The Lenses of Gender Justice: Challenging Oppressions

Access to justice has multiple entrances. Whatever door we women knock on, we access with locks, vetoes and conditions. We have not entered on an equal footing. We are not the only ones, we are also accompanied by indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant and migrant women, people with disabilities, low-income people, just to name a few. Unfortunately, the list of exclusion is long, but the hope is that in Chile there are concrete signs to place the pillars that allow us to advance rights for all people without discrimination.
Despite these exclusions, discrimination and unfair treatment; women have rebelled with ideas and proposals. We have put on glasses to look at reality, questioned the current frameworks and proposed other forms of knowledge; relieving that innate capacity that humanity has to question and modify the bonds of coexistence, so that life is liveable.
At the heart of our demands is a way of coexistence that respects and guarantees our rights, that realizes the mandate that women and men are born free in equality and rights.
For this just longing, the new Constitution is a historic opportunity. Women mobilize, organize, dialogue to change our destinies and have a better life. We articulate ourselves in various spaces to assert our demands that the current Political Constitution does not recognize us.
In this year, in the constituent process we have claimed parity democracy, a life free of violence, real equality, sexual and reproductive rights, right to care, mainstreaming of the gender approach, sexual and reproductive rights and human rights, in general. And our historical demands have been recognized and reflected in the constitutional text.
Behind our demands are the struggles of our ancestors, of different generations; that have guided us in this project of coexistence, in this new a scratching of court, in this hopeful constitutional framework that will help us transform a hierarchical gender order that excludes and oppresses us.
Our demands and their concreteness cannot be looked at separately, they are a whole, which is expressed in rights, distribution of power, institutional reorganization, freedoms and also in a way of exercising justice. With these new lenses, which make it possible to recognize the place of subordination of women and to value new forms of linkage and social organization of the reproduction and production of life.
In our demands it is not that justice rules in favor of women, what we demand is that justice considers the cultural elements that have been generating inequality, injustice and an inferior position of women in relation to men: the necessary gender justice.
The system of administration of justice is not alien to the discourses, practices and resistance in terms of real equality between men and women, both in access to positions in the higher instances of the Judiciary and in its rulings.
Justice continues to be sexed, it resolves based on the male standard and the aspiration is that judges decide with a gender approach; that considers gender differences, respects and values them.  Justice with a gender focus will allow those who must resolve a conflict to have tools to analyze a given situation, looking at the reality of the country and the sexual differences that have been established as a constant discrimination.

Thus no one will be able to say that the “housewives” do not work, taking away the economic and social value of the care tasks. In this way we can aspire to reduce the insulting figure that a high percentage of alimony is not paid and that it is women who have to bear the cost of a State that does not guarantee rights.
Thus no expert will be able to say that a divorced woman is a “good mother” if she decides not to have a partner again and not to take other men to the house and that a man is a “good father” because he remarried and has a home to receive his daughters or sons.
We demand gender justice, to build a door, which by touching it allows us to access a real justice, that creates and listens to us, which has been denied to us for so long.  Nothing more, nothing less.

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The content expressed in this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.

Original source in Spanish