Meritxell Freixas | Santiago de Chile, (EFE).- Tenderness, proximity and not hiding one’s own fragility “are very feminine characteristics that great statesmen have” and that the Argentine anthropologist Rita Segato (Buenos Aires, 1951), one of the most influential in the current feminist movement, observe the personality of the Chilean president, Gabriel Boric.
“That spontaneous way of occupying the position that falls to him should not be easy for a young man. It deserves my trust ”, the academic was honest in an interview with EFE on the roof of the Municipality of Recoleta, near the center of the capital, where this week the Social Sciences Book Fair is being held, in which she participates.
Segato, who was invited by the president to his inauguration on March 11 of last year, highlights “the important role that women play” in the Boric Executive, but faced with his challenge to become the “first feminist government”, such And as she promised when she took office, the academic believes that “a long debate is needed on what is a vision of the world and a feminine politicism”.
“How should the state structure be reformed so that the State could be a caretaker and feminine?” she asks rhetorically.
“Retrieve the narrative of the process”
Segato was also in Chile in the final stretch of the “Approve” campaign of the plebiscite on September 4, to participate in a massive feminist act a few days before the vote in which a large majority rejected the proposal for a new Constitution that aimed to become the most progressive in the region.
“It is possible that, in some way, the Constituent Assembly distanced itself a bit from the experience of the people and from the reality and history of the nation,” he points out.
However, for her, “an error was to focus all expectations on a result” instead of emphasizing “the process”, which she considers to have been “extraordinary” and “unsurpassed in force” in Chile.
He also says that in this second attempt that is being carried out to write a new Constitution, he has detected “a very great difficulty” in creating another story that allows “recovering and strongly promoting the narrative of the process that, moreover, continues in course”.
A “bad business” for men
Recognized as a reference in the world for her research on gender violence, power in the patriarchal system and relations between gender, race and colonialism, she can often be heard in talks and presentations or read her opinions in the press.
“I really believe in what I am doing at that moment: naming what is in people’s experiences, but – for whatever reason – has not been named, and in doing so, flashes of awareness and lucidity are generated”, accurate.
“People – he adds – want reflection and search for vocabulary, but we need narratives that illuminate what is happening and help to understand it in order to change their lives, their relationships and their positions”.
Beyond the advances in discourses, themes, and the presence of women that the anthropologist –and also an expert in ethnomusicology– acknowledges, she is waiting for men to “understand” the patriarchal system that pigeonholes them in a “mandate of masculinity” that – ironically – is a “very bad business” for them.
The patriarchal system
“Patriarchy is a foundational, archaic order; it was the first form of extraction of surplus value, the theft of value, oppression and the first creation of a hierarchy of prestige and power that forces men to maintain certain attitudes and efforts”, he points out.
Without that “mandate”, she is convinced that even the new forms of war blamed on Latin American countries such as Colombia, El Salvador or Mexico could end because “there would be no recruitment of young people capable of killing to show themselves to be men, even though the risk to their lives be immense, because appearing macho is more important than living”.
However, and despite everything, Rita Segato oozes a certain amount of hope when she talks about the future because she has perceived first-hand, in her colloquia and conferences, “a masculine activism that seeks a freedom that men don’t have either”, and that confirms one of the key ideas of her speech: “The struggle of women is not for women, it is for all humanity.”