
Some time ago, trans-activist F. was the target of bullying and harassment via social networks that lasted months and included defamation on Twitter and Facebook, articles in feminist blogs and web sites, and letters to women’s organizations and public institutions to request they ban the presence of F. from feminists spaces. Who did this? Feminists who had been F. friends. Why? For a disagreement with F.
In fact, F. was obliterated from women’s movements and even lost job opportunities. The most serious, perhaps, was the deep depression that affected her and the loneliness in which she had to live this experience.
Cases like these are examples of a behavior that is not strange, but instead is pitiful and very harmful — the destructive socialization of females to please patriarchy and to reproduce patriarchy and oppression at the expense of our integrity as women.
Women fight with the guns of patriarchy
We have been domesticated, trained to obtain the approval of a man and of the patriarchal system at any cost, to do whatever it takes to have a place at his side. We are the result of centuries of pedagogy that creates mistrust between women, and the validation and reproduction of our oppression and conditioning towards mutual competition. This is the root of our inability to deal with conflicts between us in a constructive and non-dehumanizing way. We can only give of what we have and as long as we have an identity as objects instead of individual people, women will be expert agents of misogyny.
Being a feminist, an scholar in gender studies doesn’t excuse or free anyone from this, at all. Continue reading “Women and the Ethics of Conflict by Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente”
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