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Interpreting the Internet
Feminist and Queer Counterpublics in Latin America
By Elisabeth Jay Friedman UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96010-7
CHAPTER 1
Conceiving Latin American Feminist Counterpublics
On December 6, 1873, the founder of O Sexo Feminino and girls' educator, Dona Francisca Senhorinha da Motta Diniz, wrote an editorial in her three-month-old, path-breaking Brazilian women's periodical. In this editorial, also entitled "O sexo feminino," she informed men that women, given the opportunity, could be their intellectual equals: "We have intelligence equal to yours, and if your pride has triumphed it is because our intelligence has been left unused." She exhorted women to take up the arms her new endeavor provided: "From this day we wish to improve our minds; and for better or worse we will transmit our ideas in the press, and to this end we have O Sexo Feminino; a journal absolutely dedicated to our sex and written only by us. Avante, minhas patricias! [Onward, my countrywomen!] The pen will be our weapon." Speaking to both the men whose minds she sought to change, and the women she hoped to inspire, Dona Diniz charged into the public sphere. But she did so fully aware that she would need her own vehicle to propel her and her countrywomen's ideas forward.
As the work of Diniz and many other members of the keystone species of editors and publishers over the next century demonstrated, by the time the internet spread across Latin America in the 1990s, feminists had over a hundred years of experience constructing alternative media to achieve their own goals. In historical counterpublics, women learned how to shape media to their own ends, absorb and contest international ideas, and strategize how to achieve impact and inclusion in wider publics. Wielding pens, typewriters, printing presses, and, eventually, copiers and fax machines, these women laid down the foundations upon which late twentieth-century feminists would build their internet-enhanced communities.
Writing in their own and other periodicals, Latin American feminists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries steadily amassed their written arsenal, as increasingly well-educated professionals sought to contribute their passion and perspectives to social reform. But because of their political disenfranchisement — women's suffrage would not begin until 1932, in Uruguay, and took until 1961, in Paraguay, to extend across the region — and subordinate legal and social status, members of this keystone species helped to construct counterpublics centered in the distribution of their own writing and reinforced by face-to-face meetings. From these communities, they participated in general movements to improve social welfare, and their own movements to improve women's status. Given the limitations of a social system that left the vast majority of women and men at the bottom of a steep economic and racial hierarchy, the early counterpublics were largely inhabited by educated, lighter-skinned, middle-class and wealthy women. But their approach of using their own media to find each other, develop their ideas, and wrestle with the world around them would continue throughout the twentieth century.
Two international developments expanded these efforts in the 1970s. The UN Decade for Women (1975–85) and its three international conferences opened global opportunities for Latin American activists to engage with new ideas about how to confront their subordination. Simultaneously, they found their own countries' contexts converging. Military and military-backed governments unleashed a wave of fierce authoritarian repression to silence reformers and revolutionaries alike. Many governments also imposed an economic model rooted in fiscal austerity and free markets that displaced and impoverished millions of workers. In response, widespread movements mobilized to demand the protection of human rights and a transition to democracy.
To respond to these international opportunities and regional challenges, feminists built a powerful regional counterpublic. Its most tangible instance, the likes of which does not exist anywhere else, was the Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encuentros, or encounter-based mass meetings. Begun in 1981 and continuing every two or three years afterward, the Encuentros have been a space of learning and solidarity, yet are always riven by profound disagreements over the methods and direction of women's activism. But again and again, activists from across the region have come together to have those debates, which have expanded with the explosion of feminist principles and perspectives spanning racial, ethnic, class, ideological, and geographical boundaries. Throughout, they have relied on their own media to circulate ideas before, during, and long after the participants have turned the outcomes of their workshops, panels, and protests into extensive lists of conclusions and demands. The propagation of the ideas and fierce discussions from the regional Encuentros has, in turn, nurtured and challenged national and local communities. Latin American feminist counterpublics have grown through regional cross-pollination.
Feminist counterpublics in Latin America have relied on two forms of communication: the distribution of alternative media and face-to-face national and transnational opportunities to connect and strategize for change. These endeavors inspire each other. This chapter does not present an exhaustive exploration of either feminist media or regional organizing, focusing instead on illustrative examples and pivotal intersections. It begins with the founding of the first women's publications and transnational networks, and then profiles several alternative media projects created during the regional upsurge of feminist energies starting in the late 1970s. Just as their feminist descendants would incorporate and transform internet-based technologies based on their goals and values, these foremothers' previous alternative media strategies reflected their own objectives and ideas. As community media scholar Caroline Mitchell argues with respect to women's radio production, "feminist values tend to be central to both the production process and the content of what is produced." Although focused on different elements of counterpublic construction from different ideological perspectives, all of these projects encouraged regional solidarity. Such solidarity also spurred and supported the exceptional counterpublic space of the Encuentros.
The final section profiles three relevant international endeavors to connect women through alternative media, two of which directly influenced Latin American feminist counterpublics. The third was the first attempt to use a computer-based network to promote international women's rights: "Hotline International," meant to broaden participation in the United Nation's 1975 World Conference of the International Women's Year in Mexico City. This venture was not specifically directed by or at Latin Americans, and in fact effectively ignored the "heated confrontations" over class, sexuality, development, and politics among the diverse conference participants. Nevertheless, it offers a glimpse into the early problems and potential of computer-mediated communications for women's rights work prior to their expansion in the 1990s.
CONSTRUCTING COUNTERPUBLIC COMMUNICATIONS
In the nineteenth century (and even before), educated women of means created journals, such as Brazil's O Sexo Feminino, La Mujer (Chile), and El Aguila Mexicana (Mexico), that were foundational for early feminist counterpublics because they offered a platform through which women could discuss, debate, and publicize ideas largely absent in the male-dominated media. Due to their founders' lack of resources, the publications were often short-lived. But as their descendants would do decades later, these publishers, editors, and writers refused to allow scarcity to dictate outcome as they moved from one masthead to another in search of a venue. The historical record attests to their persistence: over two hundred women's magazines were published in Latin America before 1979. Across the region, the first generation of a feminist keystone species built the communications infrastructure for their counterpublics.
Although internationally connected, initial attempts at counterpublic communications interpreted ideas from the Global North through the reality of local and national environments. Activists eagerly read international feminist writings as they contemplated their own pathways toward improving women's status and rights in Latin America, and among them a "transnational, often multilingual network of print culture blossomed." Thus, the participants in this "transnational" conversation spoke in regional accents, with publications demonstrating collaborative cross-fertilization of ideas across Latin American countries. As in later periods, editors and writers often carried these ideas across borders along with their suitcases. Women such as the nineteenth-century Argentine writer Juana Manuela Gorriti, who spent much of her adult life in Peru, practiced journalism in more than one country; Gorriti herself founded both an Argentine and a Peruvian newspaper. Immersed in the realities around them, their feminist attention to circumstance was evident in the subjects they addressed — and how they addressed them.
As with feminist production in the United States and Europe, Latin American women's "literary-journalistic" activity blurred the "cherished boundaries" between a masculinized public and feminized private sphere: women wrote about domestic issues as well as their status in social, economic, and political life. They did so following their own set of priorities, driven by what historian Francesca Miller has termed their "different mission" from that of men. They focused on reforming legal and social conditions that impinged upon their ability, if not duty, to fulfill their roles as wives and mothers. Education, employment conditions, and social status, particularly women's rights within marriage and divorce, topped their agendas, as "they expanded the definition of motherhood to include devotion to the pen." However, crusaders like Diniz did not only focus on women's conditions; she herself used her pulpit to condemn Brazilian slavery. As times changed, writers and publishers followed suit. The over fifty feminist periodicals of the 1920s and 1930s — along with feminist contributions to other publications — reveal writers profoundly influenced by the politics of the day, including the growing anarchist, socialist, and conservative movements. Counterpublic communications reflected shifting contexts.
Even when focused on improvement from within traditional gender roles, women writers' violation of those "cherished boundaries" between their private lives and the male-dominated sphere of public expression struck a nerve. Their public activity elicited negative, often satirical, reactions from male journalists. One Argentine publisher even went so far as to distribute a fake women's magazine for the sole purpose of slandering La Aljaba, a feminist publication from 1830. Such reactions illuminated the importance of creating and maintaining counterpublics. Those assumed, and thus often forced, to be on the periphery of public life needed alternative ways of acquiring, processing, and presenting information. The women's periodicals of Brazil and elsewhere offered "mutual support and intellectual interchange" fundamental to counterpublic construction, even as they sought wider audiences for their ideas.
Face-to-face exchange nurtured and reflected the production of counterpublic communications. Some of this took place at tertulias or salons, where writers such as Gorriti would host discussions of literature, women's emancipation, and other issues of social reform. Through personal visits, others acted "as 'godmothers' to one another's organizations." They also sought to draw attention to feminist issues in regional scientific congresses, an effort culminating in the first regional feminist meeting: the International Feminist Congress, held in Buenos Aires in 1910. As with the publication of feminist periodicals, this presaged the explosion of regional and global opportunities feminists created in the late twentieth century.
Organizing in Latin America and reaching across the north/south divide, this generation of activists sought to bring the perspectives nurtured in their counterpublics into wider spheres of influence. For example, working together, organizations such as the Alianza Femenina Cubana (Cuban Feminine Alliance), the Consejo Feminista Mexicano (Mexican Feminist Council), and the National Woman's Party of the United States successfully pressured nascent Pan-American organizations to consider an Equal Rights Treaty in 1928 and to establish the Inter-American Commission of Women, a specialized agency of the Organization of American States responsible "for hemispheric policy on women's rights and gender-related issues." This unique intergovernmental agency gave feminists an insider position from which to influence regional governance. And advocates also were active at the international organizations of the League of Nations and United Nations. Both at the national and international levels, early Latin American feminist counterpublics supported the public-facing efforts of their members.
FEMINIST COUNTERPUBLIC COMMUNICATION AFTER THE 1970S
With the resurgence of feminist activism in the late 1970s, a new generation of the keystone species learned to support a diversifying set of counterpublics by producing and distributing their own publications. Between 1980 and 1990, this generation founded another two hundred women's magazines, many of which were outspokenly feminist, located in nearly every Latin American country. Instead of the brief lifespans of earlier publications, these had staying power, finding an eager audience in women across the region who were coming to feminist consciousness in local and national counterpublics. Moreover, new women's organizations, including some that produced regular publications, were committed to sharing their information in order to nurture feminist community and/or reach larger publics. Magazines including the influential fem, widely distributed mujer/fempress, and news service CIMAC circulated feminist perspectives on issues ranging from violence against women, to sexuality, to economic development. Both regional realities and international opportunities heavily influenced the construction of this communications infrastructure for local, national, and regional counterpublics.
Although Latin American feminists had begun to organize regionally by the middle of the twentieth century, their regional orientation took off with the traumatic dislocations of the 1970s. Waves of authoritarian repression, neoliberal economic models that increased inequality, and ongoing struggles against patriarchal and homophobic social mores showed many that they had much in common — as difficult as building alliances across class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and geography would prove to be. As fem's foundational documents argued, "the struggle of women cannot be conceived as an issue delinked from the struggle of the oppressed for a better world." Latin American feminists understood their efforts as being joined to other work for social and political transformation.
But when progressive women sought to take part in the region-wide struggles against inequality, whether through socialist parties, guerilla organizations, or leftist movements, many became deeply frustrated with the subordination of women's to workers' liberation in both theory and practice. Women frequently found their ideas and actions slighted by left male leadership. One outlet for their frustration was paradoxically created by the impact of political displacement. Those fleeing the fierce authoritarianism of military- and military-backed governments in the 1970s and 1980s traveled to Mexico or Europe, where they were exposed to other feminist ideas. There, some joined alternative media outlets, where they sought to draw attention to their home countries. As with earlier generations, shared political experiences encouraged regional feminisms, which were reflected in regional and international periodicals.
At the same time, the UN Decade for Women (1975–85), with its three global conferences, increased the transnational connections of Latin American counterpublics beyond anything they had experienced in the first half of the century. The location of the United Nations' 1975 International Women's Year conference in Mexico City inspired discussion of feminism across the region, and especially in Mexico. Moving on to the World Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women (1980), and culminating (for that time) at the World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the UN Decade for Women (1985), these conferences provided some political "shade" for Latin American feminist organizing. Even the authoritarian governments that restricted political activity in general sought international recognition through their lip service to women's rights issues (if not their fulfillment). When their governments came together to negotiate positions on women's rights and status at the official conferences, feminists sought to articulate their own positions and fought for space at the table. In nongovernmental forums linked to official processes, they participated in strategy sessions and debates with women from around the world. Participants brought home ideas and tactics to their national and local counterpublics, but those who could not attend still could engage by reading accounts and analysis in feminist media outlets.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Interpreting the Internet by Elisabeth Jay Friedman. Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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