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ME CUIDAN MIS AMIGAS, NO LA POLICIA

Annalisa Muscolo

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This video explores the relationship between feminist social movements and the police. The title of my video “me cuidan mis amigas, no la policia”, which is repeated in different forms in the entire piece, is one of the chants of the South American feminist movement Ni Una Menos. It powerfully conveys the idea that policing does not equal safety, but does instead mean danger and fear for many individuals. So if the police do not protect us who does? Well, my friends do it: the institutional inability to provide safety is addressed through a feminist collective response, which adopts feminist self-defence and actions, and relies on the support of sisterhood bonds and community-based protection. I tried to translate this dichotomy into my piece by opposing moments of clear police repression and moments of joyful feminist protests.

As my video represents some episodes of repression experienced by Non Una di Meno Torino, the feminist collective that I was part of, I wanted to focus my reflection on my experience with the police, which is informed and dependent on my positioning as a white cis woman. I believe it is relevant to notice that my subjectivity changes for the police depending on the context where I am inserted, which reveals both the oppression that I live as a woman but also the privilege of being a young white cis woman. The response that the police usually gives to feminist demonstrations reveals how patriarchal stereotypes pervade institutions too. These protests are considered less dangerous by the police, so they are less likely to repress the demonstrators with violence. This is dependent on the fact that feminist demos are imagined to be mainly composed by women and consequently are read through gender stereotypes. Women are weaker and less likely to respond violently, men’s role is to protect women; hence the police cannot repress feminist protestors as they do with antifascist and antiracist demonstrators. Paradoxically the police act humanely towards protestors because of patriarchy, producing a desirable effect for wrong and discriminatory reasons. However, most of the time, activists that organise and take part in feminist demonstrations are the same that fight in the front line during antifascist/antiracist protests, as people that are in feminist collectives are also antifa militants. In the context of feminist actions, women are considered as women and so treated according to patriarchal ideology; when the same people are part of antifascist groups, the category “woman” is temporarily suspended in favour of the “violent antifa” one, which exposes them to police violence in the same way as men. I want to stress that this is true for my experience in the Italian context where feminist collectives have still a majoritarian white presence. As police violence is also racist violence, they behave differently if the front line of feminist demos is mainly non-white.

Analysing police response, the recent storming of the United States Capitol made evident that police departments are packed with racists and fascist sympathisers that act differently depending on the class of individuals that organise a protest. This is not surprising as normative privileged bodies are protected by the police, while non-conforming and marginalised ones are policed, controlled, and eventually repressed with violence. Moreover, the police are not only non-effective in protecting women from sexist violence (sexual assault, rape… to the extent that many women do not report aggressions) but they are also often perpetrators. The recent case of the kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard by a Met police officer shows the intersection of patriarchal violence and police brutality and exposes the violence of the police as an institution, a place where sexism and misogyny are performed, reproduced, and alimented.

Police brutality and repression is part of the bigger problem of institutional violence, it is the enforcing department of a system that is structurally oppressive. This system has many means to police and control bodies and existences of non-normative or marginalised individuals (which are seen as dangerous as they embody an attack to the norm of the centre). One of its ways is repression of dissent: even though police bodies are (generally) softer with women that does not mean that feminist demos are never confronted with violence. Policing women’s and non-binary people’s presence in the streets is necessary as it threatens to reverse the order of the patriarchal system. Women taking over the public space disrupts the binary that associates femininity with the private and domestic sphere and masculinity with the public and the political. It is also the expression of anger, a feeling that women are not entitled to, as well as autonomy over their bodies and choices. Through the appropriation of the streets with the materiality of people’s bodies, feminist demonstrations become a space where individuals feel safe in revealing the absurd and socially constructed character of decorum and norms. People that fall outside traditional binaries or do not conform to social norms feel safe embracing their marginal existence and living it as revolutionary opposition to the system. This disruption of the order, both actual through certain actions and metaphorical, is dangerous for the established system and needs to be controlled and repressed.

The police do not need more power, as the Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing Bill (that the UK government wants to pass) is trying to give them; it needs to be abolished.

 

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