Gomez "El cuerpo por asalto"

Otro comentario sobre los tobas y el cuerpo. Este articulo de mariana relamente me gusta. E sun trabajo super minucioso de un tema que hasta ahora no se estaba haciendo visible e incluso se minimiz'o en arios casos.

Gomez analyzes the unequal gender relations among the tobas through the thread of sexual assault that women of while in the bush. She argues that the gender an sexual relations are unfold in a system of structural inequality, which is both manifested in the kinship and systems but that has also been the result of missionary work and their role in spreading a christian morality among the tobas, as well as their experiences in the sugar cane plantations during the first half of the 20th century.
The women of the rural communities of western formosa with whom she works go to the bush mostly to gather algarroba, during the harvest season, an to collect materials for their handicrafts. If the women unfold particular territorialities in their trips, each group using only some sectors of the forest. These trips are made with no masculine presence, it is in such context that the women meet the danger of finding men that may attack them. One strategy is for the women to always go in groups, to go to the bush alone is the. They also identify the machete and their own physical strength as ways of defending themselves in a the case of an attack. In these practices, the bush is produced as a non safe space for women, something that adds to the ambiguity of being also a place strongly identified with the practice that constitutes women's identity, this is the recollection and the production of handicrafts.
The bush is thus produced as non safe but is also experienced physically in this way. Women walking on the bush are alert constantly of any evidence of someone else's presence in the bush. If women and men engage in eventual sexual relations in the bush, and in this way it is constituted as a site both of experimentation but also of sexuality outside marital relation, men and women are not equally considered in this regard. Women's sexuality remains under control and safe as long as it is in the domestic areas and its surroundings, as far as the glance of husbands and other members of the family can reach.

The men are both exempted of having a bad reputation when engaged in these type of relations and are also participant in forcing the women into having sex in the bush. It is not uncommon, as Gomez registers form the accounts of many wome, group rape in which many men rape a single women or help other do it. The men attacking, who can be both members of the communities or neighboring criollos, legitimate their actions by regarding the female who go to the bush as not being careful enough.It is women who participate in this encounters who are categorized as "women who go out", thus as transgressors of the norm of staying within the social glance. Gomez, following Segato, understad rape not as an exepmtion but as a norm that serves to the purpose of limiting women's sexuality and generally limiting women's range of action. The unequal gender relations are thus constituted around the production of places, something that demarcates a relativity in the acceptability of violence, and defines the rage of action of what is acceptable for women to do. Both women's right to sexuality and the bush as a place are produced within ambivalent terms in which violence is accepted as a mean of constructing gender difference.