Feminismo, corpos e territórios | JUDITH BUTLER e PRETA FERREIRA

[Music] hello um [Music] yes [Music] foreign [Music] foreign is [Music] m uh well i thank you for um honoring me with this invitation and with the chance to um to listen to preta and her story and her analysis it is important for all of us no matter what language we speak to hear pretty's story because pretty's story of course is her story she she lives it this is her life she was arrested she was falsely accused of crimes she never committed she was incarcerated 108 days every day knowing that this is injustice no every day knowing that this is the injustice of the law but also the government and also knowing as i understand it that the injustice that she was experiencing was one that many many people have experienced that this is a pattern and that black women in particular are targeted by the police by the law restrained falsely accused given no access to justice no possibility of redress except of course through the community of support that exists outside the prison now the problem of course with the community of support that exists outside the prison is that they could any day go to prison themselves and if you're advocating for somebody in prison you are already a suspicious character right so the media people the legal people who take the risk of advocating for those who have been unjustly incarcerated are also now targets are they against the government are they will they be told that they are also guilty of crimes and we can see this is a a system that is able to discount and devalue anyone who tries to speak the language of justice um now preeta said something extremely many things extremely interesting and i'm so grateful for your your clarity you know your your great uh intellectual clarity your your your um extraordinary way of telling your story um because it is about you but it is also about a government that kills its own people a government that puts its own people in cages a government that restricts not only the freedom of movement and the freedom of expression but the very freedom as you put it to exercise one's constitutional rights right so that's that's an extraordinary freedom to deny because when you deny the freedom to exercise your constitutional rights you are no longer a subject who is protected by the law you are a subject who is attacked by the law and we have to see that these um that this pattern is a deep one if we rely on the law to protect us we are also subject to the same law that will attack us which means that our sense of what our rights should be our sense of what should be a constitutional right exists sometimes outside the law even in a sphere that the law calls criminal now this is a crazy world right where those who seek to exercise their rights are criminalized those who seek to demand justice are considered to be terrorists or they're considered to be anti-government or a threat to the nation right and of course black women have always been a threat to the nation because the idea of the nation has always been a white one and it's always had a very narrow idea of who belongs here who belongs in brazil who's entitled to education who's entitled to a home to housing rights who's entitled to vote who's entitled to uh a decent wage and so all of these questions um i think pertain to the to the idea of what kind of nation is this how does it imagine itself and we know that under bolsonaro but the formal sonata on the right and after bolsonaro we must remember there will always be i hope not always but there is such a strong white supremacist assumption in brazil so when we think well who threatens the nation it is certainly black women it's especially trans black women and men who are subject to violence exclusion poverty um lack of access to housing to health care to literacy but also um uh the sex workers upon which the white men depend who who have no decent wage or sometimes no wage at all who look for protection or access to health care or to a living wage whose exploitation is well known and you know it tells us something uh about what our communities have to be we have to know what justice is when the law does not embody justice we have to know what justice is when the law is actually actively destroying seeking to destroy the very idea of justice and when as as pretty says the law becomes an instrument of death right the law is an instrument of murder it's an instrument of abandonment and also an instrument of death and murder so at that point uh the law and the government becomes a kind of killing machine and uh we have to find the modes of resistance that not only expose that perverse logic that perverse operation of the law but reimagine the world in a different way reimagine a world in which equality and justice would be paramount but also where everyone would have an equal right to healthy health to education to a livable wage to respect and dignity and protection against violence whether it's violence from the state or from non-state actors who are able to act the way they do because the state looks the other way right they have the tacit approval of the state it may not be state actors but the states looking the other way allows the non-state actor to kill so that's why we have these horrible numbers of femicides of the killing of trans people of travesty um of sex workers of migrants so i want to say perhaps one other thing to add to this which is um capitalism like where is that in this picture well one thing i think we can say is um that when bolsonaro says oh the the the the virus is not so bad uh we can all open the markets we can all go into the streets we can all go back to the factories um what he is saying is that the prophet that brazil can make from open markets is more important than the protection of human lives because he knows that those who are most affected by covid are those with no access to homes as pretty says you can't stay inside or go home if you do not have a home and if the system of finance is such that evictions are happening at ever higher rates because nobody has a wage and there is no guaranteed wage for the people right if we had a guaranteed wage if everybody knew oh the state will support me even when i lose my job when there's a pandemic and no one can work the state will give me what i need to live no the state will not give you what you need to live because that's socialism i don't know if it's socialism bring it on i say but this specter you know it's castro castro's at the door you know enough um but listen i i just want to say this this one point which is that there is a calculation how many people will die how much profit can we make if we have open markets um we will make more of a profit than if we close them brazil will lose its standing as an international trade partner it will not accumulate wealth what this government is saying is that yes we accept that people will die but the people who die are workers who can be replaced the people who die are the homeless and the poor and they don't count they're not productive workers right and that means that an entire part of the population is targeted for death and capitalism is i believe a death driven machine right there's a kind of death drive that belongs to capitalism it is always sacrificing human lives for the purposes of its own expansion its profit and its accumulation of of value so one question is how do we think the value of human life outside of the framework of market values and this strikes me as an important question it's also i believe one reason why um feminism yes not only to be fundamentally anti-racist uh by which i mean there is no feminism without the opposition to racism because feminism uh is fundamentally tied to black feminism there is no feminism without black feminism right if feminism is just representing women unmarked on without any reference to their racial or colonial constitution then it is a feminism for white women and that is not okay we don't add race later similarly i think that feminism has to be a theory and practice of solidarity that it's not about just one identity or we're feminist that's our identity it's like no no feminism means we are committed to a broad solidarity that we understand the exploitations of workers of the homeless of those who have no access to education we are we we have a fundamental solidarity with trans activists and travis d and sex workers and it also means of course that it is um both local acting locally and acting trans regionally and transnationally so maybe we can talk about some of these um issues it's extremely important i think during these times when the attacks on feminism are rising not just in brazil it's where there's the fabulous ironic attack on gender but uh throughout the world in eastern europe and uh um in parts of africa and in the united states in in france in switzerland the the attack on gender the attack on feminism the effort to take it out of universities and to to undermine its political claims um are enormous and they're enormous because they see the progress we have made they see that we are powerful they see how many women flood the streets as they fight against sexual violence they see how powerful and contagious our political commitments can be which is why they try to stop us with the violence that they do and my own view is that we fight them yes i love the says we fight or we die right it's fight or death but i my question is how do we fight we do fight how do we struggle we must struggle how do we fight and struggle such that we are in the very terms of our action producing a different world and not reproducing their world of violence and my belief is that the most fundamentally important uh movements of our time and that includes black lives matter and its intersection with feminism and queer and trans rights we are radically non-violent but that does not mean we don't fight we fight we fight non-violently and we don't fight the same way they fight because we don't want to reproduce their violence we are fighting against their violence and that means that that is our task and that's our struggle um as we move forward and we are by the way moving forward there's no doubt in my mind uh a is [Music] foreign liberalism hey is yes foreign foreign um well thank you very much i there's so much to say and it's important to uh organize my thoughts in some ways um in light of all that that pretty saying to us and flavia saying um as well um i suppose um i want to go back and say that um if we think about the abolition movement the abolition of prisons and um pretty's previous remark that incarceration exists everywhere uh flavia says this as well right in throughout society it's not just in the prison the prison is maybe the most explicit uh architectural structure right oh there it is incarceration but incarceration is exists throughout society which means that people are walled in they are stopped from moving they are uh they are surveyed they are watched they are punished and also let's remember that this practice repeated practice of incarceration dates back to the enslavement of black people and their their uh forcible transport to uh to brazil um and it affects those um either who live in bahia or in ways that are enormous it also affects migrants and the poor um and the indigenous um which i didn't mention before but it seems to me that the indigenous struggle is absolutely fundamental to uh this um struggle which also means um the struggle for uh the environment nature lands that belong to the indigenous lands that have been destroyed through the practice of extractivism and extractivism is of course the continuing colonial exploitation of those lands very often sacred lands that that fuels the capitalist machine and that might be understood to be the most uh clear site where um colonialism continues um and the decolonial struggle continues um and and and the um the intersection with capitalism and in particular finance capitalism or neoliberalism uh is intensified uh so we this is a crucial part of the struggle when we ask how to build a resistance that is strong enough and clear enough i have to say two things one is that we have to make clear to to some men on the left that feminism is not a secondary oppression if they want to talk about class then they need to see that women are disproportionately poor if they want to talk about class they need to see that women are subject to exploitation on the job and also subject to radical unemployment so poverty literacy employment health care all of these are women's issues they are also issues of class and they are more often than not issues of race so if their framework does not intersect these the various categories then we are in some trouble because they are telling us that they are the leaders and that our various struggles are secondary and we must resist this we must resist this and i you know i have seen that they sometimes mock um the ecological concerns of feminism but i have something to say to them which is that without addressing climate change and the destruction of the earth they will not have their social movements in other words the movement to save the earth is the precondition of all other social movements and it is tied to the indigenous it's tied to the question of environmental racism it's tied to the question of the killing character of capitalism and the killing character of those laws that seek to protect the market at the expense of human life and living processes and the living world so that is what i believe and we need to be strong enough and clear enough and in solidarity enough to make sure that that version of the left does not become the primary framework in which we are asked to position ourselves as identities that are secondary to the fundamental oppression this cannot take place and i want to suggest as well that feminism gives us not just a theory of the identity of women or i mean it's very important but feminism is also a theory and practice of solidarity it shows us in its practice how you negotiate difference how you come to understand worlds that are different from your own how you you join in a resistance movement um with a clear goal in mind supporting each other [Music] in networks of care i would say radical care um that keep our lives regenerating rather in the face of a world that would um target the precarious for death right so we must find ways of regenerating conditions of life that's part of what solidarity is and we also feminism does this more than any other social movement tries to think the problem of difference and what it is to achieve solidarity among groups that may not understand each other or may have some antagonisms like how do we build solidarity without denying the fact that there's some conflicts between us how do we embrace those conflicts work them through even decide to keep them in place as we move forward together this this i think false ideas of unity can be very dangerous because then we fall apart but the idea of unity that accepts the tensions i believe is stronger and um and and that is what i i would suggest um abolition i just want to say that abolition is about dismantling violent institutions wherever they are in cars incarceral institutions wherever they are it's it's a fight it it is an act of dismantling we might even say it's an act of destroying institutions of violence do we want to say that destruction is violent i think not i think that kind of destruction of violent institutions is comes from an insistence that we should be able to live without violence maybe an idealism maybe a possible imagination but why not we can live with idealism maybe we need our impossible imaginations in order to help each other know that what is being called justice is injustice and that justice is what we are creating as we as we move against these violent institutions hey [Music] okay i'll try to be a little shorter in my comments this time well thank you uh flavia for your wonderful questions and your thoughtful response i i find um all of what you and freita are saying to be so um exciting and challenging and um it's not always possible for me to think you know quickly um but i i want to um i want to make to suggest that you know feminism is not just one movement among many movements um i i'm interested in um what veronica gago says when she talks about feminism as a way of interlocking different movements right so she actually sees feminism not as an identity but as a way of building relations um and uh generating new possibility for relations and i i think that for for that claim to be true and i think it's perhaps more true in latin america than anywhere else um we would have to connect the critique of finance capitalism the long violent history of colonial dispossession the patriarchal forms of state terrorism directed against indigenous um and black women trans tran transvesti all all precarious lives precarious workers and um and that would uh and that means um having different centers that actually emerge from different communities we can't have one uh kind of center of feminist power we we have feminist power emerging from different communities that are in dialogues and that see that what is happening to them is linked to what is happening with others so as we lay that out in our understanding we are also able to act in certain ways now vulnerability is an important concept but it's not the basis of a new politics you know i think sometimes that's it's misunderstood as like oh the vulnerable we are the new class like no not quite because um at least in english we have a book called um vulnerability and resistance um and and in that book we look at some the struggles in turkey and elsewhere where um women and other precarious lives are profoundly affected by violence and legal subjugation incarceration uh they are they are vulnerable uh but the ways of resisting uh they're not efforts to become invulnerable right invulnerability is not an ideal we don't want to be invulnerable we know the men who think they are invulnerable we don't want to be like that right invulnerable is i'm a master i'm not affected nothing affects me i can't do i can't die of covad i'm i may be sick but i'm on my motorcycle going through you know downtown you know sao paulo um this we don't want invulnerability right we want actually for that vulnerability to be a strength and to be be the basis of the power to identify to connect to build solidarities and it's a different kind of action that emerges from that understanding that i can be we can be put in jail we can be summarily killed like um or we can be uh left uh to die without healthcare or without basic provisions like food and water um that as many migrants are so many migrants are so or the indigenous we can see our land destroyed and we are destroyed with our land because that connection between land and who we are is so deep that if you destroy the land you destroy this culture so of course we understand ourselves as vulnerable but vulnerability also gives us a chance to uh understand other forms of oppression and to feel and to respond and to understand that um this vulnerability should not be exploited this vulnerability should be valued it should be it should be addressed right i'm vulnerable to death if i do not eat that means that the obligations of the society and the government are to make sure that everybody can eat that tells us what the obligation is this is a human vulnerability we have an obligation to address this vulnerability i'm vulnerable to death if i am not given provisions and that is why we call upon governments to provide these provisions that's why we demand health care education livable wage safe health conditions it's why we demand respect for the environment and non-extractivist policies because they are vulnerable right the vulnerability gives rise to the demand in a different way um i'm very interested in how care as a concept has emerged in during the pandemic as a feminist value and there is of course a um i don't know if it's uh in portuguese yet but there's a an important book called uh the care manifesto that some british feminists have um published and there are other um other books like mutual aid societies written by dean spade the trans lawyer in the u. s and and there are others as well um many but but the idea is that care is not just the task of women it's not just what happens inside the household we need to think about de-domesticating care that is to say yes care should happen in the household but it also happens throughout society and that it does it needs to happen because we are interdependent on one another and that has been made very clear by the pandemic it's also made very clear by climate change what happens in one part of the world affects the other part of the world and we know how globalization has established radically unequal forms of dependency and exploitation which is why the opposition to exploitative finance and capital finance capitalism must have in mind an idea of interdependency that is linked to radical equality um and i believe that uh care uh is not just a sentiment that i feel it's the actual uh practice of providing basic providing for the basic requirements of life we do it in our neighborhoods or in our groups in our networks but what if those ideals could be translated into global ideals what would it look like what would the principles be and the practices be that would follow from that vision a [Music] foreign foreign moment [Music] [Music] foreign well it's enormously cynical i think for the government to suspend uh minimum wage when actually it should be supplying a guaranteed annual income of course i'm all in favor of subsidies and i see that yesterday the u. s senate approved a sub a huge subsidy one-time subsidy for many precarious workers and that's a very good thing but subsidy subsidy is important but a guaranteed annual income is even more important people sometimes are employed sometimes are not employed sometimes they are too ill to be employed sometimes they have dependents for whom they must care uh um all the time and those people should not be abandoned to uh poverty and desperation um their lives should not be threatened by the fact that they are trying to uh take care of others or or or there are no jobs for them uh under certain conditions so i do believe that um this is a moment where a very basic socialist principle has to be invoked and which doesn't mean that we have to go with all the existing ideas of the marxist state but i think there are some precepts of socialism that really need to be honored like the right to education free education the the right to shelter no matter whether you can pay the the right um against violent incarceration i would i would add to that as a as a newer form of feminist anti-racist abolitionist um feminism the right to live in you know in a world uh where we are free to move and breathe without fear of violence or incarceration uh but also um uh uh you know healthcare and shelter and um these are are are so um fundamental uh that it doesn't make sense when a society is not committed to providing those fundamental conditions of life and when it's not committed it is accepting the fact that yes certain people were will die and and that is a disposing of life it is a it is a policy decision that agrees with the fact that accepts the fact that certain people will die and and it is fine with that that is part of its calculation that is part of what it accepts and it is what it does it's why it's a form of death dealing it's a form of death dealing that does not need a gun it does not need a physical instrument it does not need a bomb it just needs a policy that refuses to give people the fundamental uh um um provisions of life housing and food and shelter um and i would include education among a fundamental provision so and a protection against environmental destruction and toxicity so all of this is at stake here and um and yet i am um i'm drawn to what creta describes as these forms of making connections within the prison and in the u.

s prison education movements although they are reformist activities right they are also educational activities where you can start to think about the institution of the prison where does it come from what does it do what are the alternatives to prison um how do we imagine a world in which um in which prisons would no longer be necessary what would the new institutions look like what would it mean to provide social services or other ways of bringing people into community who have in fact uh committed crimes and this is of course a very um it's a very complex issue and i'd like to ask a question directly on this topic because i'm myself a little confused you know there are so many feminist science um uh and and i include the killing of trans people in this category of course trans women um but so many i guess we should say femicides and and and and trans sides um that go unprosecuted and um and we see what happens in courts of law when men are are accused of having killed women and the judge says oh well that was a crime of passion or uh that's a private issue i don't think the court should make a judgment here and the men is man is exonerated so many feminists would say no no we want those men to go to prison we want them to be judged we want them to be held accountable and we want them to go to prison and i understand this there are many people i would like to see in prison i want trump to go to prison you know it's like a fierce imagination no like i want this person to go to prison at the same time i don't like prisons i don't believe prisons are a just way of life i think prisons should be abolished i think they should be dismantled and we should think of other ways of handling the problem of crime um community organizations social services education other ways of intervening in the problem of violence especially violence against women and trans folk of genderqueer lesbian gay people um people who are black or brown migrants i mean we we need other forms of intervention against that form of violence rather than simply immediately saying oh whoever does that kind of violence should go to prison so i'm just wondering how you handle that tension i know that many people are thinking about this but my thoughts are not fully formed and i would benefit from your wisdom is um yes i mean it's a huge issue and um uh perhaps it's just a moment to repeat something that pretty has drawn our attention to namely that when people are told to stay at home um in order to protect themselves from the vaccine there's an assumption that they have a home and that they can stay there without suffering domestic violence that they can stay there rather than go to work to get a wage in order to secure food and to pay the rent that they can stay there that they haven't been evicted um so um we see i think that um the injunction stay at home is is addressed to those who have homes and who do not need to leave the home for work or who have somebody else leaving working for them and and they are profiting from that labor um and so can stay home and stay at home with their with their financial situation intact um i think it's clear around the world that um there's an increase in domestic violence not just violence against women but certainly that but also violence against children and violence against queer kids trans kids whose ability to connect with each other and pursue their way of life depends on getting out of the house and meeting in common spaces those common spaces have been suspended if not destroyed and that's enormously difficult you know at the beginning of the pandemic um arundhati roy said you know maybe this is a portal through which we enter into a different world a world of more radical equality of respect for the earth of uh understanding our common vulnerability as human beings all of whom can be infected all of whom can fall ill all of whom are vulnerable to to death um angela davis thought the same she she saw that the forces of production had ground to a halt and she thought oh maybe this is a moment where we ca before we just restart everything as it is we can ask ourselves what kind of economic reorganization of life would we like to see and how can we build that so there were i think these moments of great hopefulness um and of course i uh i am moved and touched by those and i share them to some degree at the same time that we saw the intensification of social economic and racial inequality in the united states those who um most of those who have died from coved come from black and brown communities the um the latinx communities many many of whom are living in um in the southern parts of the united states um or who have been discriminated against on the job market or perhaps are living without documents um uh and have not conventionally received the same um health care the african-american community also uh receives discrimination from health care providers their identity is always questioned they have to prove their residency they have to prove this and that about themselves that they have insurance their insurance is is revoked if they're not working so those who have long been discriminated against by the health care system are more intensively discriminated against now and it makes them more likely to die their rates of mortality are much higher than white citizens of the united states there's no question about it so we've seen how certain populations are left to die and others are highly protected and of course uh you know in the u. s some of the most intense sites of infections have been meat packing industries or uh the pa or or or delivery services and these are generally staffed by poor people or working class people black and brown people who are who are making sure that white people in the suburbs can continue their way of life so they die for the white way of life and this is um they don't have any choice this is they have they have to leave their home they have to make and of course the prisons also have been places of intense infection and high mortality rates um and uh that has been a site of enormous uh [Music] public criticism and we have to remember that in the u. s the vast majority of people interned in the prison system are black and brown men but also black and brown women that this is a a form of population control it's a form of institutional racism and um under pandemic conditions we see that this way of discriminating this way of incarcerating is also a way of exposing people to further violence and to death so it's on a continuum with a form of killing or letting die so so all of these issues have to be addressed i think it was interesting to me that in the black lives matter movement uh the the incredible protests that broke out not just in the u.