The week of May 23-27 took place in Barcelona the 5th meeting of Anawanti, the international network formed by organizations that work with women who have gone through experiences of male violence in Honduras, El Salvador, Palestine, Guatemala, Morocco and Catalonia.

The Anawanti network was born in 2011 with the vocation of being a space for civil society to share experiences, knowledge, good practices and provide organizations with tools and methodologies to address gender-based violence from the perspective of diversity and interculturality. 

Anawanti works from the recognition of diverse feminisms and an intersectional perspective that allows for support in the face of the multiple oppressions that cross women in a transcultural dimension, including colonialism and racism.

The organizations that make up Anawanti identify that violence against women has a transcultural dimension, and is produced in all patriarchal societies that silence our voices and experiences, denying and canceling their stories, and the contradiction of entrusting, exclusively, the reparation of male violence to institutional structures.

This is the fifth face-to-face meeting of the network. The previous meetings were in El Salvador, where the founding manifesto of the network was created (2018) and in Casablanca (2019).

The Barcelona meeting addressed the power relations between feminisms, with the objective of generating articulation in women’s movements from a practice of recognition of diversity.

In this sense, the colleagues of Mujeres Migrantes Diversas (migrant diverse women) offered a space for the formation of the process ‘Revisant Privilegis’, a pioneering experience carried out during the year 2021 in Barcelona to situate and think in relation to the dynamics of power between women within the spaces that call themselves feminist.  The space ‘Revisant Privilegis‘ served to identify tools that can disarticulate the dynamics of power and transcend them towards a political practice that opens new work methodologies.

As part of the activities of the meeting, a meeting was held with Carme Gual, Imma Bayarri and Marta Casamort, from the Catalan Agency for Development Cooperation – the institution that supports the project – with the aim of sharing views on the situation of women’s rights and organizations in each country.

The meeting ended with an exchange with the Working Group on Women’s Rights and Gender Justice of Euromed Rights, to build strategic alliances against patriarchal symbolic violence and to think of tools to transform the impact of symbolic violence from the political practice itself.

We understand symbolic violence as that exercised implicitly and subtly through culture, beliefs, values and narratives, which end up shaping our subjectivity. We find symbolic violence in all areas of our lives, in sexist advertising, in non-inclusive language, at work, in the enmity against our own body, in the disappropriation of our own body?

Symbolic violence constructs our subjectivity and at the same time dehumanizes otherness, a fact that allows violence towards the other, in this case women. Understanding how symbolic violence operates in our societies is what allows us to understand the rest of violence against women, and therefore, its action.

Anawanti aims to be a space of knowledge where we share knowledge generated around how to address male violence both locally and globally. We also make visible campaigns in support of the right to a dignified life for women around the world.

On our website and social networks we regularly publish reports on tackling male violence in the Mediterranean area and Mesoamerica.

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