Judith Butler @Biblioteca Vasconcelos

[website]

To be honest I know very little about queer theory but when I knew Judith Butler was coming to Mexico, I got myself invited to this event. This woman is an institution. It pretty much represents (along Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and a few other people) performativity and feminism theory.

Many intelligent things were said and I'm terribly aware I'm not that smart because listening to these women throw incredibly complicated words to each other seemed more like a word fencing match than a dialogue. By the time I thought about the meaning of the words, they had already moved on to another subject.

I'm totally aware there's another understanding to what they talked about but what I really enjoy is the fact that by being "ignorant" on the matter, I get to interpret what I want from certain contexts. Take for example the following term: Grievable Lives in regards to precariousness. Of course it rang a bell in the actual Mexican scenario not only today but as long as I can remember. Way back through my social service I imagined this neoliberal train of progress becoming so diametrically apart from our roots, that I always wondered what was going to happen to the people we were helping out then. Those indigenous, barefooted, weather beaten women left in a state of precariousness, without a sense of value upon their lives and progress. Whose lives qualify as such or are valued as such?

With the missing 43 students we have become aware around the fact that those who are lost or forgotten can't be mourned. Whether queer and gender were really the central issues in the conversation, I went to a different path as Leticia Sabsay uttered Resistance amongst Vulnerability. Butler pointed out solidarity being a possible discourse to fight back and also shared a powerful phrase with her graceful and almost performative hands:"We don't need to change the world but to change the idea of the world we live in."

Now, gender. In Mexico. Tough one. While this word in the US,in Europe or certain red circles here mean defiance or the fight for equality towards other discourses of desire, I immediately thought about what gender means for most of our people. I thought about femicides and violence towards our gender. About how being a woman in Mexico, means owning a body conceived as a territory that hasn't been conquered nor claimed (forget by our men) but by our own gender. We have left our womanhood in a state of precariousness and thus vulnerable to violence. To be undervalued if lucky, aprehended and killed serially when worth has ceased to exist and power is exerted with freedom of punishment.

My head pounded by the end of the discussions. I overheard the translator say that he was exhausted. This made me smile. Words like homolegality or pigmentocratic systems were tossed like frisbees to our ears.

One last word about the Vasconcelos Library. Beautiful. A modern version of the Name of the Rose, or my version, where I wished some books just flew from one side to the other, floating through the space between.