Bodies, Owned.

reflections on gender-based violence.

Picture from here

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I stand in front of the mirror naked after I read about another woman killed, about another war started where women’s bodies have become channels of war crimes, another abortion law overturned. I stand in front of the mirror and acknowledge that even though my body is safe today, it might not be tomorrow. I get sad at how much violence sits silently inside the bodies of our mothers, and grandmothers, whose world shamed them into silence. But now that we can speak, we must.

How many bodies have to be buried before we understand that it is our very culture that legitimises gender-based violence?

My friend sent me a voice note the other day after I posted about Giulia Cecchettin, an Italian woman who was killed by her ex-boyfriend in Italy. “It gave me crazy dreams, there’s something about femicide which just hits a spot in the subconscious”. Our fear is ancestral and when another body is violated, something deep inside us is activated.

The question is always: why do they do it? And although many look in false crevices for answers, the answer is actually very simple: men kill because they can. Not because they weren’t properly educated, not because they have daddy or mummy issues, not because they are monsters. They abuse, rape, stalk, and kill because this society has legitimised them to do so for centuries. Femicide is an exercise of power, it is not the act of a monster. The same is true for transphobic, homophobic, and racist acts. I’m tired of being angry. But this rage is righteous, it is activating, it is a force that propels me to make art, do rituals, and be in community.

In the news, our bodies become things to be dissected: “stabbed then thrown in a ditch” (Giulia) “impaled”(Lucia) “burned” (Ryma). Media searches for reasons: how did she make him jealous? was she drunk? what time was it? And then, then there are the ones who overturn laws with a signature whose hands are dirty with blood. That hand, signing the legislation, is so far removed from the bodies of all those who will suffer the consequences of that action. The woman’s body is a political tool.

Gender-based violence is an epidemic that is centuries old. It has no colour, class, or race; it is psychological, physical and sexual. The power dynamics that put one sex, race, class on top of another are at the root of this systemic issue. I don’t say this lightly, but I am trying to come to grips with yet another murder, that presses on an ancestral wound hidden in my body. I ask myself: who owns our bodies? It feels that everyone has ownership over a woman’s body, except themselves.

The demands against gender-based violence are usually legitimate but inadequate. We try to find solutions but fail to recognise the rhizomatic nature of the issue. As the Feminist Manifesto Feminism for the 99% says, “The most widespread response is to demand criminalization and punishment”, but what needs to be called into question is “the mistaken assumption that the laws, police, and courts maintain sufficient autonomy from the capitalist power structure to counter its deep-seated tendency to generate gender violence”

Genocide, femicide, and ecocide all happen because of perpetuated power dynamics under oppressive, sexist, racist, and ableist systems. “One form of violence cannot be stopped without stopping the others. Feminists for the 99% aim to connect the struggle against gender violence, to the fight against all forms of violence in capitalist society- and against the social system that undergirds them”.

To end gender-based violence, we must get uncomfortable, we must give up certain privileges and understand our deeply entangled existence. In darkness and in light, our destinies are intertwined. To fight in isolation is to not fight at all.

This weekend, thousands of people will march the streets demanding an end to gender-based violence, raising our voice is important, but the work continues outside the rallies too.

Systemic issues are often not recognised because they feel extremely overwhelming to tackle. But we must look into the cracks, we must find the small revolutions that count as much as the big ones, we must inject our culture with knowledge and beauty and art. We must feel our bodies, the vessel and the blueprint. The 25th of November is the International Day against Gender-based Violence. If you are able, go and scream in the streets, if you are not, your voice can sing a million different songs and will still be heard.

I honestly didn’t know if I should write this piece, I didn’t want to be the “feminist party pooper” (as I have been called before) that talks about “heavy” things. But then I thought that there are people who suffer the consequences of our silences, and so I wrote it.

As every week, I am leaving you some recommendations to dig deeper into the topic, this newsletter aims to be a house to access knowledge around revolutionary topics, in whichever form resonates for you. These are mostly for paid subscribers as they require a lot of hours of research.

There is currently an offer for paid subscriptions so you can access all content on this platform.

If you want to have more detailed recs you can go to the Summer Forest of Knowledge or the Autumn Forest of Knowledge.

This text by Ginevra Lamberti:

“Femicide is a crime intertwined with violence perpetrated on any subjectivity perceived as inferior or weak. It is the extreme exercise of power that clarifies the hierarchical structure of a world in which no one must ever forget who is in charge.

Femicide is the plastic proof that gender violence is not a rapture, but a tool to discipline. Women who do not conform to the role of ownership are disciplined as well as women who conform. The focus is not on the satisfaction of the task required of the victim but on the exercise of power over the victim. The exercise of power is absolute since the victim is stuff, possession, a depersonalised object.

And if a man can consider a woman his property, then we must accept that the long and belated journey towards fairness that in Italy has seen the repeal of the offence of simple adultery and adulterous relationship (1968, 1969), the reform of family law (1975) the repeal of the crime of honour and reparatory marriage (1981), the enactment of rape as a crime against the person rather than against public morality and decency (1996), the introduction of the crime of stalking (2009) is not only defective but has largely failed.

Outside the territory of the law, which alone cannot change the whole body of a system, being a limb of it, the culture of the country requires women to live in a regime of constant threat. Therefore it is necessary to work on the culture of the country. On the transmission of knowledge that dismantles the nightmare we inhabit. That deconstructs the gender hierarchy and restores a sense of existence and mortality to others. I really don't know if we will be able to do this.”

This podcast with Fariha Roisin

Embodied Exploration:

A dancer once told me “[Dance] is also the language of healing, it is also the language of expressing, the language of telling a story” (Kapila from Natanda Dance Centre in Colombo, Sri Lanka).

Reclaiming the body is reclaiming the story around it. As an embodied exploration, I am inviting you to dance however you are able to (even simply with your mind). Put on this song, and move your vessel of life, dance for those who are not alive, move that ancestral wound that lives in so many bodies and give it some tenderness.

The full playlist in the audio can be found here.