Doors open 18:00 | Movie + Discussion 19:00 @ Rigaer 94

The colonial history of Western Sahara is often not well known, both the occupation of the territories by the Spanish State since the 1700s, as well as its continuity in the hands of Morocco since 1975. There are several examples in the world where colonial powers hide their history of domination in the narrative of “regional conflicts between neighbouring countries”. Among the most prominent examples are Palestine – England/State of Israel and Sahara- Spanish State/Kingdom of Morocco. Such a narrative distorts the continuity of profiteering that the original colonial states maintained in the occupied territories. At the same time, it blurs the military relations between the different occupying forces and the role that the institutions of so-called international law play in advancing Western capitalist interests.

In such a landscape, the dependency on humanitarian aid plays the role of pacifiers. The lowest form of extortion imaginable: is forcing people to follow rules that favour only the West, to have access to a food ration that does not even provide the necessary nutritional levels nor the quantity to feel satisfied.

The extortion is as crude as it reads: exchanging food for self-determination. In this way, the resistance, the direct action, and the taking of subjectivity by the people are seen as “unnecessary violence”, to the point of being presented as the real cause of the situation of domination.

Global patriarchy has been one of the great means to install this reality, assisting the consolidation of the monopoly of violence through the armed forces of nation-states, seeking to relegate queer people and women to the private sphere.

Global patriarchy, that is to say, the white supremacist patriarchy, is installed in the world by setting up a field of competition in which not only gender binarism is imposed but also a specific model of being a woman as good, adequate or even emancipated. Thus, the liberal positions of Western societies use aspects of emancipatory, anti-patriarchal or feminist discourses to implant a global image of the developed vs. the underdeveloped woman, the emancipated vs. the oppressed woman, i.e. the western woman vs. the woman of the global south. The feminized body becomes a territory of war, to be conquered with methods of repression and violence specifically designed for this purpose.

Such a specific western model on gender can only imply the protection of the capitalist interests it serves. Thus the clichés about the “other” are strengthened: the submissive woman, the woman who does not think or act on her own: the woman who is still not there…It is therefore not surprising that the idea of armed struggle, direct action and liberation is mostly portrayed with a man’s face. It is mostly portrayed through western lenses.

Insumisas presents us with a local and global reality at the same time. Resistance in the hands of queer people and women is not a particular example of certain territories or historical moments, as they would have us believe. On the contrary was, is and will be a constant and widespread reality. Insumisas confronts us with the preconceptions that white liberalism tries to implant in our thinking, of territories stripped of feminist practice. It reaffirms not only the importance of thinking of ourselves as anti-patriarchal and anti-colonialist as entangled but also shows us that this practice is already a reality in other territories.

Proposal for discussion

• Analyzing the role of Morocco as an occupying force. Why is there an interest in externalizing colonial control by European states? What political interest lies behind this division of colonial power?
• Thinking about differences in order to think about new worlds. What is the role of global patriarchy in the existence of colonialism today?
• Colonial morality and patriarchy as a means of repression. The use of particular forms of violence, starting from the physical and psychological and extending throughout the social fabric.