Between Choice and Subjugation

Since leaving my profession and career behind to dive headfirst into immigrant life, I have devoted myself to other ways of living and thinking. From institutional work to everyday experiences, I began to reflect deeply on hegemonic culture and how it, through its familial, emotional, educational, and economic mechanisms, structures and freezes our paradigms and regulates our perception of our autonomy.

There is an important symbolic turning point when we manage to stop and ask ourselves: "Wait a minute, does this make sense for my life experience? Is this how I want to live? If I die tomorrow, is this how I would like to have lived my story? Are my choices based on my conscious will or on nameless fears? I dare to look fear in the eye and ask: what do you want from me? - in an attempt to name and confront it (?)"

The answers that emerge will be personal and unique. However, they invariably lead us to question what has been established up to that point and push us in directions and attitudes that will disrupt the supposed natural order of things. And it takes courage—and some faith—since, when we disagree with the forces that sustain the current economic and social macrosystem, we encounter the many layers of censorship and prohibitions imposed on a more authentic becoming-woman.

I am interested in topics such as domination, subjective prohibitions, and control mechanisms—not only as subjects of study, but also as reflections on the reality that has affected me personally for a long time.

As a white, middle-class Brazilian woman, I played the game with the “rule book” under my arm. I studied for years, worked, studied some more, and followed all the steps that were supposed to guarantee me a minimally stable, recognized, and dignified working life. Until I realized that, from where I was looking at my life, the path ahead was one of exhaustion and a compressed, standardized existence.

It's difficult to say this without feeling a little naive and unsuspecting—but I have to be honest. I always wanted to give birth and raise my children. I didn't find the model of children in daycare, with nannies, full schedules, and rushing around, appealing. And look, this isn't an alienated criticism, because I observe the struggle women go through to raise their children without resources or support. However, until then, I thought, if it's not someone like me, who studied, who was able to seek knowledge about childhood, bonding experiences, structural gender oppression (with the invisibility of domestic and care work), who has a partner with me, supporting and sustaining choices that are unusual in my generation, who else would it be (?).

When we began gathering strength to live abroad, this reflection was present: how to create space to experience motherhood fully, without the pressure of the market, productivity, and acceleration that I already knew (and hated)?

We left Brazil with a genuine desire to build another reality: a more expansive life, with more time for good living, trips to learn about other cultures, other languages — to open up new horizons. When our first child was born, the pressure to return to the old way reappeared with force. That's when I experienced a profound identity crisis. We didn't want to leave him in daycare all day to follow normative lives that we already knew where they would lead. So, I decided to give up on continuing on that path that had already shown me its limits in terms of pleasure, stimulation, and meaning.

It was at that point that I strongly felt the symbolic weight of the culture operating around me — especially in the way my choice to prioritize my time as a woman and mother was interpreted. Instead of being recognized as a gesture of courage and autonomy, it was read as a gesture of someone who had lowered herself to the life of a housewife, who had given up, who didn't have the strength to continue, who was lazy, who lived outside the reality of the world. That's right, even though I had already had a supposedly adult life of paying my own bills, with jobs of some social value, I imagined, as a teacher, obstetric nurse, researcher.

More than that: the simple fact that I had become financially dependent on my partner—even within a shared project, discussed, desired, and undertaken by both of us—began to carry more weight in social perception than all the immense, extremely repetitive, tiring, daily work, full of unpredictability, that is raising a child in this society without unpaid emotional support networks. As if being financially dependent on my partner insidiously nullified my intellect, my labor force, and the full agency of my adult life.

Care work, which is essential and fundamental, continues to be undervalued because it escapes the immediate logic of the market, even by women themselves, who mostly perform it. But it is precisely this work that silently sustains the functioning of social life, as we already know. By caring, we contribute — in a concrete way — to the overall health of our children. This has a direct impact on public health, education, and safety systems. Children who are cared for and allowed to play tend to get sick less often, develop more evenly, and require less from the state throughout their lives. Even so, the hegemonic culture insists on valuing only what is counted as capital. What is at stake is not only power, but symbolic authority, a clear message of recognition of social value. And it was this distortion that struck me hard, making me wonder: since when is sustaining life — with all the daily implications experienced by all of us, from the time spent on organization, planning, and execution — less important than sustaining a bank account?

When it was just the two of us in the world, we lived the reality of two autonomous adults together, each focused on their own lives, with our libido at work and sharing our free time. With children, we moved out of the center.

Of course, providing for our children remains important and indispensable, undeniably. But we have to go further to reflect. We are challenged to undergo a process of intense maturation, since our needs now come after our child's fever, our child's sleep, our child's needs.

Are we the ones denying this reality, or is it a society that operates on an authoritarian logic, removing us from the concrete and symbolic power contained in this experience, which is numerically female and everyday?

Why do we continue to deny this at the expense of symbolic-practical subordination without asserting ourselves from our place as non-machine bodies?

Why do we accept without complaint the separation of the domestic and work worlds, when for women both stem from the same being who only accumulates responsibilities?

Why do we accept a hierarchy that privileges mechanistic thinking and linear rationality?

What happens to our perception and our ability to engage in emotional relationships in a way that allows us to express our sensitive integrity—without silencing what we feel and want for ourselves when we raise our children?

Why does culture make us feel inferior when we put these fundamental conditions first? If my body and my hours of existence are at the disposal of an experience that is social, in theory encouraged, why does culture demand and expect me (and us) to care, look after, and dedicate ourselves without asking for anything in return?

What leads women to repeat narratives that are detached from the sensitive experience of raising children in favor of patriarchal confetti, whose applause seems conditional on us giving up what happens in our bodies and cycles in order to have the same social value?

Why do we take so long to integrate our sexual and reproductive power with our intellect within our realities in large groups, if not because of the prohibition imposed on us by the rules of the patriarchal game that tells me I will only be good enough when I do this and that, but we all know that we will never be enough in a structurally misogynistic and racist culture, because we will not deliberately kill people for territory, because violence does not define us, because we bleed, we get pregnant, we give birth, we breastfeed. Our constitution is one of connection with life, with inclusion, and never with killing as justifiable or affirmative. The alienation of our condition has led us to terrible macro-systemic consequences.

Culture is born from us.

Why do we delay breaking free from oppression and structural exploitation within ourselves in the family environment, and also laughing together about how innocent we once were?

We are the ones who live and embody social transitions and maturation in our bodies. Every woman knows that raising children requires immense altruism, that the pleasure of the experience can easily be overshadowed by daily difficulties. Therefore, I want to leave behind essentialisms that border on the brutalization of women.

There is another important aspect that is not unrelated to blame and judgment: the rejection of the logic of the triple shift. In my case — as with many other women — this choice did not come from passivity or escape, but from a mature reflection on the kind of life I want to sustain. The emancipation I seek transcends capital. For those of us who had a professional life, immigrating was never about survival, but about getting our time back. Working under constant pressure and stress in an increasingly exploitative system, without social rights, taking care of children, constantly managing family life, trying to maintain some semblance of mental health and a body in shape for gringos to see, as the ideal of female independence? What a trap. As Silvia Frederici said in an interview: “No, we are not emancipated, we are tired and in crisis.”

Not accepting this model does not mean erasing oneself or settling for less. I am a feminist and would never tell a woman to have children, let alone depend on a sexist partner, which is unfortunately very common. On the contrary, it means claiming a sovereign, deliberate stance over one's own time, body, and desires. To challenge the patriarchal system from within the place where it originates, where women-mothers assert themselves as not subjugated to the power that money evokes, is to affirm that creative life, emotional health, and freedom of presence in everyday life are of central value. That we can position ourselves in the world based on a conscious and non-submissive choice. And that this does not make us any less radical in our thoughts on social justice, any less feminist, any less capable.

Many of us are trying to break free from this cycle that only drains us. And in breaking free, there is great discomfort, but there is also space to recreate the world based on other affective and sustainable logics.

If the quest for independence through access to capital via work is not necessarily emancipatory in itself—since, in order to access it, we remain subordinate to patriarchal, financial, and productivist institutions — then what can liberate us, or at least move us beyond the repetition of domination/submission to hierarchies that will never benefit us in the long run?

For me, art has been a source of power. Art demands our freedom. It trains us for freedom. It involves risk, presence, body, imagination. It operates through displacement, subversion, transgression. It disrupts the norms that colonize us from within. Art — whatever form it takes — gives us back the autonomy of gesture, of time, of desire. As they say in my homeland, it is small, but it is big.

While capital is conditioned by artificial systems that classify, control, standardize, and hierarchize us, experimenting with art can be the field where an emancipated body experiences being. A body that is not at the service of others, that does not explain itself, that does not justify itself, that feels, that moves, that creates worlds and re-enchantment through the exercise of perception. And that is profoundly revolutionary. From subjectivity embodied as a political gesture, to everyday life as a symbolic space for fostering and creative input.

Raising children transcends the patriarchal gaze when a woman inhabits the time of creation to recreate herself subjectively in her own way and for her own pleasure. This is an important shift. Giving ourselves permission, offering ourselves, not conceding what is rightfully ours. This is how we create new worlds, we create escapes, detours.

Inhabiting discomfort will be the dwelling place of our autonomy. It will serve us to create more expanded ways of finding meaning, satisfaction, and communion, without obeying the order that we must be submissive and suffer in order to deserve enjoyment.