Natalia Gaitán was assassinated in March this year that is ending. Was shot in the chest from a relative of his girlfriend for being a lesbian. An extreme manifestation of an entrenched hatred and protected by silence and indifference that is not terminated by law.
By Valeria Flores
"I'm Natalia Gaitan," reads the giant sticker produced by the Crusades, Tucumán lesbian group for the last National Conference of Women held in Paraná. Many use it on the fly and then save it for display in the activities our cities as public memory exercise. Shot by a lesbian. At 27, Natalia Gaitán was shot point blank in the early hours of March 7 this year, in the city of Cordoba. Daniel Torres, the stepfather of his girlfriend, pulled the trigger. Bled in the shadow of an institution called compulsory heterosexuality. The public hospital ambulance took to arrive, while police expert in his blood a crime. The corrosive power of poverty acted decisively again, one more.
Nearly 10 months after his assassination, the silence of the thunder begins to seep, quietly and deeply, in the frenzy of life. Because the death of a lesbian would easily eclipse the pyramid of the dead tree in the village. Is one. Is a lesbian. Is poor. It tomboy. Is the interior. Conjugation Natalias present for all, for all lesbians who survived the awful story of hate. It is a death that is blurred in the eyes of the triumphalism of equal marriage, blurring in wisps of smoke, warning that discrimination, hostility and violence against lesbians is endemic. And it's a death that bothers, who is boycotting the smiles of officials and officers as large organizations Glttbi because illuminates the stark force is exercised-in this case lesbophobia in our country, although not exclusive of these borders. "Happiness gay friendly", as recited and publicized, is the privilege of a few and not federalize so easily.
Natalia's murder shows that there is a complex, arduous and persistent work to do: disarm the institutional fabric and symbolic lesbophobia, singular expression of the political regime of heterosexuality. Task for which there are no photos, no media recognition, and rewards outstanding. Task for which political correctness becomes an unwitting ally of atrocity, it requires discipline respectability to the protocol of the public orders and, often, is the protocol itself that we are still. Task that calls us day by day, in the melee, word for word, in the kiss kiss. Thus, in the vicinity of the dishes that are ready to satisfy hunger, and in the community kitchen that Natalia argued with her mother, Graciela Vázquez. Scenario collective appetite, too, Natalia, because it was there that he met his girlfriend. In the midst of mouths to feed lend shared, took place at the snack that lesbians, even today, we find it elusive. Because desire is hidden lesbian, flashing on and off at any place, anywhere, and we must be attentive to the glow to give the address crouching.
Again I must say that lesbophobia wreaks havoc on our lives, from the most cruel to the more subtle but no less pernicious. Systematic insults and taunts, threats, sanctions and emotional blackmail, the inability or refusal to grant existence to our desire, home confinement, the expulsion of our families, the desire for death by parents, early psychologizing, polarized oscillation between hypersexualization and desexualization, gynecological care under heterosexist assumptions, beatings and abuse, rape and non-grinding, isolation, loss of custody of children, heterosexist harassment, fear of job loss, labor difficulties for carrying an expression of male gender, stigma and even murder are some of the expressions of a politics of hate, that did not end with the adoption of equal marriage, barely, and with much effort militant, with a plus especially those that activate Glttbi organizations without much funding, they begin to surface and come to some degree of legitimacy on the political agenda. All these manifestations repressive and oppressive, a sex-political system governed by the predominance of tax model as the only valid, heterosexual and monogamous, form an equation of vulnerability that requires resolve lesbians in the day to day, often with unpredictable results. Because this equation becomes more difficult, and even deadly, when the body is crossed by other coordinates of differentiation that result in inequalities, such as class, gender expression, national origin, age, political affiliation, among others. Because, basically, lesbophobia express the tacit consensus of silence makes the formula for the challenge of our lesbian identities, through a grid impunity and coercion that regulates the stability and consistency of sex-gender binary system, trying to ensure normality in each body with the right sex, gender and desire for appropriate.
Pepa, as I said to Natalie in the neighborhood, he might have watched Big Brother and been surprised at the "Pride of cake" claimed by Light, one of the members of the program, in which, through paradox, the closet as a regime of (in) visibility and (un) knowledge is redefined as a large house of intimacy commodified for consumption, with a device confession of massive scope. Or, perhaps, nothing would have disturbed Pepa. Or maybe he had not seen the program. Spurious speculations of the writer of this note. Because they took the opportunity to see it. Because basically took the life of a lesbian. Splinters of his death spread in all directions. Rub some flags, others bore slogans or embedded in the walls of offices and courts. Some bounced off the fence of indifference and neglect.
amnesia can not compensate for the sadness and anger against the horror. The requirement of "Justice for Natasha" can not be swallowed in a past sunset. Is the resonance of noise, its tangible effect on the wound, which urges us to spread a leafy affirmative action and the condemnation of desire of who triggered, but also for all the lives that embody different bodies and identities, and that throb with cruelty whipping our breath. Then, as Clarice Lispector starts the story in a breath of life: "This is not a lament, a cry of birds of prey. Colored and uneasy. The kiss on the dead face. "
Valeria Flores
