Por:
Sandra Milena Álvarez Ramírez
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Fecha:
2021
My own voice: where do the stories come from?
To what extent do the voice of the State, the media and social organizations influence the life decisions of women community activists?
With these questions I began this research work, in which I, a 35-year-old woman, who was born and raised in the city of Medellín, set out to recognize and document different forms of neighborhood participation and organization, led on a daily basis by women, with whom we confront different types of violence: economic, carried out by large companies that exploit quarries at the cost of the lives of the women and men who live on the outskirts of the city of Medellín; policies, exercised by the State, self-defense groups, paramilitaries and traffickers; the sexual ones, who attack us with different types of harassment, from the obligation to accept dolls and stuffed animals from self-imposed admirers to the violations practiced by the parents themselves; environmental ones, fostered by models of expansion and modernization of cities, which accumulate services and well-being at the expense of sanitary landfills and dumps; the media, which deal with the lives of populations that have been forced to migrate and those of women who have lost their loved ones in urban warfare, under media stereotypes that silence us and make us disappear; finally, the symbolic ones, in which customs, expectations and beliefs insist, for generations, on controlling the totality of our lives as women.
Based on the self-review of my experience, I decided to turn the academic exercise of research and writing into one of affirmation of my presence, for myself and for others, with the conviction, political and sensitive, of inventing other memories and mobilize my own memory, and the memory in the name of which I have participated so many times by organizing public commemorations. In this effort to create another story for myself, I discovered what I announced in the first lines: our voice and our own words are conquered when we allow ourselves to listen to ourselves and everybody else.
Keywords: auto-ethnography, violence testimonies, social movements-women, journalism, own voice, Medellín.
Fuente:
Biblioteca Digital Feminista
Formatos de contenido:
Otros
