Salomé Gómez-Upegui, author of the book 'Feminist by accident'. Sofi Perazzo
Salomé Gómez-Upegui (Medellín, 26 years old) says that if she is a feminist, anyone can be.
Until just a few years ago, she couldn't stand them, she saw them as hysterical women, whom it was better not to approach.
She now teaches courses on feminism and last year she published
Ella feminista by accident,
a book in which she tells how she went from looking suspiciously at any feminist to becoming one of them.
She talks about her Catholic upbringing and her life in a paisa family (as the natives of Medellin and surroundings are known) and especially conservative.
“The school was a space that curtailed the possibility of being different.
We are pressured from there to fit into that box of controllable, perfect women.
There was only one way of being and that had to follow a mold and that was that of the Virgin Mary.
She was taught that the right thing to do was to be submissive, without any kind of personality, without any agency of her own,” she says.
In
Feminist by accident
, her first book, she tells how she managed to break down the walls that separated her from feminism.
“About abortion they instilled in me above all fear.
We were taught to see in abortion a ticket [ticket] to hell with no return,” she says.
Gómez-Upegui studied at a convent school and grew up in a large family where the women exclusively took care of care work.
Her book is a compilation of essays on feminism and stories of the experiences that led her to break with traditions and lose the fear of calling herself a feminist.
“One of the first ideas I abandoned was that in order to be one I had to hate men.
Thinking about it led me for many years to believe that it would become a betrayal of my father, my partner, ”says the author, who after finishing a master's degree in law at Harvard University, decided to dedicate herself to writing.
Feminist by accident
, edited by Planeta, tells stories that today sound like anecdotes but that reveal how machismo is experienced in families.
She remembers her father's complaints about her because, at the age of 12, she did not know how to prepare rice.
"The most absurd thing was that he, then over 30 years old, didn't know how to do it either," she says now, laughing.
When she was younger, she was amused by the story of her great-grandmother —who had 18 children—, about whom they said that she got up before her husband, at dawn, to put on a little blush and lipstick to go back to bed. and see herself “fixed” when her husband woke up.
Gómez-Upegui remembers it as a story that she listened to as another family curiosity, but today she questions it.
“Recognizing yourself as a feminist is not easy.
You feel a lot of frustration.
When we believe that things are improving and that progress has been made, a bubble bursts in our faces telling us that there is still a long way to go,” says the author, who dedicates a few pages of her book to talk about feminist movements in the region.
Of what it meant —the now global anthem of feminism—
A rapist in your path
, of Las Tesis, or of the Mexican feminist movement and its creative forms of protest.
“In Colombia something is also happening [with the feminist movements] and it is admirable because it is a country with many war wounds.
I admire that in the midst of this a movement has been created and strengthened, ”says the author, who especially recognizes the scope of the movement in favor of the decriminalization of abortion.
“That this is being discussed in a country where it is still such a difficult issue is already an achievement.
The lawsuit that today has the Constitutional Court debating the decriminalization of abortion is thanks to the titanic work of feminist groups”.
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Cover of the book 'Feminist by accident' by Salomé Gómez-Upegui. Sofi Perazzo