Between antimonuments and winged victories: memory practices of a feminist political language

Abstract

Since the 1970s in Mexico, feminisms have created diverse and unprecedented narrative and visual practices to investigate, denounce and address the violence suffered by our bodies. In this article I juxtapose actions, slogans, interventions in monuments and construction of anti-monuments to understand how practices emerge that manage to propose a form of political communication between diverse territories. These practices, which link claims and utopias, resonate spatially and temporally throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, creating mobile symbols of struggle against different types of violence and configuring a new ethical-aesthetic sphere in which their criteria of visibility are problematized and from the which we manage to activate multiple possibilities of community transformation. These symbols of life break with the enumeration of the names of the victims and the static classification of violent deaths because they weave a shared political language about the processes of dispossession and dispossession that we suffer. Through this analysis I hope to show how these practices move between a movement of denial and an inverse movement of affirmation: denial because they are dissident practices that oppose violent patriarchal and colonial systems, transgressive operations of an imposed disciplinary order; affirmation because they are not based on destruction, but rather they open spaces of possibility where before there was an impossibility or only frustration. They are memory practices that manage to enrich and strengthen a feminist political language.