Pigs Manifest 2014

PIGS MANIFEST Why do we perceive ourselves as an intersectional subject? Following Lykke, we understand Intersectionality as a way of thinking, as a thinking technology which help us to “rethink how power differentials, normativities and identity formations in terms of gender, race, class, sexuality” (2010, p. 207), functional diversity, language, etc. are mutually co-constructed in a process of co-coproduction and mutual transformation. Studying in a University with an American system of education, we have realized our vulnerability in different ways. The “linguistic barrier” leads us to understand it as other mechanism (apart of the hate speech) which makes possible our vulnerability within the language. This vulnerability is also connected to our geopolitical positioning as subjects from Southern European countries. Clear example of that is the acronym P.I.G.S, rather, injury that the hegemonic countries of the Economic European Union use it to describe the European countries (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) most affected by the financial crisis of 2008. The precariousness that constitute our existences is much related to the politics of austerity implemented by the TROIKA, we mean, European Commission, Central European Bank and International Monetary Fund. (The PIgs countries are considered unproductive to the big finance interests but still places to exploit and from which to extract territorial and human resources. Their new slogan of flexibility are just ways to increase exploitation, making subject more vulnerable and subjected to different kind of blakmail.) This neoliberal policies force us to migrate from our countries to hegemonic countries to be exploited and to sell us as qualified labor force occupying precarious jobs. So, the capitalist system dispossesses our existences in different ways forcing us, normalizing us in its productive times and places. As sexual dissidents, our vulnerability is increasing in this system because as Michael Warner argue “every person who comes to a queer self understanding knows in one way or another that her stigmatization is connected with gender, the family, notions of individual freedom, the state, public speech, consumption and desire, nature and culture, maturation, reproductive politics, racial and national fantasy, class identity, truth and trust, censorship, intimate life and social display, terror and violence, health care, and deep cultural norms about the bearing of the body” (1993, p.13). Thus our struggles cannot focus on just one axe of oppression. We have to fight about all of these questions at the same time, locally but in a transnational network of abjects and assuming the consequences. We understand that in the capitalist process of dispossession of our lives, the body has been placed in the margins of the system. We aim to give to the life in general and to the body in particular, the necessary centrality to overcome the vulnerability that crosses our subjectivities. We