Fourth-wave feminism in Spain

Much of the study of feminism uses Anglo-Saxon models of discourse. According to Italian academics like Rosi Braidotti, Gianna Pomata and Paola di Cor, this model can be problematic in the context of Mediterranean feminism as it ignores specific cultural baggage for women from the region. To compensate for this, Pomata suggests further elaboration of socio-historical context be given to properly situate this feminism in a broader global context. These models are also particularly problematic in a Spanish context as they fail to address the very nature of Francoism that sought to purge all female identity from society through forced assimilation legitimized by fear and violence. Fourth-wave feminism in Spain began in the mid-1990s. When resolving waves around the work of important Spanish speaking feminists discussing wave theory like Amelia Valcárcel, the Spanish fourth-wave may at times actually represent an international fifth wave, not a fourth one. First-wave '', a magazine published by the organization of the same name. The organization would be an important first-wave Spanish feminist group during the Civil War. in 1917. Margarita Nelken, María Martínez Sierra, Carmen de Burgos and Rosalía de Castro were all important pre-Republic writers who influenced feminist thinking inside Spain. First-wave Spanish feminism was about women assisting other women in improving their lives. Spanish first-wave feminism drew from eighteenth century with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Feminism and socialism continued to have a fraught relationship during the early Francoist period. Feminism moved from being out the individual to being about the collective. It was during this period that second-wave feminism came to Spain. Spanish second-wave feminists were mobilized in this wave around three primary issues: sexual harassment, sexual assault and prostitution. Women were repressed because they were viewed as interchangeable parts of a social contract focused around make desire. Like many other western countries, this movement defined feminism as a social, political and cultural movement. Spanish third-wave feminism was the result of high-profile quarrels among leftist women and increasingly involvement of male dominated political organizations. This new wave of feminism was both similar and notably dissimilar to their American counterparts of the same name by being more explicitly socialist and politically focused on class in their orientation. Third-wave Spanish feminism focused on the autonomy of women in their ability to define their own priorities and strategies. The major organization in the wave's early history was Frente de Liberación de la Mujer, which was founded in 1976 in Madrid. Other third-wave feminist women founded Partido Feminist (PF) and Seminario Colectivo Feminista, an organization founded in 1976 as a result in a split inside PF. According to A. Valcárcel, "Without a recognizable feminist past, having suffered like the whole country the ablation of memory, we supplied ourselves with varied sources but it helped us a lot not to miss the very magnitude of the objectives we were facing." Third-wave feminism process wise was often about self-criticism. This process nearly destroyed feminism as a movement in Spain. == Themes ==

Spanish feminist authors Pilar Aguilar, Luisa Posada, Rosa Cobo and Alicia Miyares all agree that Spanish feminism has moved into a fourth-wave. Fourth-wave feminism is fragmented, and is not monolithic. This has forced the movement to be a space where feminists need to engage in dialogues with others and to acknowledge other points of view while everyone works towards overcoming patriarchal systems. Violence against women One of the most unifying elements of Spanish fourth-wave feminism is sexual violence. Sara Berbel says that patriarchy condones sexual violence against women, as a way of forcing women to go back to the home. In 2004, 74 men were convicted of killing their female partners. Male voices are viewed as important in the fourth-wave. Sexual violence and sexual assault can only be reduced in Spain if men question traditional Spanish masculinity that says this is acceptable. Men's voices going silent is viewed by Spanish fourth-wavers as being silent accomplices. Abortion The Council of Ministers announced a plan on 14 May 2009 to change Spain's abortion laws, allowing women to have abortions without a stated reason up until 14 weeks, and with the reason of fetal abnormalities or risk of physical or mental health of the mother up to week 22. The age of majority to make the decision to have an abortion was to be 16, and the law would make clear that no woman could be sent to prison for having an abortion. This was approved by the Plenary Congress on 17 December 2009 by a vote of 184 in favor and 158 opposed. It was then passed by the Spanish Senate on 24 February 2010, with 132 voting in favor, 126 voting against and 1 person abstaining. Following feminists success in modifying Spain's abortion laws in 2010, they were again met by a wall of patriarchal anger. Women's voices A particular concern of fourth-wave Spanish feminists is the credibility of women's voices. The assumed lack of credibility of women speaking out means that women are disadvantaged when reporting sexual harassment gender violence or sexual assault. This lack of credibility is viewed by fourth-wave feminists as endangering the lives of women; they are unable to turn to state institutions for protections. The judiciary frequently does not trust women's voices. According to Varela, this is because "they consider that we have to show that we have defended ourselves tooth and nail [or that] we even have to go with our heads under our arms to make us believe that we have been attacked." The term surrogacy () is not used in feminist communities. Government documents range between using "rented wombs", "surrogate motherhood" and "gestation by substitution". Political leanings of the media impact their preferred usage, with ABC using Vientre de alquiler much more frequently and El Mundo instead using Gestación subrogada. Fourth-wave Spanish feminists reject the concept of surrogacy. They see the practice as the capitalizing of female bodies for the benefit of men. Wage and economic parity The Barcelona-based group 50a50 and the #Onsónlesdones initiative both were part of fourth-wave feminist movements to address issues around wage parity women face. They are comparable to Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In movement. 53.2% of members of the legal profession are women. Most do not gain positions of power within this system. This represents a broader problem, as Spain's constitution is celebrated for the rights Spanish women acquired but no women were involved in the process of writing the 1978 Spanish Constitution, nor were women consulted about what their needs and how they could be addressed in such an important legal document. As of 2019, Spanish women have also never been leaders of any of the major Spanish political parties. == Influences ==

Andrea Dworkin has been a major influence on fourth-wave Spanish feminists, especially during the period of the late 1990s and early 2000s when many people had assumed feminism as a political movement in Spain was dead. In a 2000 interview, she said, "In feminism there seems to be no plan, no political organization. That has been the biggest gap between other feminists and me. I believe that the feminist movement is a political movement, and a political movement has objectives and strategy, and advances, and sometimes suffers defeats, but then it continues. A large number of women felt very good about discovering things they had not known before about the history and lives of women, but they were not prepared to strategically decide what we have to do, what we want and how we do it." We should all be feminists was translated into Spanish in 2016. Malala Yousafzai and Nawal El Saasawi are also popular authors among younger fourth-wave feminists in Spain. == History ==

During the 1980s, conservative figures emerged around the globe that challenged gains women had made in the previous. This included figures such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Their ideology would feed later ultraconservatives decades later including Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump, who accuse feminists of indoctrinating women with what they call gender ideology. Spanish fourth-wave feminism started during the 1990s, as lipstick feminism and consumerist feminism was slowly starting to come to an end and as Spanish feminist were rejecting queer theory espoused by American academics. Fourth-wave Spanish feminism developed slowly, globally using the Internet as a mode of communication. The movement traces its roots to the murder of Ana Orantes in Granada on 17 December 1997. This early fourth-wave Spanish feminism was around using television and newspapers as the primary social network. Early on, this new wave started rejecting academics like Judith Butler and other queer theorists, who during the late 1990s and early 2000s sought to erase women as political subjects by reframing everything as gender, by hiding the fact that aggressors against women were men and excusing men for their violence and oppression of women, of hiding the existing of lesbians, bisexuals, transsexual and asexual women as specific groups of oppressed people. Fourth-wave Spanish feminism is about reclaiming the word woman, and reclaiming the importance of the sexual and reproductive organs of women. Spanish fourth-wave feminism, borrowing heavily from socialist feminist, reject Butler's postmodern feminism that suppresses female identities and relies on academic theory over street activism. The beginnings of this wave in this period were already taking place in Latin America, Poland and Argentina. Over the next five years, coverage of the topic of violence against women would continue in the media. The Tani case, where a woman who was granted a pardon for a prison sentence in October 2000 as a result of her killing her abusive husband. This sparked a nationwide conversation about gender violence. Castilla-La Mancha President José Bono stepped into the discussion by suggesting the regional government should publish a list of all men convicted of killing their girlfriends and wives in order to further protect women. He continued to debate this issue in the media into January 2001. Organic Law 1/2004 of Comprehensive Protection Measures against Gender Violence became the center of focus for many Spanish feminists in this early period, marking another important moment in this wave. Social media would have an amplifying effect as the fourth-wave feminist movement began to grow. Women's mobilization also challenged for the first time, the legitimacy of Spain's judiciary, whereas in previous waves the focus had been more on political leadership and acts of the legislature. Mobilization by this wave would have the unintended impact of putting feminism at the front and center of the 2019 Spanish general elections, with feminists clashing with the male anti-feminism espoused by Vox. Marta del Castillo 17-year-old Seville resident Marta del Castillo disappeared on 24 January 2009. Her disappearance attracted national media attention. By 29 January, friends, classmates, neighbors and strangers had been mobilized on social media to solicit information to locate her and created montages to remember her. A video on the social network Tuenti received 10,000 visits within days. Police went into lock down, suggesting that the girl had left voluntarily. Women in Seville took to the streets following the murder of Marta del Castillo. People came from several cities and autonomous communities in Spain, some who were families of women who had also been victimized in similar ways. During the protest, del Castillo's family demanded that the trial of the accused be repeated. Partido Popular Minister of the Interior and former mayor of Seville Juan Ignacio Zoido was among those taking place in the march. Vox spokesman in the Andalusian Parliament Francisco Serrano also participated. Sandra Palo's mother María del Mar Bermúdez also participated in the march. Gallardón's proposal would have limited women's freedom to obtain a legal abortion. Opponents to the law believed the existing law gave women autonomy and freedom of conscience. They characterized Gallardón's proposed modifications as "cynical" and "malevolent". On social media, opponents to the changed used the hashtag #mibomboesmio. In taking to the streets, some women were beaten by the police, who reacted with violence to their protests against the law. 7N (International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women) On 7 November 2015, Madrid hosted the first ever protest in the country against sexist violence. The march saw women demand the abolition of prostitution that punishes the woman, and demanded that surrogacy not be made legal as it was little more than making wombs available for rent. The march took inspiration from the 8-M protest earlier in the year, and reminded people that 44 women had been killed by their partners so far that year. Protesters included young women, student groups, unions, pensioners and members of feminist collectives. Dressed in purple, women protested in Barcelona, Seville, Santiago, Zaragoza, Madrid, Bilbao, Mérida, Badajoz, Cáceres, Logroño, Las Palmas, Tenerife and Mallorca. They also demanded the Istanbul Convention (European agreement on gender violence) and the recommendations of the CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women) be implemented. Shortly after the news of her disappearance was released, feminists took again to the streets and went to the media to denounce the machismo nature of the alleged crime. A protest took place in Madrid on 7 April 2018, starting at the Puerta del Sol at 11:00 AM, which from there went to Cibeles and then on to the Congreso de los Diputados. It was promoted by the sister of Diana Quer, Valeria Quer, who said, "I need your support, we are going to do it together. Because, from one day to the next my sister was murdered and as it happened to me, it can happen to anyone. Let's fight for a safer society. I need you." Valeria Quer would later join other protests, including in La Manada case, in support of judicial justice for victims of machismo and sexist violence. Feminists in 2019 were fighting to see murders with victims like that of Diana Quer being counted by the state as gender violence; her murder was not counted as the man who committed it was a stranger. 8 de Marzo (International Women's Workers Day) . The fourth-wave became visible as a broader social movement because of 8 de Marzo, International Women's Day. Political philosopher Jule Goikoetxea further explains, "it is necessary that there are non-mixed spaces", where "women, in this case, can empower themselves and organize themselves to become a subject political, as men are already." On 8 March 2019, Spanish women held their second general strike as part of International Women's Day events. La Manada gives a presentation about sentencing for La Manada|left La Manada (the wolf pack in English) was one of the most important events in Spanish fourth-wave feminism. They also intersect with broad Hispanic feminism and Argentina's #Miracomonosponemos. The social pressure brought by feminists against the judiciary resulted in 750 Spanish magistrates filing a complaint with the Consultative Council of European Judges. They felt the attitude in Spain, following the court's decision on the La Manada case, had led to a climate where they felt like they could be subject to public lynchings and where judicial independence was under threat. == Social networks ==

Fourth-wave feminism utilizes a number of digital platforms including YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and personal blogs. Podemos Deputy Ángela Rodríguez explains the importance of hashtags as part of feminist institutions, "Among other things, because many times we live them as women in the first person, I have published tweets with all those hashtags without going any further." She goes on to say they help in setting legislative priorities, It is inevitable, we have as an absolute priority to finish our law of sexual liberties and against sexual violence, because much of what these hashtags speak is about impunity in these cases. [...] We celebrate the turn that in recent years has achieved the politicization of many women in the first person through networks and feminism, this is a revolution, a fifth feminist wave that has its first impulse in these hashtags and in Spain." Hashtag statistics In just eight days, the #Cuéntalo tag was used 3.5 million times. This compares to 17.5 million uses of #MeToo over the course of a year. == References ==