#54

FiLiA Meets Consuelo Rivera Fuentes – Lesbians in Chile.

FiLiA: Hi there and welcome to this FiLiA podcast. Today I'm delighted to be interviewing Consuelo Rivera Fuentes, and we're actually interviewing in person, which is a massive rarity, at the FiLiA Conference in Bradford. So firstly, thank you so much for coming all the way to talk to us today and to speak at the conference as well.

Consuelo is a writer, an academic and a publisher, and she's also been a campaigner against violence against lesbians and spoken widely about her own experiences of this. Is that a fair description or is there anything I've missed out there? 

Consuelo:  Yes I am a publisher, but at the moment, not academic except for memoirs, the rest is novels, fiction, but also books for children and so on and as for the writing I've been a poet I think almost all my life and the writing has helped me to begin denouncing publicly what I suffered during the eighties when the dictatorship in Chile was still there.

That's why the writing is so important for me especially poetry, because sometimes in poetry you can disguise things a little bit because they hurt too much, but then you can also tell the public what's going on. 

FiLiA: So I want to start by asking a bit more about Chile and for people who don't know, how are things over there for lesbian human rights at the moment and how have they been in the past?

Consuelo: Well, in the eighties as well, there was one woman who made the news because the soldiers, one of the soldiers in the street kicked a lesbian to death saying you fucking lesbian, and so on and so forth. So it was the first public knowledge in the media because it could not be hidden about what was going on in Chile because lesbians had to kind of hide not only because of the military regime, but also because their families, patriarchal families and so on, a machista country, couldn't know that they were lesbians. 

So, and then there was a group which was made out of two women called Ayuquelén is like to be happy in an indigenous language called Mapuche - they started a lesbian kind of letter writing. So lesbians would write to them saying that finally they could see someone listening to them in this case, reading what they were doing. And slowly they began growing. So the first lesbian kind of group was Ayuquelén, and then they started growing. 

After my experience of torture in the eighties, I also started a group in the second city, the largest city in the country called Concepción, . And I founded a group of lesbians which we call LEA, which is Lesbianas en Acción. we decided, well, we, I started it on my own and this was because at the time I was doing a diploma, my Women's Studies at the local university, and one of the subjects was the violence, intra familiar violence, and everybody wrote about the heterosexual kind of violence. And I decided that I wanted to write about lesbians and what was happening between lesbians because at the time I had a partner who had been subjected to violence by her own partner. 

FiLiA: So you're talking about inter-familial violence between a lesbian couple? 

Consuelo: That's right. So I decided to write about that in my research for that course, for that particular subject. We had other subjects and for that I needed more people.

So I just made up a little leaflet and I went to the post office, which at the time it worked because nowadays, you know, post office, everything is internet now. I started giving this leaflet to women. and the leaflet said, you are not alone, speak out, let's meet on such and such a day. And so I made it as if it was a big group, but actually it was only me. And then when they started arriving, then I explained what I wanted to do and we started the group as a support group, they were telling me about their experience of violence between them.

And of course then we became friends and we formed this group ‘legally’ we had the meetings in my house because there was not a place where you could have a meeting of that kind at the time. So that's how I started with this. 

I wrote about in a book, I can't remember the, the name of the book where I talk about LEA and there are stories or narration by women, lesbian women around the world, and one of them was Chile with my writing. I'm trying to remember, but if I do, then I'll tell you the name of the book.

FiLiA: We can, we can put it out in the description of the podcast.

I was just wondering, what did you find when you were looking at the kind of experiences that lesbians had of violence between them or within relationships? Did they differ from the violence that's reported in heterosexual relationships or in more ‘traditional’ family settings?

Consuelo: No, they were the same. They were the same and they all cried. That was the only difference, that they all cried when they were telling if they were the abuser or the abused but they all cried when they were telling their stories and the conclusion I came to is that because they had been brought up in a heterosexual abusive family as well. They were just copying the model that they had, the patriarchal model. So they thought that that was the way in which you were supposed to relate to each other. 

So in the group I was La Feminista because they didn't feel feminist at all and so I had a big task to for them to get to know what feminism was about and so on.

But I'm La Feminista in that group. But eventually when I left the country to come and live here, someone else was kind of in charge. They said, okay, let's do an election kind of thing. And they chose someone who was the leader but about two years after that the group kind of started to dissolve. And they met only to go to disco and stuff like that, where they were expelled because they were violent again in the disco. So they needed someone to talk to and so on. Then I went back and we all met again, but, you know, if you're not present there, it's very difficult unless there is someone else who can do it. 

FiLiA: To take on your mantle. 

What do you think happened? Why did they dissolve? Why did they stop talking about the actual violence side of things? 

Consuelo: I think because they were a group mainly, but not all of them, were lesbians who were from a very humble class. I don’t know how to describe that. so they didn't have studies or anything. They had finished, some of them had finished secondary school. Most of them hadn't done that. But amongst them there were a group of about 3 or 4 women who were teachers. But within the group there was a difference in that sense because those women didn't want to interfere too much or didn't want to mingle too much with the others. So it was a very difficult job to try and do it but we did and we were in a way, a kind of model for another group of young women, feminist who created another group about 10 years after LEA finished. So there is hope there.

 FiLiA: A positive legacy. So you mentioned really briefly the dictatorship that Chile was under in the eighties. What was it about that that made it so virulently anti-lesbian? Why were lesbians’ kind of frightened and forced underground in that political context?

Consuelo: The dictatorship was in 1973 it started and the eighties was like the pinnacle of the social movements against it. People started going out and protest daring, which before they couldn't. You have to think as a military person, square minded I say it. And it's all a very machismo or chauvinist, patriarchal organisation. All of the armed forces including the police force which at the time of the coup, they were not considered part of the armed forces, but with the coup they were.

So, their way of relating to people and between each other is through power, power structures, and everything is top down, so having a woman who can think independently and who doesn't want men is a threat to that power, and I think that's why there was this reaction from them, for the few women who at the time, dared to defy the things and come out publicly, but we weren't very many.

I was a public figure because I came out with everything. I had my son who at the time said, mum, I don't care. You are my mum. And that's it. because his father had told him who I was. And I had married because I was just following what everybody did. I got pregnant and I had him, but he was 10 when his father said, your mother is a lesbian, and she blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And he said, you that are a marico, which is a word for a gay man. 

FiLiA: So you left Chile and you came to the UK and you were writing poetry and you were writing also a bit about kind of bodily experiences of torture from a kind of like a pseudo-scientific academic perspective.

Can you tell us a bit more about both of those things? 

Consuelo: Yeah. it was difficult to write and one of the first papers that I wrote for a Women's Studies in Lancaster, which is where I did my MA and my PhD, was in an anthology where I talk about the women's movements in Latin America, but in the, what we call the South Cone and there is when I started learning how to express myself in that way in an academic kind of way, and not hiding behind metaphors and things like that.

Because of the pain that I experienced in, which was the paper I gave yesterday, it was like something which liberated me and that's why I continued writing as academic. And I've written lots of papers or articles for the autobiography group, the British Sociological Association and so on, I've written many articles that have appeared in different places and in the Women's Studies Centre in Lancaster as well and then all my teaching has been done that way. I cannot write an academic paper without flouting the rules. I always do what I want. I do a little bit; I stick to some of the publishing rules but I don't do it on someone else's terms. I do it on my own terms. 

And I've been lucky because they have accepted it, including in the Women's Studies Forum which is where I've got that article with my partner. They accepted it, although it was completely out of what they wanted. It's a conversation between my partner and I and I included other things that my partner who is a biologist, said, but we cannot do that. It's not scientific. I said, well then let's stop it but she was quite kind to say, okay, let's continue. 

FiLiA: But it's important though, and I'm interested in your opinion, I guess, on how women experience torture, because I read a little bit on this and there's an idea that torture in a way is kind of like your own body being used against you being turned against you. And that fundamentally changes your relationship with that body. But I read that and I thought, well, in a sense, not in a physical sense, but certainly in a kind of agentic sense, women are really used to having their body used against them. It happens all the time. 

Consuelo: That’s why I don't write a testimony because a lot of people write testimonials where they say, this happened to me this year. This is what they did to me, and so on and so forth. That's why I write about what I felt. So when they asked me, so what happened exactly? I said, well, I can't tell you because that's not how I am. That's not what I felt. I knew they were doing things to me. I knew they were putting electrodes everywhere and that they were raping me and so on. But I couldn't tell you exactly how many people there were in the room because I had a blindfold on so I had to rely on my senses, on sense of smell, sense of touch, and so on and hearing. But I couldn't see the people who were torturing me. 

So, that's why I kind of went into myself and I even taught myself, I don't know, unconsciously, to forget names, because that's what they wanted. They wanted names. I trained myself so much under those psychological circumstances that even to this day, I can be your best friend and sometimes I forget your name. 

But the people who know me, they know, so they just say whoever, Sarah. That's how I felt, and that's how I put myself on paper as well. Or when I am performing what I write I cannot write in any other way. 

FiLiA: Thank you for taking the time to talk to us. 

Consuelo:  And thank you both. And to FiLiA in general, to Lisa-Marie who invited me to this conference. I really enjoyed it in spite of all my health problems. So, um, thank you very much and good luck for the next conference. 

FiLiA: Keep fighting the good fight. 

Consuelo:  Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.