Abstract
The chapter focuses on the feminist protest cycle against gender violence in Spain between 1997 and 2019 through a selection of case studies. It argues that these protests and their challenging of silenced stories are deeply rooted in Spain’s historical, socio-political and cultural context. Abolishing women’s rights was one of the cornerstones of Francoism and gendered violence was used systematically against left-wing women during Spain’s Civil War (1936–39) and the early years of the Franco dictatorship (1939–75). The chapter analyses the strategies employed by women’s rights activists by drawing on Rancière’s notion of ‘dissensus’ and mobilising Keck and Sikkink’s scholarship on transnational activism network; it contends that performance protests expose and challenge those cultural, social, and political norms and power relations that often remain invisible in a society.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Feminist organisations in these countries joined the Purple Friday protests and raised the alarm of a transnational feminist emergency by expressing solidarity with Spain and also focusing on locally based incidences of femicide.
- 3.
The manada rape case refers to the gang rape of an eighteen-year-old woman in Pamplona in July 2016, which elicited intense public scrutiny as it challenged the definition of rape under Spanish law.
- 4.
All translations are the author’s unless indicated otherwise.
- 5.
It needs to be acknowledged that the chapter is substantially informed by concepts of two male theorists, Bourdieu and Rancière, from outside the field of feminist theory and gender studies. However, despite the critique from some scholars that Rancière does not specifically theorize the ‘gendered, sexual, racial, colonial, and other forms of power that dramatically shape contemporary possibilities for dissensus and disruption’ (Sparks 2016: 421), I argue that his concepts of ‘dissensus’ and the interrelation of politics and aesthetics are nonetheless fruitful for the analysis of feminist performative protests. For an extensive discussion on Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ in the context of gender and feminist theory, see Moi (1991) and Adkins (2003).
- 6.
Orantes has become a symbol for many silenced stories of intimate partner violence and, recently, public space was renamed in her memory. While I was in Andalusia’s capital Seville in 2019, a street in the city centre was renamed Calle Ana Orantes and a memorial plaque denouncing gender violence affixed; Granada and Marbella followed suit shortly afterwards, and in the centre of Madrid, a green zone was named after her (Garrido Peña 2019).
- 7.
Towanda Rebel’s YouTube video had 90,000 views within a day (Veiga 2017). By the end of 2020, the video had had more than 330,000 views.
- 8.
Here Vallejo Nágera and Martínez wrote of the awakening of ‘crueldad’ in women, which could be translated as ‘cruelty’, but ‘fiereza de ánimo’ [fierceness of mind], given by the dictionary of the Real Academia Española (2020) as an alternative definition of ‘crueldad’, captures the spirit of what the authors were objecting to better.
- 9.
The historical memory movement is a grassroots movement that began in the late 1990s with the aim of recovering the previously silenced memories of Republican victims of the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, with a focus, from 2000, on the recovery of remains of the estimated 112,000 disappeared from unmarked mass graves throughout Spain. Consequently, in 2007 the controversial Law of Historical Memory was passed, followed by the passing of a further-reaching Democratic Memory Law–that includes a ‘gender perspective’–in September 2020 (RTVE 2020); its final wording was approved by the Spanish Cabinet in July 2021 (Junquera 2021).
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Hepworth, A. (2023). Representing Gender-Based Violence in Spain: Performance Protest, the #Cuéntalo Movement, and Purple Friday. In: Williamson Sinalo, C., Mandolini, N. (eds) Representing Gender-Based Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13451-7_10
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