Feminist self-defense, an experience from Barcelona
Some of us from Barcelona share our experience and our idea of feminist self-defense, without representing any specific collective but having shared for years different spaces of self-defense for women. Part of patriarchal oppression is the stigmatization of gender. The power and domination of the male gender is maintained through this stigmatization. Each of the two parts of this binary division carries “negative” or “positive” characteristics (stigmas) that predefine and pre-stigmatize our lives, behavior, character, appearances, abilities, weaknesses and many times the possibilities and functions to which we are subjected.
Examples such as:
- Women = weak, passive, submissive, dependent, hypersensitive….
- Men = strong, violent, active, skillful….
In this way, power relations continue to be perpetuated for centuries, affirming the dominance of the male gender over the female. Limiting and repressing the development of free and horizontal identities and relationships. One of the stigmas is the privilege of violence attributed to the male gender. Violence or being violent is recognized as part of a man’s nature and he is granted the power to exercise it in multiple situations. He is legitimized to defend himself, to attack, to dominate. On the other hand, women, recognized as the weaker party, do not have the same possibilities. Since childhood we are educated in such a way to be dependent on the “stronger” “protective” part, to the point of losing our ability to defend ourselves, a capacity inherent to any living being. Because of this, our physical and psychological capacities are atrophied, leaving us more defenseless and exposed to multiple situations of violence and forced into submission.
Feminist self-defense wants to break this stigma. It works to learn and recover our confidence, autonomy and train different capacities to confront systematic violence and respond, to be able to protect and self-defend ourselves from different aggressions. It is one more step to free ourselves from patriarchal oppressions and also to break with victimhood. Without disregarding the weight of centuries of different oppressions (patriarchal, colonial, state, capitalist…) it is necessary to break with the stigma of the victim, passive and observer of our own oppression, in order to take an active part in our liberation. Thus taking the reins of our lives and recovering collective knowledge and learning.
The system and its capitalist institutions are designed and function in such a way that they are shown to be indispensable for our physical safety/integrity and to make us totally dependent on them. With self-defense (and not only) we try to regain the collective responsibilities and sense of community that have long been stolen from us. It is our task to regain our autonomy and to be able to resolve the conflicts that arise in our communities on a daily basis. To self-organize and fight for these values. Weave networks of support and trust to grow and educate ourselves collectively. From here we learn and share what we define as feminist self-defense. A physical and psychological practices that we have been training every week for a few years, with different partners and methodology, but sharing the same visions and objectives.
We call it feminist self-defense because we understand that our trainings do not want to be the typical self-defense ones, but moments of building bonds, complicities and collective strategies. For this reason our self-defense would not be possible only focused on technical/physical knowledge. On the contrary, we understand that this space also arises from the desire to share ethical values and a feminist stance. The techniques learned can obviously be useful in situations of danger of aggression where we find ourselves alone but the goal is to understand our defense always from the collective, seeking in this sorority the best weapon against macho and police aggressions. We understand self-defense not only as a circumstantial defense against a specific aggressor but as a form of resistance against the state and the system of oppression as a whole. A way for our own defense, both individual and of our spaces, not to go through the laws and “security” structures tailor-made by our own oppressors, such as the judicial or police system.
Self-defense: the knowledge of society in the common force of self-organization.
Abdullah Öcalan, used a very simple phrase to remind us that we cannot be an existence above society. We can only ask ourselves questions, and the lucky thing is that asking questions is half of understanding.
As we will see, the self-defense elaborated within the Kurdish women’s liberation movement breaks every binarism, even the classic passive/active one. Because it breaks the two extreme polarities through which, in many cases, self-defense is misunderstood: sometimes as militaristic aggression sometimes as passive waiting. When we speak of the need for active self-defense, we intend a third way between the two polarizations, against the melancholic fixations of an inevitable present: a self-defense that deregulates the opposition’s plans, that starts from another level of values and that carries out an alternative in its practical unfolding.
Fascism is on the agenda of nation states, not only in Turkey, not only in the Middle East through a global proxy war; but also through violent demographic changes, with policies of extractivism for example in Latin America and through the control of lives and migratory flows with a strong return to nationalism in Europe. All these phenomena I have listed are not only extremely interconnected by influencing each other, but they also describe the very system of power, and directly address the memory, the future and the present of our existence.
In this context, what is most important to observe carefully is that the mode of organization of nation-states, which acts through massacres, destruction, assimilation first culturally and later economically, shows, today, its unsuccessful face. Its tendency to collapse. Looking at this reality in its true face represents a great opportunity for us, aimed at developing a common alternative across state-imposed borders. But we really need to understand how the nation-state model is bankrupt. Why is it failing? Because it doesn’t work. And it is interesting to note that at present, the world powers that continue at the ideological and propagandistic level to try to maintain their necessary gains (for example in the world war in Northern Syria), in reality, in practice in the different territories, are going to act in the form of decentralization of control and will not go so far as to implement state forms of organization. Let us think of how, with the aim of creating division in the Middle East, they implement, and just with the so-called “Islamic State”, instead of centralized regulations of defined territorial areas, they bilaterally arm intervention forces through multicentric policies of balance based on the destabilization of the areas. Or let us think of how, in northern Syria with the interventions of France and England, and the armed support of Italy and Germany, forms of indirect control are developed over territories that could not be reconciled with a vertical and centralized local state organization.
Today they want to use in Kurdistan the same methods that were used in the direct annihilation and colonial division by the European countries during the period of World War I. But history does not repeat itself in fixed and closed cycles, nor in a linear, straight and universal way. But history does not repeat itself in fixed and closed cycles, nor does it repeat itself in a linear, straight and universal way. It is up to all of us to change its course. We must focus on the universal characteristics of the history of societies, and not on that of states: in this way we will see the spiral lines of change already implemented and those to be followed. Today we can participate directly in the profound effects of the revolution carried out by women in Rojava, in the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria. There communities based on ethical values, among a myriad of peoples, knowing that the first objective of capitalism is to destroy, have created new forms of social life, building a communal and collective world of living together, paralyzing the interests of patriarchal states based on profit, genocide and accumulation. They have done this through self-government, social ecology and self-defense.
We have as a great example the worldwide uprising generated on March 8, as well as the many demonstrations and actions that remembered the Argentine revolutionary Legerin Ciya (Alina Sanchez) and the British internationalist Helin Qereçox (Anna Campbell), who dedicated their lives also to the defense of Afrin and the women’s revolution. Especially in Latin America and in the UK their images were carried in the marches for Afrin identifying them as universal symbols of the struggle for social liberation and* for women’s freedom all over the world. We are living in a moment in which it is a priority to revise the word “internationalism” by asking ourselves how and if it would be appropriate to describe the present situation, to enable us to put in place new ideas and new practices, reaching out to create platforms for global democracy.
Women are, in this phase of global mobilization, the engine that will be able to bring, by organizing in the territories and strengthening their alliances, the most radical transformation. The global responses that women have been giving to the exploitative wars of the states today are also the sign of a revolution. Can these uprisings be understood as a form of self-defense against the system? Looking at every part of the world, the presence of an extraordinary shared force undoubtedly appears to us. However, what I want to say is that all this force, in itself, isolated, is not enough: it is necessary today more than ever to mobilize to take organizational steps. And this is fundamental, in order to understand correctly what self-defense is. Because practicing it means putting ourselves and our social history into action together in a concrete way through new organizational practices.
Jineolojî is an instrument of struggle and self-defense, it leads us to think differently about all our experiences and to imagine new ones. I suggest, then, that this discussion that we do today be a promise to meet again at the next camp, only if what we are here today to discuss and realize, in an extensive way, in our own territories, has been informed and tested.
So, let us begin by asking ourselves: what do we think when we say the word self-defense?
What comes to mind? What do we understand by self-defense?
To continue on part II…
