SATURDAY OCTOBER 28th: WORKSHOP 2 10h-13h (Porta Pratello)
This workshop co-organized by Transnational Migrants Coordination (TMC) and Essential Autonomous Struggles Transnational (E.A.S.T.) presents a discussion on the reproduction of our life. We want to start from the material conditions of life under the current racist, patriarchal and capitalist oppression, meaning the different and hierarchical conditions in which we are forced to work and live; the racist migration policies deciding who survives and who dies at borders, as well as who wastes lives in camps and detention centers, and works for the lowest wages under the blackmail of a residence permit.
We want to promote and imagine transnational connections that could boost and amplify the ongoing struggles at borders with the everyday barriers in our homes and workplaces. Patriarchal violence, the sexed division of labour, and the privatization of welfare trying to command women’s bodies and labour impact the reproduction of our life. The war in Ukraine is a crucial knot of these entanglements. On the one hand, it is allowing the establishment of new hierarchies among migrants, legitimizing institutional racism. On the other hand, it is the ground of right wing, familistic and reactionary politics which justified in the midst of a social crisis strengthening relations of authority and control over women reproductive labour. War is getting more and more on the central stage, increasing disorder and instability, as we are seeing now with the dramatic explosion of the war in Palestine, which is shutting up any anti-patriarchal, anti-theocratic opposition, and asking to take fronts.
Despite the European institutional violence confirmed by deadly agreements, as the one with Tunisia, migrants are still challenging European racist borders and contesting the conditions in camps, as in Lampedusa. Strikes in hospitals and care work, where women are rising up against the devaluation and isolation of their essential labour, often performed under the blackmail of residence permits; insubordinations and protests against masculine violence, familistic policies and attacks on abortion point to a refusal to be silent in front of the attempt to discipline women by reimposing on them sexual hierarchies.
The workshop will be structured in two parallel moments, focusing on:
1) patriarchal violence and the reproduction of our lives
2) racist violence, borders and migrant labour.
These two slots of the workshop will come together to let emerge the material conditions in which we live, work and struggle, as well as problems and obstacles of organising, and find the crucial points which must inform our transnational initiative. We will ask: Which are the possible terrains of struggle that could form the connecting ground for our political initiative against the racist and patriarchal conditions of the reproduction of our lives? How to visibilize experiments of insubordination, not only on the borders but also in every house, reception center, factory or field where migrants are exploited? How to amplify women’s everyday struggles so that they resonate louder than patriarchal violence and national and EU policies attempting to reduce them to mere wombs and devalued workforce? How to rethink in this context the migrant and feminist strike, to break the racist and patriarchal grip on our lives and disrupt this violent order?
