Feminist Collective Trece Rosas: A FiLiA International Women’s Day interview
The 8th of March commemorated International Women’s Day. It provides a moment for society to reflect on the struggles, the advances and the continued fight for the liberation of women and girls around the world. At FiLiA, we marked this date by highlighting the work of feminist campaigners or organisations around the world who dedicate their lives to tackling structural discrimination and oppression against women.
In this interview, FiLiA Spokeswoman Raquel Rosario Sánchez interviews Argentinean-based feminist organization Trece Rosas (Thirteen Roses) - the feminist branch of the Argentinean Reason and Revolution (Reason and Revolution) political organization. They propose a frontal fight against patriarchy as a gender and class system, refusing to consider as “automatic” both the triumph of feminism simply because a socialist transformation has begun, and rejecting the idea that patriarchy is an exclusive instrument of the bourgeoisie.
Patriarchy benefits all men, whether they know it or not, use it or not. For this reason, it is not possible to wait for the installation of a “new society” to develop an anti-patriarchal culture and moral values. Their task is done with a view to society as a whole, but it begins within their party itself. The male comrades of their revolutionary party have the obligation to be feminists and anti-patriarchal, because the struggle includes them, not only as necessary allies, but as directly interested in it.
Raquel Rosario Sánchez: You are a women’s rights advocate. When and how did you personally decide that this was a struggle you wanted to dedicate your life to?
Trece Rosas: I got married very young, thinking that in this way I was escaping a family life that I felt limiting. As Erich Fromm says in The Art of Loving, I chose one oppression to free myself from another. On the other hand, and contradictorily, I always felt strange, as enabled to an intellectual life by my family of origin, because I had developed interests that came to me especially from my father.
Although I would love to be an actress, the pressures led me to look for something more "acceptable" and to generate less conflict. So it was that I studied ‘Letras’ at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires. I finished my degree while raising my two oldest children. Then came the teaching job, the divorce, the burden of the children and a new relationship, which came with politics in tow. During that time, I was writing a book of stories, The inheritance, stories where these contradictory experiences of the lives of many women appear: ‘that evil that has no name’ (to paraphrase Betty Friedan) and that was emerging as a spontaneous feminism. With the approach to political action, I construct myself as a socialist, but I assume that this socialism must also emancipate women from patriarchal subordination.
My political evolution coincides with that of my party and vice versa: it was about discovering and building my / our feminism. When we decided to throw ourselves fully into the political arena (we started out as a theory and propaganda group), it became obvious that our socialism implied making its feminism explicit.
I decided to dedicate my life to fight for feminism when I realized that these life experiences are common to the vast majority of women. The contradictions, the discomforts, the anguishes, the daily violence were not the product of my imagination, nor did they happen only to me. Realizing that I was not alone, how could I not join those who had preceded me in this fight and those who were fighting at that time? Since then, with the tools that I had been able to acquire and thanks to the possibility of organizing myself with my colleagues, I put all my efforts at the service of the struggle for women, and first of all, for the women of the working class. .
RRS: How and why did Trece Rosas start? Tell you about the moment when you had the vision to create this women’s rights organisation. You could explain to our UK audience the context of the original women here.
TR: Razón y Revolución is a very recent political party (it was born in 2016), but it has existed since 1995 as an intellectual group that tries to rethink the problems of revolutionary socialism in Argentina. Many theoretical and practical problems required investigating the national reality from the beginning, a task that we carried out during 15 years of scientific work at the Center for Studies and Research in Social Sciences (CEICS). About 40 comrades shared the various areas to investigate (origins of capitalism, the history of the working class, the accumulation of capital, popular culture, Peronism, etc.).
I began studying popular culture, in order to understand many of the problems that explain the peculiarities of the class consciousness of Argentine working class. At the same time, I focused on this problem within the field of "women's studies" (my doctoral thesis is on "Love and capitalism"). The drift towards feminism as a theoretical and practical problem (the critique of feminism actually existing in Argentina) was an immediate by-product of this task. Since the mid-90s we have carried out this research task with a very active militancy in the so-called “piquetero movement” (a group of political groups of the Trotskyist and Guevarist left for the most part, which played a relevant role in the fall of De la Rúa’s government and in the crisis that was called "Argentinazo", between 1998 and 2002).
When Argentine capitalism stabilized relatively, we dedicated to pure research, although we remained mainly related to Trotskyist groupings, throughout the 2004/12 period. This research process was distancing us from that “traditional” left, but also from the “new postmodern left”, which ended up being co-opted by the government of Néstor Kirchner. We distance ourselves from the traditional left and also from postmodern opportunism. It was around 2012 when we came to the conclusion that our relationship with that left was over and we decided to develop a party organization. During the research process, we concluded that in Argentina there is no socialist feminism. The traditional parties of the left denied feminism and the feminist movement was either not on the left or denied a broader social perspective than that of “abstract rights”.
In Argentina, until the emergence of Kirchnerism, a bourgeois feminism of equality dominated the domain, along with a wide arc that defined itself as “radical”. These expressions were joined by the queer theory version of feminism which is now dominant. The left parties, instead of overcoming the limitations of the first two and opposing the deployment of the last, ended up, by pure electoral opportunism, surrendering to queer theory. If a socialist party must necessarily have a feminist perspective, it must organize it, give it a real body. Much more so in Argentina, where this feminist socialist perspective is completely absent. That is the reason for the constitution of Trece Rosas as a feminist organization.
RRS: From your point of view, what are the top three priorities that we should all be advocating about right now when it comes to women’s rights?
TR: At the end of last year, although with limitations such as “conscientious objection”, Argentineans have achieved a historic conquest with the enactment of the law of voluntary interruption of pregnancy. However, most Latin American women still live in countries where this right does not exist, since it is mostly due to causes. That is a fight that continues. The historic fight against prostitution has no sights to back down globally. Feminists still have the task of building a real abolitionism, one that penalizes the man who prostitutes women and enforces the sentences for pimps and traffickers. Education and declaration of principles are not enough.
However, we consider that the battle of our time, the most difficult, is the fight against the erasure of women. This erasure is the denial of sexual determinations as the basis of social hierarchies between men and women and has become the great strategy of the patriarchal reaction of the last decades. Saying that being a woman is simply a statement and that this constitutes an “identity” implies that anyone can be a woman and therefore there are no women. In a society that continues to be patriarchal, this denial of women and their oppressions cannot but deepen domination. In fact, this reaction has led to a tremendous advance in relatively recent expressions of the commodification of the female body (surrogacy, donation of eggs), as well as the most extreme forms of violence against women (femicides).
We had an average of one woman murdered because of sexual violence every 30 hours and the last year we went to an average of one murdered every 22 or 23 hours.
Of course, none of these issues can be solved or addressed without linking them to the economic and political struggles in which women are involved and, therefore, without raising them from a class angle, in which the working woman occupies the central place, because we are most vulnerable to all the violence that I mentioned before.
RRS: There is a lot of movement worldwide when it comes to women's rights. What is your opinion regarding the state of women’s rights in Argentina right now?
TR: Two problems stand out in Argentinafrom the agenda that we indicated in the previous question: the one of violence against women, especially the issue of femicides, and on the other hand, the problem of the erasure of women. On both issues, our country is a point of interest for feminists around the world, both because of the importance assumed by the “Ni Una Menos” movement, and because of the “advanced” nature of the process of “erasing” women, due to the dominance of queer theory in the local women's movement.
In Argentina, prostitution is a very serious problem, in particular since every time the economic crisis deepens, the poorest women fall into prostitution. The organization called AMMAR (Asociación de Mujeres Meretricesde Argentina), a pro-prostitution organization, has achieved a very large insertion in the Argentine political system in such a way that the lawyer for that organization is an advisor to the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity. Furthermore, the ‘Law against Violence towards Women’ only mentions that it is violence when prostitution is forced. There is increasing pressure from the lobby entrenched in the ruling party for prostitution to be regulated as an autonomous activity. We, as abolitionists, are answering that autonomous prostitution or not, is, quite simply, violence against women.
Another issue on which women's rights have regressed is in the field of reproductive rights, since the practice of surrogacy has been establishing jurisprudence for several years and, in fact, there are several bills presented and ready for their discussion.
Although from the outside it seems that Argentine feminism has made important progress, the situation can be considered, globally, as one of regression. This setback is even broader if one leaves the narrow bourgeois and petty bourgeois feminist field and enters the problem of working women, for whom most of the “advances” remain on the formal field. In real life, our situation has worsened along with that of the entire working class, not only because of the capitalist restructuring underway in the country since the 1990s, but also because of the economic crisis worsened by the pandemic.
RRS: On March 8th, 2020 the world was about to enter a global pandemic that has had a distinct impact on women and girls lives. One year later, what has COVID-19 taught us about women’s status in society?
TR: It has been proven that the daily life of women worsened because of the pandemic. To give just one example, in Japan, a country where these types of variations at the social level are regularly documented (unlike other countries like ours), the suicide rate in women increased by 15% during 2020, as well as well as panic and depression attacks. In Argentina, the crisis does not begin with the pandemic, but has come much earlier. As we said before, the deepening of economic problems dragged many women into prostitution. So much so that it already extends to impoverished middle-class young women, with the “Only fans” phenomenon.
The first thing you notice is the increase in violence against women within the family: we have gone from one femicide every 30 hours to one every 23 hours. Also, as a result of the confinement, sexual assaults and intra-family abuse against minors increased. Both in our country and worldwide, the disparity in the distribution of housework and childcare, plus the additional responsibility for the schooling of minors, all tasks that most of us perform, multiplied. The education of women also suffered due to this increase in domestic responsibilities. Without a doubt, all these data have shown that the impact of the pandemic meant the continuity and deepening of the patriarchal sexual hierarchy between men and women.
RRS: How has Trece Rosas coped with the pandemic?
TR: Since 2018, when we organized and launched the First International Abolitionist Congress, we began to think about what the next step would be. So in 2019, we projected the Second International Feminist Congress for 2020. Unfortunately, when we had everything prepared, the world woke us up with a pandemic.
When the confinement was no longer mandatory, Trece Rosas accompanied the marches and rallies that were held against femicides and those that were held in favor of the abortion law. Throughout the year we continued with active propaganda on social networks, giving interviews, writing articles that were published both locally and internationally. The greatest international achievement was the development of the alliance Contra el Borrado de las Mujeres (Against the Erasure of Women), of which Trece Rosas is a part. We participated in the Latin American Contra Borrado de las Mujeres webinar and collaborated with Tribuna Feminista.
We have launched for a few years (and within the framework of a broader editorial task of our party) the collection of feminist books Trece Rosas. Throughout the year we have been translating texts that we consider essential for current feminist training, texts that will be published this year: one of them is The Pimping of Prostitution by Julie Bindel and the other, Pornland, by Gail Dines.
RRS: What does International Women’s Day mean for your organisation?
TR: On International Women’s Day we must honor the struggles of the women that came before us. On March 8, 1857, thousands of textile workers took to the streets of New York with the slogan ‘Bread and Roses’ to protest the miserable working conditions and demand a cut in hours and an end to child labor. It is a day of struggle and work and not of celebration, we have a lot to do and we are experiencing a backlash.
Susan Faludi described the 1980s as a reactionary time of undeclared war against women, but this time we are living is even more reactionary, with the additional risk that it hides the regression in a costume of progressivism. Two key characteristics we hold for feminism: feminists do not battle for individual achievements, but collective ones, and feminism must be internationalist. As Amelia Valcárcel once said, “a chain is how strong its weakest link is”. For us, it is a day to put the interests of working women at the forefront of demands, globally.
RRS: Do you have any projects around International Women’s Day, or this year, that you would like to share with our audience?
TR: In our country, queer theory has taken the entire field of the women's movement by storm and, consequently, the ruling party is carrying out a policy that is harmful to us. Unfortunately, the left has folded into queer theory and there are almost no organized spaces that propose to openly confront this situation. Trece Rosas will make a call aimed at recovering the political subject of Women’s Day, as we want all women who are willing to build a space to recover our rights to join.
We must build a space against that official policy that does not generate effective measures of protection against patriarchal violence and against the tendency of the left to give in to queer theory and postmodernism, a space where we can fight against prostitution, reproductive exploitation and all forms of violence, especially, to set limit on femicides.
You can learn more about the work of feminist collective Trece Rosas by visiting their website. Or follow their work on their social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter.