by RAQUEL GUTIERREZ AGUILAR
On March 8, International Women’s Day, we’ll return to the streets to condemn the multiple forms of violence that rage against our bodies. We’ll come together to continue to forge justice, a process at once uncomfortable and life-affirming. And together, we’ll take the time to feel our collective strength.
The old world is dying. The patriarchal, capitalist and neocolonial structures that have governed individual nation states and the international order over previous decades have ruptured.
A group of male millionaires, many old and some younger, is destabilizing the old scaffolding. They are interested only in increasing their holdings and profits. In order to do so, they can draw on immense military power.
Let’s call this group of conmen, who are intensifying the war against women, against gender dissidents and migrants, against territories and against minimum material guarantees for the conditions of social reproduction, the “chainsaw gang,” after the phallic instrument they wave around as a sign of their contempt for life, for rights, for women and for dissidents. The chainsaw gang is pathetic, ridiculous and, unfortunately, very dangerous.
Members of this gang include rulers like Javier Milei, Nayib Bukele, Daniel Noboa and, of course, Donald Trump. They believe that everything from the natural wealth of vast territories, to the bodies, dreams and diverse peoples that inhabit the world, exists only for their service and enjoyment. Their arrogance is as vast as the fortunes they possess.
Through their assertion that there are only two genders, they have set in motion a revanchist process of colonization. In doing so, they ignore the overflowing of historically fixed gender roles, a process led by the diverse multiplicity of bodies that we are, and which have mobilized intensely in recent years. As Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui explains, reinstalling the monopolization of “naming and norming” is at the core of the colonial process, which is what excluding everything that exceeds and challenges gender binarism attempts to do.
Banning anti-racist education, as is happening today in the United States, as well as striving to erase the memory of recent and earlier anti-racist and Indigenous struggles, is another step in the colonial and capitalist restoration of a patriarchal order in decline. The actions of the chainsaw gang expose the fear felt by its members and their followers in the face of destabilizing mass movements that have erupted over the past decades.
In countries like Colombia, Bolivia, Chile and Mexico, where voters have expelled the most delusional versions of right-wing corporate governments from power, those who govern continue to plunder territories and encourage militarization. The rulers who today claim to be left-wing also ignore and deny the rights and desires of women. They have been unable to break with economic models based on extractivism and sweatshops that prey on the fabric of life and undermine the possibility of dignified life.
There is a transparent need for an internationalist, anti-racist and anti-militarist trans-inclusive feminism that takes a stand against the advance of the far right and war, that is critical of the left-in-power, and that firmly supports migrants.
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