One of the core themes for discussion in the Fearless Cities summit in Barcelona few weeks ago was the feminisation of politics. What it means to feminise politics has been largely written and discussed in Spain the past couple of years: when we speak about politics we mean any physical and symbolic structure where a group of people comes together to reflect, demand and act towards a common socio-political, cultural or economic objective. The debate, which is still developing, has some axes that can help us understand the difficulties of feminising politics without first transforming the political institutions and movements themselves from the inside through daily feminist actions in both public and domestic spaces. [...]
Even if this is a fundamental condition and first attempt at the process of feminising politics, it seems clear that there is a significant difference between the number of women that have a role of representation in political space and the power of decision and action that these women have de facto. The level in which women involve and participate in political debates connects with our historical underrepresentation in the public spaces. Feminism has taught us that it is not enough to reclaim more representation in institutions, we also need to reflect about the structural conditions of society that leave us underrepresented. That is why it is not enough to include more women in the structures that are excluding us “by nature.” We need to think instead about why and how they are doing it. Women need to be more represented but we also need to change the structure of institutions that from nature expels us. [...]
From a feminist viewpoint politics needs to follow a road that moves women out of the traditional social and political marginalisation. On the one hand, feminism is the legitimation of the increasingly active role of women in politics, and the response and patriarchal reactions against this shift. It needs to be used as structure and method and not as object or topic for discussion. This structure needs feminist references and emotional perspectives for the struggle of women and feminists demands. On the other hand, feminising politics also means bringing the responsibility for domestic care into the public sphere, with a double objective of demanding a shared responsibility in the tasks that historically have been assigned to women, and demanding a public debate that highlights the social responsibility of restructuring the domestic work, to avoid delegating it to women, and more specifically, to the most precarious women.
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