On being a lesbian in Abya Yala

Watercolor painting for Ojalá © Zinzi Sánchez.

Opinion • Libertad García Sanabria • June 27, 2024 • Leer en castellano

On May 5, motivated by anti-lesbian hatred, an assailant threw a homemade bomb into the home of Andrea Amarante, Roxana Figueroa, Pamela Cobbas and Sofía in the Barracas neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Argentina.  Only Sofía survived. 

The attack against Pamela (52 years old), Roxana (52 years old), Andrea (43 years old) and Sofía (50 years old) revealed a scaffolding of structural violence against lesbians and those who don’t fit within the traditional family and couple mold. Rejected by their families, they lived in poverty, faced social exclusion and poor access to social services, and had to endure hateful media, fake communities and messed up politicians that govern with pro-market and anti-people discourse. 

The day after the attack, Bogotá city councilor Julián Triana introduced his team. It included his press officer, Anna Robledo-Corredor, who presented various credentials and stated that she is a lesbian.  

Hateful comments poured in right away from both men and women. They railed against the political importance of an out lesbian holding a prominant position as a public servant.

Hate against women and lesbians is on the rise in the region. The Latin American Map of Femicides indicates that there have been 350 femicides in 16 Central and South American countries in 2024 thus far. In Mexico, data collected by the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System shows that 184 femicides occurred as of March 31.

Rebellious lesbians

Women in general, and lesbians in particular, often face danger in public and private spaces. The alternative for many lesbians has been silencing—also called insilio—as well as physical flight in the form of sexilio [sexile], both concepts developed by Norma Mogrovejo.

Lesbians, who Monique Wittig and other materialist feminist lesbians suggest can be read as rebels against the class or category "woman," must defy the hatred arrayed against them and women in general. They have deserted their role as servile providers of free labor and services to men. There is nothing more uncomfortable than poor, elderly lesbians in a gentrifiable downtown neighborhood in a Latin American capital. 

In societies that hate women to death, choosing to love other women, above and beyond patriarchal pacts, is an act of rebellion. Survival itself is an achievement. 

Despite the violence and hatred that we experience, being a lesbian feminist is poetry, utopia, a chronicle of a sustainable future. It is a promise that distances us from the paradigm that crush culture imposes.

It is up to us to recover the stories of sexilios and shed light on unpublished stories of rebirth and flowering—to amplify the stories of collective and individual healing. To do so, we must go beyond closed discourses formulated out of resentment, hatred, violence and complacency. 

Imagine hearing "lesbian" in the voice of your president, your mother, your father, your brother, your boss, your neighbors. To do so is to evoke the discomfort of a word rarely spoken aloud. 

I believe that it is politically important to name ourselves lesbian feminists and to challenge the heteronormative status quo that sustains patriarchy and its scaffolding, which are chained to neoliberal capitalism by individual exploitation. 

Of course, there are lesbians who want to live within this system. But there are also those of us who seek to dismantle it and build another world in which we can live in autonomy and interdependence. 

Towards transnational lesbian memory

We intend to multiply our interlocutors. My wise feminist teachers from the South say that we seek a meeting between people who are similar but not alike. Some of our dialogues have wings, while others await an inciting question.

We call difficult issues knots—unfinished business that must be untangled. This allows us to bridge the gaps between our points of view and to recognize our power as lesbians.

We have demonstrated this power by carrying out diverse projects throughout our history and now we plan to come together again.

This summer, from July 22 to 27, we will convene the Lesbian Archive Gathering to recover lesbian memory, archives, archeologies and genealogies in Abya Yala, the Caribbean and beyond.

Through dialogue in caracolas [online thematic panels], virtual discussions through online artivism and juntanzas [online assembly spaces] we seek to recover untold stories of aunts, lesbian maternities, lesbian ladies, lesbians in traditionally masculine professions, Indigenous and Cimarrón lesbians, and so many others. 

We will discuss possible futures, our utopias and dystopias. We’ll talk about how we want to grow old together. We will consider those who are already weaving communal spaces. We will share stories of healing and creation. It will be an opportunity to envision future encounters both near and afar, as Zapatista women have urged us to do. 

We will meet virtually as lesbians, lesbian practitioners, lesbofeminists, sapphics, manfloras, chongas and zapatonas, coming together to recover our memory, to build our collective genealogy and to create a common front against the politics of death. 

Our process will produce cartographies, maps, constellations and genealogies that will allow us to share unprecedented lesbian and feminist existences outside the patriarchal norm, which we already inhabit.