When a woman is the protagonist of an event, public discourse will focus on her body and her psychology, as an emanation at the service of male fantasy. Categorizing women as "monstrous" is a strategy of distortion of the facts and classic misogyny. In the same week, Donald Trump has called Greta Thunberg "crazy," "troublemaker," "angry," "enraged," and the top brass of thealt-right Catalan dedicated to Eva Piquer, who has presented her book Defamation, adjectives like "weak" or "furious." Why do they find an angry woman so threatening? Why this gesture of infantilizing women as if they weren't sovereign over their actions? The angry woman is an uncontrollable woman, insubordinate to the leader or the military logic of control. The angry woman organizes her arguments from strength and discourse, not from the attributes traditionally associated with women, such as compassion, discretion, or sentimentality.
Greta Thunberg had just been released from the Israeli maximum security prison KetziotShe arrived seriously, giving a speech that emphasized that the important thing wasn't her, but the thousands of Palestinians killed, condemned to starvation, or imprisoned due to the inaction of governments. Trump's paternalistic speech indicated that Thunberg needed to see a doctor because she couldn't control her "anger," her "madness." A woman who doesn't control herself is a failure of the system. John Berger tells Ways of seeing That being a woman meant being born to be kept by men in a pre-assigned space. Women must always contemplate and judge themselves, even when they cross the room or cry for their father's death. Women are the protégés, as Franco's regime used to say.
In 1900 the neurologist PJ Moebius wrote The mental inferiority of women, inspired by texts such as The normal woman, the criminal and the prostitute, by Cesare Lombroso. Likewise, conservative Victorian society invented "female hysteria" as a way to confine women to a category associated with illness, deviance, and worthlessness. According to George Didi-Huberman, hysterics suffer from reminiscences, that is, from poorly resolved traumas or painful memories. From this perspective, humans exert a double violence: imprinting a painful experience and, at the same time, blaming the sufferer for manifesting this imbalance, both physically and expressively. Hysteria was cured through procedures such as hypnosis, vaginal cleansing, or hysterectomy (the removal of the uterus). Thus, the supposed illness was inseparable from the woman's body as an instrument that men could use at will. We don't have to go back to the 19th century. Also this October, religious and political groups linked to the Madrid People's Party (PP) and Vox began to speak of "posturamento disorder," which supposedly included depression, anxiety, drug and alcohol use, and suicidal thoughts. This lie is part of the same history that Silvia Federici traces back to the 16th century, when there was a regression in rights over women's bodies. Guardianship responded to capitalist accumulation: women were to be an instrument of demographic reproduction, a source of labor. Doctors then replaced midwives; "uteri were transformed into political territories," says Federici. Thus we see how men have taken over the right to decide, not only about the description of women's bodies, but also about their manipulation.
Gisèle Pelicot was drugged and raped by her husband over a period of ten years, along with more than fifty men. All of them were brought to trial. This week, we also saw Pelicot return to court, as one of the defendants, Husamettin Dogan, appealed the sentence, saying he had been a "victim" of Mr. Pelicote. Gisèle's response was: "Victim of what? The only victim in this courtroom is me. Take responsibility for your actions and stop hiding behind your cowardice." In this context, the word victim takes on a whole new meaning. It is no longer what underlines the damaged, stained body, but the manifestation of a struggle to be able to judge the other, a struggle for the restoration of facts and language, and with it, dignity. Speaking, as Pelicot or Thunberg do, or writing, as many do, is important. Then comes promotion, the publicity industry, the henhouse... but this does not undermine the gesture of recovering the power to voice and denounce sexist abuses. Didi-Huberman himself, when studying concentration camps, emphasized that what the Nazis had created was a hell created by men to erase the language of their victims. The contexts are not comparable, but in all cases, the word is at stake. Preventing speech or erasing it implies accepting that this erasure can be used at will. That is why recovering language through testimony is fundamental. Thunberg and Pelicot don't blink when they speak, they avoid any complacent smile, they don't tolerate condescension or victimhood, they come from their determination, they are killjoys—as Sara Ahmed would say—; they reaffirm life by showing their willingness to consume themselves, to give themselves unlimitedly, to burn in sacrifice—as Bataille would say—; their strength lies not in exercising power but in declaring it trivial. A sacrifice that is anything but trivial, an exemplary sermon. If these witnesses impress, it is because they glimpse the pain from which they come and their determination to empty all their particular casuistry to elevate it to the general rank, there where the bodies of so many women are summoned, all the wounds that existed before me—to paraphrase Hélène Cixous and Laura Llevadot—of us. Why is a wounded woman who speaks clearly so threatening, to the point of asking for medical confinement? Any historical challenge is frightening, because while it cannot eliminate violence, it does gradually erode its foundations.
