“The women's movements of the Middle East a fertile radicalism to show us that it is possible to create and think in other better worlds, in other ways of configuring socio-cultural relations and creating political-economic alternatives to capitalism and their nation-states,” said Yanira Hermida Martín, an academic at the University of Valencia.

News Center- Violence against women is a way of keeping half of humanity oppressed. The Covid-19 pandemic brings the epidemic of violence with it and the increase in data shows how women have been taken under domination.

Yanira Hermida Martín, an academic at the University of Valencia, has been working on anarchism and feminism. She told our news agency the reasons and ways of dealing with the increasing violence against women all over the world and how it is possible for women to organize at a global level.

· To get started, we want to know more about you, could you introduce yourselves?

My name is Yanira Hermida Martín, although I was born, due to life in Madrid, I am from a village in the North of Tenerife (Canary Islands) where I grew up and lived from the age of 5 until I was 30 years old, at which point I moved to the Iberian Peninsula to deepen my studies and my participation in anarchist feminism.

I come from a humble, working-class family, very male chauvinist but with a group of strong and wonderful women, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, great-aunts, aunt, cousins... despite the fact that we have disagreements and that I live differently from them in some aspects, it makes me very happy to know that I belong and I am part of those women, to recognize myself in them and in what they have taught me.

Thanks to the efforts of my mother, my sister, and I were among the first women in my family to go to high school and college. I studied History at the University of La Laguna and I got a doctorate in Barcelona with a thesis on the history of the women of my land during the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship.

· According to what we know, you have developed research on feminism and anarchism. In the world, domination develops along with patriarchy and, at the same time, with it, gender genocide grows. According to you, this violence that is taking place today against women and other parts of society, what connection does it have with domination? How can the realities of the system that influences the lives of women be defined?

Violence against women is a way of keeping half of humanity oppressed, despite the fact that it occurs in all patriarchal societies in times of conflict, it intensifies and multiplies, it is used as a weapon of war in all its most atrocious aspects, and that can be seen in many parts of the world today, hence the growth of gender genocide.

I think that gender violence is an instrument of control and domination that allows and strengthens patriarchy, which is a very old system of oppression that has mutated throughout history and that currently supports and reinforces fierce capitalism and neoliberal-colonial-eurocentric-heteronormative system ... ranging from the economic exploitation of female bodies for the control of human reproduction added to the free, compulsory, and discredited work of caring for other people, to the wildest sexual exploitation of those bodies and the refusal to recognize them as their own subjects with full human rights.

· All over the world, the problems of women are increasing. How do women's movements deal with this? How do you rate your organization? What are the errors of form and approach that existing organizations have?

Well, at a global level there is a huge variety of processes and proposals for mobilization and struggle that I could not summarize in my answer, only to say that some of them such as the movement “not one [woman] less”, or the fight for sexual and reproductive rights, both in Latin America, or the proposals that you contribute inspire, passionate and comfort me because of their strength, their freshness, the depth of their approaches, and their firmness in practice from the collective point of view.

I can and would like to speak from the groups of women and feminists in which I participate in the Spanish state because I think that allows me to be able to make an assessment of how we organize ourselves and the errors that we must overcome, which is what you ask me. In the Spanish state, we have a women's movement that was very strong at the end of the dictatorship, thanks to which we were able to incorporate changes in the institutions and in the legal norm that allowed certain improvements in the general situation of women: divorce law, sexual crimes came to be understood as crimes against women in 1983 and not against family honor, recognition of the civil and political rights of Spanish women, etc.

For a long time the Women’s struggle of women for broad groups in society seemed to be obsolete because it was understood that they had full equality of rights, but despite this general disinterest, many feminist groups remained. Beyond what happened in the institutions, that seed of resistance to the patriarchy allowed the women's movement to reappear on a massive scale a few years ago around the 8M strikes, and hence there is a rich plurality of thoughts and new and old practices to face sexist problems. Our big mistake may not know how to fit the different positions and ideas within the women's movement, in which it seems that many times it is reduced to the struggle of egos, unfortunately.

From my point of view, an organizational problem that we have today in the feminist movement of the Spanish state is the reproduction of dynamics of power and oppression that do not and should not respond to the Women’s struggle. It is difficult for us to include in our assemblies the speech and demands of many companions who live with us and are not reflected in the figure of a Spanish, white, European, middle-class, professional woman, with university studies, with a non-precarious job, urbane, cis-heterosexual, etc.

I believe that the way to overcome our mistakes, such as maintaining the idea of a single fight and at the same pace for all women, compressing them into a general and reductionist category is through the creation of networks of encounter and understanding between different ways of know and guide the resistance and struggles of women, reflecting our similarities, approaches, and differences, but always from the knowledge and mutual respect, every time. My personal solution and at this moment, since I understand that it is not perfect and that I must modify it when necessary, is to participate in various groups in the Iberian Peninsula, maintaining my affective ties and collaboration with my colleagues in the Canary Islands: on the one hand, with my colleagues Libertarians, that's the name of the group, to resist and try to end the oppressions within the patriarchal structures that survive within the anarchist movement, but without ceasing to participate with the comrades in the mixed spaces for shared struggles. On the other hand, I am part of the Women Defended Rojava collective, in the territory in which I currently live, Asturias, to maintain the internationalist ties of women's struggles and to disseminate and make known to the extent possible the situations derived from war and revolution in their territories. Finally, given the disagreements and confrontations within the Spanish feminist movement, we also created in Asturias, a group that we call “Feminisms for Human Rights” in which we find a wide range of feminists: migrants, racialized, with functional diversity, lesbians and bisexual, trans, non-binary, Muslim, atheist, rural women, sex workers, precarious workers, retirees and civil servants, etc. that needed to get out of spaces and debates where our life experiences were not taken into account and we were even violated, understanding that, despite our differences and disagreements, our lives and struggles are interconnected, crossed by the same threads of domination and inequality that generates the patriarchy. Wishing to try, and this is our goal, at least to emphasize again that all human beings on this planet must have recognized those we call Human Rights, which were created and recognized, to guarantee us all and a lifetime worth of being lived. I also collaborate from the rescue of the historical memory of women's movements in the past from the university but also thanks to a radio program organized by a group of women in Valencia, Dones i Prou, and two libertarian magazines that do a beautiful job for spread the historical legacy of libertarian and revolutionary women, which are our own traditions of struggles, an aspect that I also consider fundamental to stand up to current fascist and neoliberal trends.

·  What is the need for women to organize at a global level to achieve equality and freedom? What kind of coordination can be done between women's movements and create common forces and networks?

I think the need is all in the last place, I consider that the struggles of women, even having their own traditions, contributions, and historical legacies in different parts of the world respond to very similar fundamental questions, one of them that goes through all of us in one way or another it is gender violence, therefore, we need each other.

I believe that coordination, and thinking from my European position and the privileges that go with it, must go through personal humility, prior knowledge, and respect for the realities of others and the struggles of women in other territories. Understanding ourselves also as part of the global domination gears is going through not denying and looking the other way before the deaths and violence in order to preserve our borders. This forces us to get out of our comfort spaces, out of the usual circuits and channels in which political and institutional feminism has developed, from the West to the rest of the world, also including deep questioning of our participation in universities, academic bodies, NGOs and the like, which also forces us to rethink and critically assess what happens in the territories we inhabit, the foreign and economic policy of our states, the situation of migrants and refugees in our countries, etc. In this sense, it has been very important for me to attend and learn in the Jineoloji camps in the Spanish state and to share spaces, dialogue, and collaborate with colleagues who live nearby but have different realities from mine.

· The liberal ideology of capitalism, right and conservative aims to oppress women and people who fight for freedom. Through symbolic approaches, they want to distance women and peoples who fight for freedom from their path of struggle. In your view, on what basis does the struggle have to develop? How do you rate this current approach by the system?

This atrocious system that surrounds us has the horrifying ability to transform itself and enter all facets of existence, even the most intimate and private, as evidenced by the individualism and social isolation around us. In addition, we must highlight its great adaptive capacity with the sole objective of controlling and demobilizing any episode of resistance, for example, it does not hesitate to pervert and reduce the slogans of women's struggles to objects of consumption in the West that in other latitudes it punishes with the more savage violence. From the symbolic point of view in the West, I believe that the most neutralizing and oppressive thing resides in the symbolic denial of other alternatives to neoliberal capitalism, having eradicated the possibility of a society other than this one, thinking that this world, although imperfect, is the only viable one and that is not it is true, obviously, as the struggles and resistance in other parts of the planet show.

For me, the struggle must be based on the contributions of the anarchist movement, but this vital learning path that is anarchism shows us the importance of critical and diverse thinking, for what I know it is a personal preference. However, I would like to highlight that anarchism is based on the defense of ethical values that promote personal humility and understanding between equals, solidarity and mutual support, self-management, freedom and revolutionary equality for all human beings, respect for the existence of others, free love, the understanding of childhood as a space that must be happy and safe for the configuration of one's present and future freedom, etc. And finally, highlight the relevance of libertarian thought to create alternative horizons and paths to the neoliberal system that oppresses us.

“The women's struggle is the key to liberation for the entire planet”

· As you know, the Middle East is used as the main center of warfare. The continuous wars in this geography mainly affect women, children, ethnic and religious minorities. For the Middle East to come out of this oppression and be able to liberate itself, do you think that the struggle of women and their organizing methods can lead the Middle East to freedom?

Of course, the women's struggle, for me, is the key to liberation not only for the Middle East but for the entire planet. Despite many disagreements that we may have between women, as I said before, it is clear to me that we are also women capable of providing means of understanding and collaboration in defense of life, the environment, and conditions of authentic justice and freedom for humanity. We have that creative and caring power in our life experiences by knowing how to care for and reproduce life, and these are knowledge that accompanies us and allows us to create solid networks of resistance and extraordinary struggles.

· Connected to this, if you follow the women's movements in the Middle East, how do you see their level of development?

Honestly, with how little I know about this issue, I believe that they are protagonists of the Social Revolution of our time. What I mean is that I see in the women's movements of the Middle East a fertile radicalism to show us that it is possible to create and think in other better worlds, in other ways of configuring socio-cultural relations and creating political-economic alternatives to capitalism and their nation-states.

· To conclude, in the current situation in the Middle East, the most organized and dynamic movement is the Kurdish women's movement. How do you assess its progress?

Well, I would repeat what I said earlier, but I think that the Kurdish women's movement inspires us and shows us how important it is to rethink the patriarchal knowledge that we possess in order to think about ourselves from other approaches that allow us to overcome the reproduction of the system of oppression and traditional dominance of the patriarchy. I believe that the struggle of the Kurdish women's movement is a complex and very rich process to generate resistance to this neoliberal system in which we live. The way to build bridges of understanding and collaboration between women from different groups and with women's movements from other territories are also a great example.

· Finally, what message do you want to send to the women of the world for March 8?

Oops, it is difficult to give a message to all women, but without a doubt, I would like to express my respect and my love in all its deepest and most revolutionary extension, and tell them that I hope we retain the joy, the strength, the courage and the resistance to defend and conquer that dignified, free and pleasant life that we all deserve.