Not One Less

Mourning, Disobedience and Desire

Maria Pia Lopez, Frances Riddle

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781509531929, 9781509531912
• eBook ISBN: 9781509531943
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

On June 3, 2015, massive women's street demonstrations took place in many cities across Argentina to protest against femicide. Under the slogan Ni una menos, Not One (Woman) Less, thousands of women took to the streets to express their outrage at systematic violence against women, giving a face and a voice to women who might otherwise have died in silence. Maria Pia López, a founding member and active participant in the Not One Less protest, offers in this book a first-hand account of the distinctive aesthetics, characteristics and lineages of this popular feminist movement, while examining the broader issues of gender politics and violence, inequality and social justice, mourning, performance and protest that are relevant to all contemporary societies. A unique analysis of a social movement as well as a rich and original work of feminist theory and practice, this book will appeal to a wide readership concerned about gender based violence in the neoliberal contexts and what can be done to resist it.

1
Mourning: All Victims Count

I’m not the woman in the bag. That’s why I’m here, standing before you, reading this text and breathing in all our pain, our struggle and our hope.

Marta Dillon and Virginia Cano

I don’t want to leave her alone. I want my book to be phosphorescence, the trail of sequins and laughter she left in the air one summer afternoon, a wake of words that express her grace and her elegance, as well as her spelling mistakes, her defenselessness and her tragedy, as well as her Facebook selfies and her karaoke nights at Le Girafon.

Iván Jablonka

The body as rubbish

On 25 August 2014, Melina Romero was found in a rubbish bag, murdered. The country’s largest newspaper called her “a party girl who dropped out of high school.” A year earlier, on 10 June 2013, the body of Ángeles Rawson was discovered in a black bag. On 28 December 2014 Lola Chomnalez was murdered in Valizas, where she’d gone on holiday. Daiana García was nineteen and was forcibly disappeared on her way to a job interview. Her half-naked body was found in a rubbish bag on 16 March 2015. A group of activists carried out a street performance to raise awareness of the string of murders. Some writers and journalists held a reading marathon in the Argentine National Library’s Museum of the Book and Language.

The feminist writer María Moreno wrote a kind of manifesto, which said:

we are all the woman in the bag, and we are coming out of it so that there will be not one less. … And the rubbish? Taking it out implies banishing from the home the leftovers of productive life. When rubbish bags first appeared, the object shifted from the space that feminism called invisible work to part of the building supervisor’s work equipment; the murderer’s toolkit today includes the rubbish bag and the dumpster, the sewer and the manhole, where practicality reveals a semiotic horror: women are rubbish.¹

The reaping has not stopped: the lives of young women are repeatedly harvested, from diverse social classes, and converted into sacrificial victims. The hands of the murderers say that the bodies of women and travestis are rubbish, waste, leftovers. I’ve named just a few women, but we must remember that the statistics compiled by several social organizations, at the start of 2015, estimated one femicide every thirty hours.²

Not One Less is the outcry against a growing horror: it says that lives matter and that every body counts, should be valued, counted – one of the movement’s initial demands was the creation of a public register of femicide – but also that their stories should be recounted. Justice for these wasted lives is also narrative; it implies extracting them from the patriarchal discursive mechanisms that resound in the mass media and in courtrooms, dissecting the victims and not the system or the criminal logic. Faced with this reality, we have tried to produce a narrative and create meaning; to use words as defense against violence; to commemorate the dead women in a kind of public act of mourning.

The speech was controversial; it sparked interpretative disputes. Marta Dillon and Virginia Cano shouted, during a protest that lasted all night, “I’m not the woman in the bag. That’s why I’m here, before you. That’s why I’m here, standing before you, reading this text and breathing in all our pain, our struggle, and our hope.” This shift challenges various means of representing the murdered women, even the drawing of portraits. The manifesto maintains that there is no substitution, no metaphorical representation where death is concerned, but that there must necessarily be a painstaking construction of common foundation, through acknowledgment of what has been lost. Every body counts because it is irreplaceable and death is irreversible. Those of us who are still living may mourn, but we cannot put ourselves in the wretched place of the murdered women. We may identify commonalities in our mutual vulnerability, in the fragility that puts us at risk, and in our empathy for the victims. And upon doing so we inscribe that act in a singular historicity.

The reading marathon took speech as the generator of a collective narrative – the retelling around the bonfire, words circulated and absorbed, creating feelings of recognition or sparking dissent – debating the association between body and rubbish. A group of people decided to take a literal interpretation of the murderers’ equipment to declare that we are not disposable. If the murderer uses signs that must be interpreted (as maintained by Rita Segato: femicide violence is expressive),³ the response is the resistant circulation of other signs and the controversy, among the activists themselves, over the meanings at play.

The second demonstration was extraordinarily massive. On 3 June 2015 hundreds of thousands of people mobilized in the plazas outside of Argentina’s Congress and in over thirty cities across Argentina, united by the message “Not one less.” The first speech declared femicide to be a “political category, a word that denounces the mode in which society naturalizes something unnatural: sexist violence. And sexist violence is a Human Rights issue.”

The polemical nature of this statement should not be overlooked: femicide is not merely a public safety issue to be dealt with using the logic of punishment and prison sentences. It is the bloodiest expression of patriarchal control, which assigns each person a position and a normative definition and kills those who do not comply. Upon stating that this is a human rights issue, the movement establishes a genealogy in which the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo figure as the central node. Both movements draw nourishment from the practice of public mourning.

Between human rights and public safety: the social archive

The present is always jumbled: it implies distinct temporalities; it inherits multiple strands. The circumstances in which Not One Less emerged have a diverse historicity, with legacies from the women’s movement and the activists for sexual diversity, certainly. But I will first address not that legacy but another that may seem further removed and yet is essential to thinking on how the movement arose and what it rails against, linking various issues on an unprecedented scale. It creates meaning in dialogue with other movements and with pre-existing struggles. To understand it requires delimiting this zone of emergence, since its character is relational and its meaning is constructed through affinity and antagonism with other movements.

In 1983, democracy was re-established in Argentina after years of state-sponsored terrorism that, starting in 1976, murdered tens of thousands of persons in concentration camps after submitting them to torture and brutality. The corpses were hidden, producing the specter of the detained-disappeared. The search for a forcibly disappeared person began as soon as they were kidnapped. The families and friends made the rounds of police stations, courts, churches, barracks, in search of information. The mothers of the forcibly disappeared began to organize one year after the military coup, demanding the return of their missing daughters and sons. They invented powerful and foundational protest methods. They met one day of every week – and still meet every Thursday – to protest together. When a “circulation ordinance” was passed in an attempt to disperse them, they began to walk in circles as they protested. To identify themselves, they wore on their heads white scarves that alluded to the diapers in which they’d dressed their lost children as babies. These women stood up to a terrifying dictatorship. Some of the mothers were themselves kidnapped and murdered, as their daughters and sons had been before them. Many were housewives, some were professionals or professors, but only a handful had prior experience in political activism. They were born as activists in the search for their children. Shortly after the mothers organized, they were joined by other women with missing granddaughters and grandsons whom they knew had been born in prison or who were also missing. The Mothers and Grandmothers led this desperate and sleepless struggle, breaking the pact of silence that society had made with the military dictatorship.

Like Antigone, they couldn’t let their dead go unburied. They went even further: in the face of the unknown status of their detained-disappeared loved ones, they demanded that they be returned alive. The most emblematic general of the genocide said in 1979: “It’s a mystery, it’s a disappearance, there is no entity … dead or alive, they have disappeared.” The Mothers responded with their turns around Buenos Aires’s main square, the political heart of the country. They were firm in their demand – “They were taken alive, we want them back alive” – even though the magnitude of the massacre and the scant number of survivors was common knowledge. Their message underscored the incommensurability of their loss. No identification of bodies, no compensation, no trial, no punishment would be enough, even if all that were possible.

These movements led by women were based on the notion that only in keeping the memory of past criminal injustice alive could we face the injustices of the present. They never stopped translating and updating their struggles to each new present, always sympathetic to new forms of suffering. In the absence of a body to mourn in private, they made their mourning public. Every Thursday of every week of every month of every year. More than four decades. This mourning included all mothers (and they mourned not only their own children), socializing maternity, demanding justice, not vengeance. They never asked for the murderers to suffer as the victims had suffered and they upheld an ethical standard that made it possible to establish the new Argentine democracy that defended the principles of human rights. In 1983, the majority of the population and political representatives supported democracy over the military dictatorship. The Never Again movement, decrying government terrorism, was key to the restitution of legitimate power. Never Again⁴ was the title of a compilation of reports from survivors of the clandestine detention centers and relatives of the forcibly disappeared. It was an attempt to reconstruct what had happened and produce an understanding of events. It stirred controversy through seeming to configure resistant violence as equal to government terrorism; but, even with the publication’s limits and controversies, it sparked a movement that, in a kind of implicit pact, emerged during the trials of the military leaders. In the 1990s the trials were suspended and the military leaders pardoned.

In 2003, after a devastating social crisis that left political institutions destroyed, Néstor Kirchner assumed the presidency. He met with the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo and made many commitments. He ordered the portraits of the condemned military leaders removed from the presidential gallery and offered an apology on behalf of the government for the crimes committed in the concentration camps. He decreed that social protest could not be criminalized. The “human rights” movement played a dual role: demanding justice for past crimes and upholding the memory of what should never again occur. Meanwhile, society was being shaken by new violence, surging from economic exclusion, social inequality, the widening of zones of exclusion, and illegal economies that often included corrupt police and hopeless youth. The deindustrialization and emptying out of public institutions in the preceding decade had created a pressure cooker. A year after Kirchner took office, a young man named Axel Blumberg was kidnapped and murdered. More than 150,000 people mobilized, answering his father’s call to demand harsher sentences and stricter security measures. In response to this kidnapping and murder, a new movement emerged, oppo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Series title
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Foreword – Natalia Brizuela and Leticia Sabsay
• Introduction: The Tide
• 1 Mourning: All Victims Count
• 2 Violence: The Role of Crime
• 3 Strike: The End of the End of History
• 4 Power, Representation and Bodies: The Construction of a Political Subject
• 5 Modes of Appearing: Language and Theatricality
• Provisional Epilogue
• Index
• End User License Agreement