Building Blocks of Feminist Foreign Policy: Ternura Radical

Source: Larousse Magazine

In reflecting on the “feminism” in a feminist foreign policy, centring transformation is essential. If our vision for a feminist future must come to bear, it is essential to pay attention to, interrogate, and dismantle the systems and structures that continue to normalize violence and harm. In our ongoing effort of learning from worldviews aside from the colonizer’s, we draw from the wisdom of ternura radical, or radical tenderness.

The term ternura radical emerged in the course of the work of a performance collective, called La Pocha Nostra, between 2009 and 2016. The concept emerged in the context of the radical performance pedagogy workshops facilitated by the collective. The collective recognizes ternura radical as an entity-force that “moves, transforms, and disseminates itself in many ways.” Its roots lie in the transfeminist community of Mexico, and accordingly, both as a term and practice, any mentions of the concept would be incomplete without citing the work and wisdom of Lia La Novia Sirena, a Mexican trans activist, educator, and performance artist. 

Ternura radical recognizes that no one raises their voice in protest without cause: For some, it is a matter of life and death. For some, it is a matter of solidarity. Regardless, there are difficult stories of injustice, violation, violence, pain, and grief behind a protest. No injustice that forms the subject matter of the reason for a protest is theoretical. It recognizes that even the strongest and most vociferous actors within a movement carry grief, fear, and trauma, and makes room to embrace the vulnerability and potential fragility as an integral part of the fight. Ternura radical invites us to “take each other’s pain into our own hands” and to see it as “the fire that gives power to the movement.”

Ternura Radical and Histories of Feminist Foreign Policy

Feminist foreign policy in practice across the majority world has consciously involved acts of subversion and protest: Whether that has concerned resisting colonialism and extractivism or pushing back against militarism and capitalism. In all these efforts and endeavours, feminist activists have not only carried their own pain and grief, but also those of others before and alongside them.

Recognizing the historic practice of feminist foreign policy in action is ternura radical in itself – it invites us to shift away from the system’s weaponization of a transformative body of work and life, and calls on us to remember that the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house. Weaving it into feminist foreign policy is an invitation to recognize the full political import of what it means to call a foreign policy approach feminist, and to act on the learning. It invites us to learn from the historic efforts and labour that have constituted an embodied foreign policy: Efforts to resist colonialism, extractivism, settlement, military and economic occupation, erasure, genocide, violence, and the imposition of dominant worldviews and othering of long-held practices and ideas. Ternura radical offers us a way to create and nurture ways of being that interrupt violence.

Ternura radical is a mode of political-affective re-existence. It helps us see the vulnerabilities that went into these fights and the embedded care and collective work it took to arrive at these efforts. It helps recognize that no foreign policy approach can call itself feminist when it arrives at the cost the systemic erasure of these stories.   

References:     

• https://danidemilia.com/2018/10/26/ternura-radical-radical-tenderness-post/ https://danidemilia.com/2015/08/12/manifiesto-de-la-ternura-radical/

• https://indiegraf.com/blog/indie-publisher/3-latin-american-activism-terms-for-your-journalism/

This article draws from the wisdom, practices, and life work of Indigenous groups. While educating ourselves on Indigenous worldviews is important, we understand that our actions can also contribute to and enable appropriation. As part of our ongoing attempts at practicing accountability, we invite readers to consider supporting the work of LaPocha Nostra or artist Dani D’Emilia, or Lia Garcia to support the lives and work of people from the transfeminist community in Mexico.