Resist, Resignify, Repair… Transform and Create

Feminist epistemology suggests the idea of a subject of knowledge incarnated and inserted in a specific social structure (a subject, so sexualized, racialized, etc.), consequently producing a situated knowledge, which does not necessarily mean less objective. On the contrary: as Donna Haraway writes, “only partial perspective promises objective vision” and this partial perspective requires location and implication politics in a particular territory from where one talks, acts and investigates.

The patriarchy has established that women cannot leave home, a home that belongs in property to the pater familias, a homte that, however, we maintain and where, despite our work, we are believed to be slaves in male’s privilege service. Faced with this situation, women have decided to resignify our home or leave it, or both things at the same time: leave pater familias’ home and found other places with our own tools, places free of sexist violence.

“Being black is to be raped and objectified by transit countries’ borders or to be sexually exploited in your destination”. Sílvia Albert Sopale, El Desarraigo.

Women’s disobedience towards staying in a patriarchal private space, the meaningless position we put ourselves in by denying the recognition of the border between public and private spaces, the decision to transit and desert the patriarchy and our desire to voluntary exile from this sexist society is harshly punished with violence against women’s bodies and their daughters and sons, violence exercised by men who act in their privileges’ name and in defense of the system that grants them to them.

The Village of Free Women

On the 25th of November 2018, Jinwar was funded, a town built and inhabited by women in sirian Kurdistan. It is the result of the collective work of dozens of associations, women’s rights organizations; and the cooperation between Rojava’s autonomous administration and feminist groups. It is a shelter to them: mothers with children who lost their partners in the war, those who suffered any type of violence, those who want to escape society and those who want to share a life just with other women. It is an alternative space dedicated to every woman in the world. Jinwar is a unique project in the Middle East.

The City of Widows

Photo by Massimiliano Clausi https://www.lensculture.com/articles/massimiliano-clausi-women-of-vrindavan

Marginalized by their families. Living in dire poverty. Old, young, and even under-aged. They all share the same disgrace: being a widow in India. Vrindavan is a city located 150 kilometers from Delhi. It welcomes unwanted women, hosting more than 20.000 women who lost their husband and are facing the condemnation of being a widow in India.

The City of Women in Colombia

“Some people said that women were unable to do it”. “La Liga de Mujeres Desplazadas” (Displaced Women League) – many of whom are single mothers or war widows – were devoted to building a new neighborhood of 102 houses in Turbaco, a municipality close to Cartagena. This place is known as The City of Women.

Elna’s Motherhood

Founded in 1939 by the Swiss nurse Elisabeth Eidenbenz in the French community of Elna, it allowed the birth of 597 children whose mothers, refugees from the Spanish Civil War, were interned in concentration camps in south-east France. It also helped to give birth to over 200 Jewish mothers persecuted by Nazism during the Second World War. Elna was closed by the Gestapo in 1944.