Choreographed Resistance: Feminist Solidarity Against Gender-Based Violence Through "Un violador en tu camino" and the Civic Imagination (2 of 2)
/Andrea Alarcon, Paulina Lanz, and Rogelio Alejandro Lopez
The imagined community of latinx sisterhood
This sense of commonality calls to mind Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities,” an idea that describes how the mass proliferation of media artifacts can delineate and then replicate our "imaginary" of the nation state — our sense of what a state is and what it means to belong to it. Through maps, mainstream media, and museums, people create a collective identity of being “Chilean.” Latin America, due to shared history, language and religion, has historically cultivated its own imagined community. At a regional level, scaling from the national, it replicates an imaginary community through other types of artifacts: mainstream popular culture such music, cinema, literature, television but also, often in counter-cultural artifacts involving class struggles and social movements, in this case through a choreographed musical performance.
If the current boundaries and maps of the world were a product of a patriarchical claiming of land, then pushing back across borders becomes a feminist fight. Scholar Jacqui M. Alexander (2005) brings together politics and sexuality through a transnational feminist approach. It juxtaposes neocolonialism to neoimperalism, contesting different cartographies of feminist struggle, moving from a local order to a global option (Alexander, 2005). Though women in Latin America have different social formations, solidarity works as a cultural relativist practice, as an ideology. Transnational female solidarity goes beyond the focus on the body, and moves instead towards using the body in acts of protest, especially as a collective medium. Hence, this performance takes the form of a solidary body practice that expresses the dynamics of the social, cultual, and political relations of a transnational — and postmodern — imaginary of America.
“Is the violence you DON’T see.”
The imaginary no longer responds to America — that which Christopher Colombus "found" — but to the collective threat of heteropatriarchy, where bodies are reconfigured from the domestic sphere to the public sphere, collapsing geographical boundaries into a hypervisible and re-imagined American sisterhood.
“Is the violence you CAN see.”
A crowdsourced map tracks the spread of "Un violador en tu camino" across the world. Here, we see the visual representation of its impact across Latin America.
Re-imagining discourse
"Un violador en tu camino" is a great example of how the civic imagination can work not only outside of the US, but across nations to address issues that impact communities at a global scale. Specifically, “Un violador en tu camino” brings people together through cultural practice — a choreagraphed performance — to challenge a toxic discourse that too often places blame on the victims of sexual assault, instead focusing on the role of perpertrators, the state that does not prosecute, the police that does not arrest. The patriarchal culture that created and maintains control dismisses the wellbeing of women while excusing the harmful behavior of men. The World Health Organization considers violence against women to be a clear violation of human rights and a public health concern due to its global pervasiveness: nearly one in three women across the world will experience some form of physical and/or sexual violence within their lifetimes, most often perpertrated by an itinmate partner. Thirty-eight percent of all murders of women are committed by an intimate partner, and is considered an issue of "epidemic proportions,"
Beyond the civic imagination as a first step towards imagining alternatives to the current social and political order (often specifically to address issues that appear to have no solution), the work at Civic Paths has identified specific functions of such an imaginative approach that are worth considering when looking at this case. They include: imagining a better world, imagining the process of change, imagining ourselves as civic agents, forging solidarity with others with different experiences from our own, imagining our social connections with a larger community, and bringing an imaginative dimension to our real world spaces and places (Jenkins, Shresthova, Peters-Lazaro, 2020).
First, “Un violador en tu camino” arguably encourages women to imagine themselves as civic agents through a shared cultural practice — a choreographed performance denouncing violence against women — bypassing the sense of powerlessness on the issue (a.k.a. what Duncombe calls "tyranny of the possible"). “Un violador en tu camino” may be considered "thin and symbolic" in terms of Zuckerman's "Levers of Change" model, meaning the performance has relatively low participation costs (time, energy) and its outcomes are cultural rather than institutional or legislative (Zuckerman, 2014). Its outcomes are what Earl (2004) may call "discursive" or cultural, since part of the aim (beyond building solidarity) is to change the public discourse — literally how the issue is discussed in everyday life, media, and politics. One desired outcome would be changing the prevalence of victim blaming, for example. Furthermore, the "thin and symbolic" designation may allow political newcomers to easily partake and see the bridge between culture and social change — arguably generating a sense of civic efficacy, the idea that one's actions can have observable outcomes in the world. In this case, the visible outcomes of partaking in “Un violador en tu camino” are seeing like-minded women come together and collectively demand visibility through the use of physical bodies occupying space, to hone-in on gender-based violence.
Second, the international spread of “Un violador en tu camino” allowed for the forging of solidarity amongst diverse groups and it facilitated an international sense of community otherwise not possible at local levels. Initially in Chile, the performance fused ongoing protests surrounding increasing transportation costs with grievances pertaining to gender-based violence. This brought together women of all walks of life, as gender-based violence cuts across socioeconomic status. Soon after, “Un violador en tu camino” spread to other Spanish-speaking nations in Latin America, countries bound together by the before-mentioned imaginary but otherwise culturally and politically distinct — a powerful gesture of solidarity among women across the region. Eventually “Un violador en tu camino” was translated into various languages, reaching the United States and Europe, and well beyond. In addition to serving as a powerful international show of solidarity with the country of origin, Chile, it also facilitated a kind of international feminist community (however ephemeral).
The song scaled: while we had to look up the Carabineros when we heard the song, singing it from Los Angeles still made sense in our context, as we sang it to a United States president who is the embodiment of what the song decries. The continent is mostly democratic, so the institutions highlighted resonate: the police, the courts, the state. More importantly, through the ease of participation, women who may not have considered progressive gender social movements were suddenly exposed to in their social media feeds. While not without its own critiques, global sisterhood has explained how women can come together through feminism — and in the case of violence against women, a problem so vast and pervasive, such a lens may be needed. Is "Un violador en tu camino" an instance of global sisterhood? Perhaps. At the very least, the spread of this cultural performance allows us to apply the idea of civic imagination beyond the US, shedding light into the non-traditional pathways towards social change across the globe.
Andrea Alarcon's interests lie in the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and Cultural Studies. She is particularly interested in studying the appropriation of social media platforms in developing countries as gateways to the web, and transnational, online labor cultures. She received her MSc degree from the Oxford Internet Institute, and her BSc in online journalism from the University of Florida. She also worked as a Research Assistant with Microsoft Research's Social Media Collective. Before academia, she worked as a web producer and editor for the World Bank, and in social media for Discovery Channel in Latin America.
_______________________________________-
Andrea Alarcon's interests lie in the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and Cultural Studies. She is particularly interested in studying the appropriation of social media platforms in developing countries as gateways to the web, and transnational, online labor cultures. She received her MSc degree from the Oxford Internet Institute, and her BSc in online journalism from the University of Florida. She also worked as a Research Assistant with Microsoft Research's Social Media Collective. Before academia, she worked as a web producer and editor for the World Bank, and in social media for Discovery Channel in Latin America.
Rogelio Alejandro Lopez is PhD candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, where his work centers on social movements, civic media, and youth culture. His dissertation is a comparative look into the role of media strategies and cultural production in developing a “civic imagination” among contemporary youth social movements.
Paulina Lanz is a PhD Student in Communication at USC. She identifies in buildings and in urban places a source of memoirs and nostalgia. Cities have led her to research in a convergence among culture and media studies at the hand of film. The theoretical immersion to space and cultural studies through an aesthetic perspective has been a stimulus for developing an interdisciplinary commitment from former disciplines to present endeavor. The object takes on a new meaning while researching buildings as media, an emerging mechanism to focus storytelling through spatial remembrance, as a blueprint-incepted testimony. Paulina is a member of the Civic Paths group and involved in research in the Skid Row and Homeless Connectivity Project, and the Mobile Devices Global Mapping Project. She is a founding member and organizer of Critical Mediations, a Communication and Cultural Studies Conference.
