A few weeks ago, when I wrote in this column about the femicide of Catarina Kasten, I expressed solidarity with her friends and hiking companions and commented on how the ongoing need for surveillance is profoundly harmful to women’s health. In this week’s column, I suggest you explore this reflection further.
The continuous state of alert in which women experience the fear of sexual violence at the hands of men is widely documented. I highlight the “Perceptions of Legal Rape and Abortion” survey, carried out in 2020 by the Patrícia Galvão and Locomotiva institutes, in which 95% of women said they had a daily fear of being raped — and 78% said they were very afraid. Among men, 92% said they feared that their daughters, mothers, wives or girlfriends would be victims of this crime.
In the case of women, the machismo that structures social relations daily produces a series of subtle – and less subtle – messages about their place in society. A recent report by Britain’s BBC journalist Melissa Hogenboom drew attention to a study by researchers from Chile, the United States and the United Kingdom that analyzed nearly 8,000 MRI images of men and women in 29 countries.
The results showed that, in countries with greater gender equality, differences in cortical thickness between men and women are small or non-existent; In certain regions of the right hemisphere, women even have a thicker cortex. In countries where inequality is greater, certain areas of the brain – particularly regions involved in emotional functions, learning and visual processing – tend to be thinner in women than in men. These findings suggest that continued exposure to environments of inequality may produce structural effects on the brain, possibly contributing to poorer mental health and educational outcomes among women in more unequal contexts – in addition to offering initial evidence relevant to public policies that consider neuroscience as part of thinking about inequality.
An obvious effect of continued exposure to alertness, of a lack of relaxation, is fatigue. Women have been very tired for a long time and, as a result, there is a persistent patriarchal discourse that seeks to justify women as fragile, easily “shaken”, unable to withstand daily pressures.
This discourse appears even when female fatigue becomes the object of a medical analysis decontextualized from the social: it would only be the simple symptom of a “natural” depression, or of a moral failure attributed to poor time management and the inability to cope with the demands of the contemporary world.
In dialogue with this anti-discrimination research and theory, it is possible to draw similar reflections between groups that occupy structurally subordinate positions. In “Why Human Beings Suffer” (Authentic), Professor Adilson José Moreira describes his experience of persistent fatigue: “As a person placed subordinately in different systems of oppression, I am frequently confronted with a situation of emotional fatigue (…), product of a variety of stressful experiences in my daily life. They are not sporadic, they are not accidental, they are not unconscious. 19).
For black women, affected by racism and sexism, fatigue permeates their lack of material conditions of existence. As Toni Morrison said in 1978: “I’d love to be in the middle of the day, put in five hours and not feel guilty about taking time off in the middle of a full-time job, thinking about what tours I should be doing.” (…) I have been working since the age of 12 and I tell you: I am starting to get tired. I love and respect the work I do. But I don’t want to have to give every speech, every class, everything I do, to secure the extra income needed to run a family with growing children.
In the next columns, we will deepen this reflection. We can analyze how fatigue is both a sought-after product and the raw material for the functioning of a patriarchal and racist system. For now, let us reflect on one of the most urgent political tasks of our time, which is to demand the right to rest.
To rest here is to create the material and subjective conditions for thinking, creating, finding and organizing.
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