Caribbean Special Profiles of the Struggle
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Yildiana, and April in an endless struggle
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April Louis: “We are not as free as we should be”
April is a researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of the West Indies in Barbados.
“I think that the word “resilient” perfectly describes the women of today with whom I live and the women of olden times, the women of the 18th century who organized protests, strikes, and revolutionary movements. They had the strength to demand their rights in a context where discrimination and stigmatization were much more antagonistic to the idea of the liberated woman. “I think that the 21st century woman is fighting in a revolution daily. They say that we have rights and freedoms in the democratic and neoliberal paradigm, but the truth is that misogyny exists. The forms of control and marginalization are more subtle, but just as dangerous as they were in the past. Moreover, if you live in a developing country with a racist and colonial heritage, it is very likely that you still haven’t gotten these rights. Yes, we vote. But how many female politicians are there in our parliaments? Yes, we work. But do we get fair pay? The statistics tell the truth, we are not as free as we should be. “I like the word “resilient” because it symbolizes that women are strong and fight against all the challenges I mentioned, but we still have moments of weakness, of tears, of anger, and of failure. In the English speaking Carribean, there is a long history of women’s movements that worked to solve the social challenges they faced. We need a radical change in culture and politics to empower women. The roots of long-term empowerment are in the decolonization of the Carribean woman and the radical revolution of ideas of gender and sex.” |
Yildiana: “We need to be visible and have public policies that include us”
Yildiana Tatem Brache is a lawyer, researcher, and feminist in the Dominican Republic who agreed to give us an interview to give an update on the reality of women in her country and their main struggles. As an activist for women’s rights, she is currently the cofounder and coordinator of the “Magaly Pineda” Feminist Gathering.
“My evaluation of the role of women in modern society is that we are still in the same trap, the trap that despite the fact that women are in the universities, in the public sphere in all aeas, we still have to always be proving who we are, what we can do, and it continues to be construed as that the natural thing for us is to be in the private sphere, and we only can enter the public sphere through an intervention we make in order to gain it, as they always tell us, and by showing our potentials and abilities.” “A big challenge we have at this time is that they are going to pass a penal code, and we need to make sure they do not penalize abortion indiscriminately, but instead at least permit three exceptions, when there is danger to the woman’s life, when the product is unviable, and when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. “It seems obvious that nowadays women should have the right to decide if they continue with a pregnancy or not, yet in our country abortion is still penalized by law, we don’t have care policies, it continues to be a completely individual and personal responsibility. “Meanwhile, in these times of COVID 19, despite there are more than 250 thousand women employed in domestic service, which is not regulated in the Dominican Republic, all of the measures taken to help people employed in the pandemic didn’t consider or take into account this huge group of people, the majority of whom are women. As such we still need to be visible,and have public policies that include us.” |
¡Resistimos para vivir, marchamos para transformar!
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