Not One Less: Mourning, Disobedience and Desire

210 Pages·2020·1.339 MB·English

by  Maria Pia Lopez

Not One Less
Critical South
The publication of this series is supported by the
International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs
funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Series editors: Natalia Brizuela and Leticia Sabsay
Leonor Arfuch, Memory and Autobiography
Aimé Césaire, Resolutely Black
Bolívar Echeverría, Modernity and “Whiteness”
Celso Furtado, The Myth of Economic Development
Eduardo Grüner, The Haitian Revolution
María Pia López, Not One Less
Pablo Oyarzun, Doing Justice
Néstor Perlongher, Plebeian Prose
Nelly Richard, Eruptions of Memory
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa
Tendayi Sithole, The Black Register
Not One Less
Mourning, Disobedience and Desire
María Pia López
Translated by Frances Riddle
polity
Copyright © María Pia López 2020
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3191-2 hardback
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3192-9 paperback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: López, María Pia, 1969- author. | Riddle, Frances, translator.
Title: Not one less : mourning, disobedience and desire / María Pia López
; translated by Frances Riddle.
Description: Cambridge ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2020. | Series:
Critical south | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Summary: “A first-hand account of the internationally renowned movement
protesting against femicide and violence against women”-- Provided by
publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019057554 (print) | LCCN 2019057555 (ebook) | ISBN
9781509531912 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509531929 (paperback) | ISBN
9781509531943 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Women--Crimes against--Argentina. | Protest
movements--Argentina. | Feminism--Argentina.
Classification: LCC HV6250.4.W65 L665 2020 (print) | LCC HV6250.4.W65
(ebook) | DDC 362.88082/0982--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057554
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057555
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Contents
Foreword – Natalia Brizuela and Leticia Sabsay vi
Introduction: The Tide 1
1 Mourning: All Victims Count 7
2 Violence: The Role of Crime 22
3 Strike: The End of the End of History 42
4 Power, Representation and Bodies: The Construction
of a Political Subject 68
5 Modes of Appearing: Language and Theatricality 110
Provisional Epilogue 146
Notes 150
Index 186
Foreword
Natalia Brizuela and Leticia Sabsay
Scholarly interest in women’s social movements is timely, given the
massive demonstrations led by women internationally in opposition
to the rise of the Global Right, the feminist mobilizations against
anti-“gender ideology” campaigns, and the performative afterlife
of #MeToo, #TimesUp and other hashtag feminist initiatives
traversing borders and cultural contexts. In Europe, the Polish
“Black Protests” against abortion restriction laws since 2016, the
huge rallies that accompanied Ireland’s vote for the legalization
of abortion in 2018, or the enormous demonstrations in Spain of
8 March, which since 2017 have accompanied the International
Women’s Strike, have made mainstream media headlines. In the
US, hundreds of thousands of women led counter-inauguration
rallies across the country on 20 January 2017 protesting against
the blatant misogyny of the new president and the foreseeable
attacks on already fragile reproductive rights. To this “lean
in” feminism, an intersectional collective responded with a call
to a “feminism for the 99 percent” on International Women’s
Day. These experiences, among others, have greatly contributed
to a renewed receptivity to feminist topics and theories by
non-specialized publishers and journals. In this context, authors
writing about the contemporary forms in which feminist ideals
and tropes have been captured and neutralized called attention
to the challenges raised by the renewed appeal of feminism and
re-encountered some new hopes as well.1
Foreword vii
This growing feminist trend has also provided an opportunity
for women’s movements and feminisms from the Global South
to acquire a new visibility and, to some extent, a long overdue
acknowledgment of their contributions. Visibility is, however,
a tricky business, since the terms in which it emerges are never
entirely straightforward. More often than not, neither those
social movements to which some visibility is granted nor their
(often self-instituted) spokespersons are in an easy position to
set the terms. The false notion that the transnational feminist
movement is some brand-new phenomenon, dating back to the
last three to five years, speaks to a temporal framing shaped by
a blind (and in many cases irritatingly white!) English-speaking
gaze from the Global North. Such temporality belongs to,
and relies on, a politics of ignorance furthered by academia
and publishers alike. To give but one example, Fraser’s recent
discovery of the potentiality of a popular feminist future sits in
stark contrast to her sustained dismissal of decades of black,
postcolonial and subaltern feminist work.2
The reframing of a social movement, rendering it more or less
visible or intelligible, is often marked by the social conditions
that obscured the movement in the first place. The fact that such
a tension is inevitable does not mean that it is not productive or
that it cannot be reworked in ways that disrupt dominant logics
of knowledge production and hegemonic narratives. And this is
precisely the kind of work done by María Pia López’s book.
Not One Less: Mourning, Disobedience and Desire tells
one of the possible stories of Not One Less – the Argentinean
women’s movement that emerged in 2015. To Latin American
feminists and Spanish-language readers more broadly, López
is recognized as one of the key activists and chroniclers at the
heart of what quickly became a widespread movement. Through
a first-person narrative, Not One Less offers an account of the
formative years of that movement as experienced by the author.
Through this first-person voice, López masters the embodied
writing for which many feminists have advocated. The author
embraces two distinct roles, crafting a plural-singular voice: on
the one hand, the body acting as part of a collective in the heat
of every battle and, on the other hand, the meditative scholarly
voice of the intellectual.
Not One Less emerged in Argentina as a collective affirmation
of life and bodily presence in the face of a rampant increase in
viii Foreword
brutal murders and gender violence. In late March 2015 a small
group of feminist activists and writers, María Pia López among
them, organized a reading marathon with the slogan “Not One
Less” at the National Library in Buenos Aires. At that time
López was the director of the National Library’s Museo del
Libro y de La Lengua (Museum of the Book and Language).
This reading marathon was not the first public event that linked
politics, performance and collective outrage. In April 2014 a
reading marathon had been organized in support of the national
campaign for free, legal and safe abortion. The 2015 event was
called to make femicide and gender-based violence a matter
of public concern, and the large crowd that gathered for the
mourning of individual deaths through a collective performance
set the stage for the years ahead and, more specifically, became
ground zero for the call to take to the streets to protest the
systemic war being raged against feminized bodies.
On 10 May 2015 a hashtag went viral: #NotOneLess. We
want to be alive. 3 June, 5 pm. The message brought together,
under a single slogan, a polyphonic multitude and a long anti-
patriarchal, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist feminist genealogy.
The collective scream of “Not One Less” was a reaction to the
growing number of brutal murders and forced disappearances
of cis and trans women that had risen exponentially to such
dramatic proportions that, on average, by 2015 in Argentina,
one woman was murdered every day. To the extent that femicide
had become an epidemic ignored by the state, Not One Less
began to articulate, on the one hand, a transversal fight against
gender-based attacks and, on the other hand, a counter-hegemony
against myriad forms of state-sponsored violence and neglect.3
The 2015 hashtag has now become a collective with chapters
throughout Argentina and beyond and has established alliances
of solidarity with other collectives and labor unions relating
gender-based violence to race, class and labor. These alliances
have articulated a heterogeneous spectrum of demands. As an
example, the second Not One Less march in June 2016 brought
forth demands both for the decriminalization of abortion and an
end to transphobia and for the rights of sex workers.
This heterogeneity is reflected in María Pia López’s crafting of
a plural-singular voice, where the sensory, the scholarly and the
activist have merged through decades of writing as both a scholar
and a public intellectual. Since the late 1990s she has authored
Foreword ix
academic texts as well as novels and essays. A professor, a
researcher, a writer and a militant, López has been pushing the
boundaries of academic writing for the last two decades. In Not
One Less, her activist research structures the fluctuation between
genres and authorial voices. As she asks in the Introduction:
Can a person write as an activist and as a theorist and critic at the
same time? Is agitation so as to question people’s wills and organize
antagonistic to the analysis of obstacles and limits? It would be
considered conflictive from the traditional conception of knowledge,
where supposed objectivity overlooks the practical, historic and
political conditions in which the very questions being studied here
emerged. On the other hand, exposing these conditions, situating the
questions to be answered among an archipelago of mobilizations and
practical dilemmas, shows us that our words are always dependent
on others’ words, our bodies and existences entwined with those of
others.4
In fact, López’s voice is more than her own; it depends on a
plurality of voices with which hers is entangled. It is an assem-
blage, but no less singular for that reason.5 Or, said otherwise, it
can be singular precisely because it is an assemblage.
This book is not alone. It lives in company with the contem-
porary writings of feminist voices from Abya Yala to India,
moving through Italy, Spain and France and back to Argentina.6
It is also in conversation with other insufficiently acknowledged
voices, such as when López discusses the feminist strike in
dialogue with the nineteenth-century French-Peruvian feminist
and socialist Flora Tristan – a figure somehow overshadowed by
the canonical name of Mary Wollstonecraft.
Honoring the transversal and transnational soul and history
of Not One Less, the movement for which it is named, Not One
Less is in dialogue with, and contributes to the construction of, a
collective “live memory, capable of continuing to produce unfore-
seeable meanings and territories,” as Virginia Cano and Laura
Fernández Cordero put it. As they rightly remark, depriving this
feminist revolt of an account of the “minoritarian genealogy of
women’s, feminist and LGBTQI social movements,” as well as
the sedimented memory of other radical mobilizations for social
justice (such as the movement that emerged in Argentina immedi-
ately after the 2001 financial crisis), not only diminishes the
success of Not One Less but also devalues its significance. And