the strange space of Juan Dolio into our own space through an act of rebellion and presence: a gesture of creation, a song, a minute of silence? The feminists from Haiti came close to reason, halfway through a plenary session, in a packed room, where women were reading reports from workshops (most were to do with corporal expression), and their reflections about new and old models of domination and the feminist movement as a social movement. The Haitian delegation, on their island, with their Afro Caribbean French and also in name of Caribbean English speakers, had to denounce that Latin American feminists continue without talking among ourselves, without the least effort to communicate, without questioning the language of the colony. They demanded that Spanish no longer be used as the vehicle of a linguistic dictatorship, and also denounced the other linguistic dictatorships: North American English and Sorbonne French.