Echoing metaphors of Stendhal’s “The Red and the Black” and “Les Miserables”; we attempt to understand today’s women’s march as a revolutionary historical moment.
From real meaning to symbolism, the colors of the world are changing day by day. Today the march is red; women around the world gathered embodying emotions, pride, and reason.
Today, women stand against despair of black and dark ages past, revived in an invigorated rhetoric of male domination, deluged in social and political mechanisms and institutions.
Today there is higher call. And, today is not a time adverb; it hints lastingness. The march is a signifier and the assembly is the revolution of a new identity. Today being a woman is not about sex or gender but an ideology; a romantic revolutionary idea strengthened by the power of reunion, animated and validated by the decantation of eras of injustice.
The march is only a trampoline to a fundamental transformation, a sparkle of human stance, fragilely positioned between what is and what should be. Red, a world about to dawn: Today women strive towards a larger goal; to no longer be the second sex. Today is not about a trivialization of women empowerment, a game played by some, confusing empowerment with rebellion or gender rivalry. Basic fact: feminism is about egalitarianism not supremacy. It is not about turning the establishment around; it is about becoming on a par.
Equality is about subjectivity, an identity, a self-concept, then come the rights. I am, ergo I have rights, that is the question. Today is about becoming a woman; it is about breaking up from the straitjackets of stereotypes. It is about understanding and deconstructing the processes of gender production, effects of a power which aims to create gender differences along lines with inequality. Today is about repealing and reconstructing belief systems and understanding how gender identity has been culturally and historically executed by institutions, dominated by men, and bound up to the question of power.
Red, the blood of angry women: Today is not about quantifying past and present under-privileges, enunciating objectification, undermining, offenses, aggravations, abuse, exploitation, rape, or murder. Today is not about the fetish but the real self.
Red, the color of desire: The color of a full throated chorus praising for an emancipated subjectivity; a revolutionary aspiration of a transcendental need materialized in togetherness, which hopefully won’t vanish into the same old power dynamic. Same old.
Red, the color of union: Woman is wolf to woman no longer. Designed to compete, with chauvinist interventionism and simmering misogyny, tamed to deliver, women are used to turn to each other. No more. That has started to turn into the biggest change of the era. Women’s battles are now about camaraderie not bellicosity.
Red, the color of the world: Women are no longer porous and permeable, divided and vulnerable. Women are sick and tired of having values eroded and tackled, living with imperiled rights, suffering practices of domination so anchored in social practices that can be hardly perceived.
Women rise in this post-truth times with ancient barricades, claiming the same rights. Only this time is for a different subject.
Originally published at medium.com