Magui Bellotti’s Not Dead Yet talk
Magui Bellotti from Buenos Aires shares her notes for the Not Dead Yet Americas launch. You can also watch the video of the launch on YouTube here.
Translated by Estelle Disch
Good afternoon sisters and friends in the Americas and good morning to those in Australia. First of all, thanks and congratulations to Renate and Susan of Spinifex Press on the publication of Not Dead Yet and for 30 years or feminist publishing. It makes me happy to know that many of us older feminists are still alive and that our ideas, our passions and our struggles continue.
In my article I begin by saying that I came to feminism at the age of 29 during the genocidal dictatorship in Argentina. I brought with me many years of leftist militancy, my love for women, and a law degree thanks to the support of my mother and my older sister.
In those hard dictatorship years, surrounded by death, I embraced feminism, I fell in love, I stayed close to new and old friends, and I began to identify as a lesbian — no longer homosexual or bisexual. It was also in those years that The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo — those women who inspired us with their incredible courage and creativity—began their weekly protests in search of their children disappeared by the dictatorship.
During the dictatorship we formed small study groups — clandestine meetings in feminist women's houses — and after a few years, in 1982, seven women formed an autonomous feminist group: ATEM — Asociacion de Trabajo y Estudios de la Mujer November 25. My life partner Marta Fontenla and I were among the founders of this group. Marta also has an essay in Not Dead Yet and talks about these beginnings, our history, and the important role ATEM played in both the Argentine feminist movement and the Argentine women's movement. We united in common struggle with the broader women’s movement, even though we didn’t always share feminist ideas.
The main focus of our attention has always been violence against women and patriarchal terrorism. We quickly realized how the state terrorism of the dictatorship fed on male terrorism. The intersection of human rights and women’s rights became clear. This version of feminism, born and reborn in the midst of the struggle against the dictatorship, also appears in the article in Not Dead Yet by Consuelo Rivera Fuentes, a former political prisoner and lesbian, who talks about feminist women's groups created in Chile during the dictatorship of Pinochet.
From our connections with the Argentinean human rights movement, especially with the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and with the Relatives of Detainees Disappeared for Political Reasons, emerged our friendship with Argentinean Rita Arditti and her United States-born partner Estelle Disch. Estelle also has a piece in this book describing how she carried on Rita’s work after Rita’s death. We were introduced to each other by Reneé Epelbaun, an activist with the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, and we all became friends.
The intimate relationship between feminism and human rights, today made obvious in International Conventions, is essential to many of our struggles including: the abolition of prostitution; our demands for the appearance of women disappeared by prostitution networks; our commitment to legal reforms aimed at ensuring that the consent of the victim is not to be taken into account in crimes of trafficking and sexual exploitation; our commitment to penalizing pimps and johns (whom we call “puteros”); and the restitution of women´s rights and supports that will allow them to leave prostitution.
Our analysis of prostitution also includes its relationship to the imposition of heterosexuality understood as an obligatory institution for women and as a definition of femininity. Abolitionism, lesbian existence, and human rights are all part of the same theoretical and political perspective and are a vital commitment of ours. This perspective disagrees with patriarchal and neoliberal positions that claim prostitution as free choice or work, and also disagrees with those who separate lesbianism from feminism. This perspective also disagrees with the trend to symbolically disappear women in a proliferation of identities in which our struggles and our very existence as women are diluted. We maintain that women are neither objects nor merchandise, that prostitution is an extreme form of violence against women, and that lesbians are a necessary part of the long march of women towards justice.
Magui Bellotti is a lawyer, lesbian feminist, abolitionist and member of the group Asociación de Trabajo y Estudio de la Mujer (ATEM). She was an editor of the magazine Brujas and has been widely published internationally. Her most recent book is Prostitution and Trafficking: Tools of Abolitionist Struggle (2017).