8M: More than a Women’s March
On March 8th, women around the world participated in International Women’s Day (IWD). The day was first celebrated at the beginning of the 20th century as International Working Women’s Day, as evoked by International Socialist Women’s Conference in Copenhagen in 1910. In its early years, women who “celebrated” this day did so by marching, demanding suffrage rights, fair wages, and better working conditions. Since the United Nations began celebrating the day in 1975, however, the meaning of IWD began to shift in many parts of the world. The UN’s move to co-opt the day effectively stripped the day of its class connotations and gave the day a gendered focus that has lasted until now.
In many parts of the Hispanic world, IWD still remains a contested site. Feminist activists fight to maintain a radical tilt to the day’s “celebrations,” while gender organizations often have a different vision for what the day should look like. In this article, we look closely at Spain and Bolivia as examples of the conflicts and coalitions that make up feminist organizing for International Women’s Day.
[pullquote]In many parts of the Hispanic world, IWD still remains a contested site. Feminist activists fight to maintain a radical tilt to the day’s “celebrations,” while gender organizations often have a different vision for what the day should look like.[/pullquote]
In Bolivia, feminist activists have been preparing for IWD, or as they call it, “el 8M,” for months. In the midst of a global crisis of gender-based violence and increasing rates of femicide, the killing of women because they are women, feminist activists are using 8M to make demands for structural and cultural changes around the issue of violence. Activists rally in cities around the country, ring bells for victims of femicide, and perform “El Violador en Tu Camino” [the Rapist in Your Path], the protest song that originated in Chile last November and that has since been performed around the world.
One eco-feminist collective, Las Salvajinas, maintains the focus on workers in their call for IWD protests. Additionally, their IWD activism is tied up in a struggle against the right-wing coup that precipitated in Bolivia in November last year. This poster, posted to their Twitter page in the week leading up to March 8th, reads, “Great march for International Working Women’s Day/ In the face of ultra-conservative advances and the coup against the people/ Women in the struggle against capitalism, patriarchy, racism, the clergy, and fascism.” The indigenous woman in the image holds a Whipala, a symbol of indigenous sovereignty used across the Andes. Over the past several months, the Whipala has been burned by supporters of the coup in a symbolic expulsion of the country’s indigenous leadership.
In this way, 8M comes to signify a day of political struggle more broadly understood. Since March 8th itself fell on a Sunday this year, most activists called for marches, interventions, and strikes on Monday the 9th in order to interrupt the workday. Bolivian feminists are making it clear that 8M is not just a day on which men should congratulate their mothers and sisters and wives with flowers. It is a day of resistance against interpersonal and state violence. Bolivian women challenge the day’s co-optation by re-politicizing 8M and infusing it with anti-racist and anti-capitalistic meaning.
In Spain, the fight for a radical 8M is an uphill battle in a country where marches have typically focused more on white privileged women. Nadia Nadesan writes in her piece, “Making Space: Black and Womxn of Colour Feminist Activism in Madrid” that “during the huelga or the women’s strike on International Women’s Day demonstrations on 8 March 2018, womxn of colour were often invisibilized in terms of presence and discourse in the events leading up to and during the huelga.” While Madrid saw thousands of women arrive for the annual march in the capital city, it was not a march with as clear political messages as movements in Bolivia. As in other Hispanic countries, violence against women is a large unifying factor, but this does not create commitments to other causes like labor rights or inclusive immigration policies. There are various efforts in Madrid to tie 8M to institutional racism and the fight to maintain common spaces currently under fire from the newly elected conservative mayor. This Instagram post for the network of feminist collectives in Madrid advertises a protest against “institutional racism in the laws and the streets.” Smaller demonstrations lend politics to the day that is now characterized throughout the city by the spectacles of its marches or public art pieces. These large efforts, however, will only continue to perpetuate patriarchal systems if they continue to exclude the most marginalized women in Spain.
From Spain to Bolivia, Mexico to Argentina, activists will take to the streets singing the chorus to “El violador en tu camino”: El estado opresor es un macho violador [The oppressive state is a rapist.] The performance implicates all systems that allow for violence against women to take place everywhere from the factory to the home to the street. The question remains whether 8M can retain this inherently political stance amidst the power of corporate and state feminisms. Todavía estamos luchando cuando enfrentamos el violador juntas en la calle sin ningún otro apoyo que la comunidad.