La ManiFestA

La ManiFestA are a set of performative readings of Chiara Bottici's Anarchafeminist Manifesto, which, through the performance of philosophical discourse, open up the possibility of making the body the subject of thought. What happens when the body in movement impacts contemporary feminist discourses? Is the body capable of transforming them? Can the body release what discourse captures?

Chiara Bottici, Italian feminist philosopher and currently professor of philosophy and director of Gender Studies at The New School of Social Research, has dedicated the last part of her theoretical production –A Feminist Mythology (2021), Anarchafeminism (2021), Anarchafeminist Manifesto (2021)– to the elaboration of an anarcha-feminist proposal: a theory and praxis that is built without arché, and, therefore, that does not want to explain gender oppression through a single principle. It is in this sense that, emphasizing the continuous intersections of class, race, sexuality, hetero- and cis-normativity, Bottici's anarcha-feminism accounts for the processual character of individual and collective identity and advocates for a philosophy of transindividuality that does not exclude any identity expressions. Thus, to the extent that bodies are plural and their oppression is also plural, Bottici argues that plurals must also be the strategies to combat that oppression.

Framed in the context of International Women's Day, the La ManiFestA takes place as a bodily strategy, as a set of performance readings that, placing the body at the center of emancipatory praxis, explore the possibilities that the text outlines to confront gender oppression. Against the violence perpetrated in the name of gender binarism, homophobia and transphobia, we anarchafeminists demand the liberation of all women. Not one less! ¡Ni una menos! Either we are all free, or none of us will be.

By Chiara Bottici and Santa Mònica’s resident artists

With the collaboration of: Master Mundus Europhilosophie, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona