Let’s talk about the rights of women with disabilities in Argentina | Celeste Romero

I am Celeste Romero, an occupational therapist, and I work in mental health and community health. I am also an activist.

When and how do you work with women in your professional life?

Well, I have been working with women since the beginning of my career because I first worked inside a women’s psychiatric hospital (manicomio). We started with a project called Fuoriuscita, where we began working with several women to help them leave the institution. This is because in Argentina, psychiatric hospitals are still fully operational and house many women. This particular hospital still has 600 women, and my work, especially as an activist, was to try to create networks that could support these women once they got out, because social networks for women—especially those with mental health issues—are very weak here.

So, that was my work in the past, and now I continue to do it, not inside an institution, but within the community. With my civil association, we work on two specific areas: the first is the job placement of women, particularly those in disadvantaged situations regarding mental health and disability; the second is supporting them so they can live in a home of their own rather than in institutional facilities.

How has the situation changed? Do you see more independence, or do you see more poverty and need?

Well, in my country, in 2018, we saw a great surge of strength. First with the “Ni Una Menos” movement, then with the issue of legal abortion—which wasn’t legal here in Argentina before that year—and then through a very beautiful thing: the creation of a Secretariat and a “Ministry of Women, Genders, and Diversity” for women’s rights. While it didn’t focus as much on specific policies for women, it served at least to highlight the lack of work being done on gender issues.

I believe our Argentine culture is still very macho and very ableist in terms of what it demands from women, and especially from disadvantaged people, without providing the necessary support. But I believe the younger generations—those under 30—have a freer outlook and greater solidarity among women. They can address gender issues at the university level, through political parties, and even through art and expression.

So, I believe that right now, especially in Argentina, we are facing a very significant cut in resources for women and social support, particularly for those in vulnerable situations. However, there is a strong movement that resists, and this strong movement is primarily led by women.

In Argentina, from the perspective of care—caring for the elderly, for children, in education, and in healthcare—meaning teachers, educators, nurses, and doctors—it has always been a gendered issue. Therefore, we speak of “feminized professions,” fields where women have always been present, often with very precarious contracts or work that is not recognized in the same way as men’s work. Consequently, care policies have always been thought out, designed, and implemented by women.

In a context where care policies—at least under neoliberal governments, as is currently the case in Argentina—face such heavy resource cuts, we are also witnessing an impoverishment of the role of women and their economic earning potential, especially in single-parent households. Along with this, we see significant impoverishment, but also a deeper reading of the gender problem and a greater capacity for problematization by the women’s movement, not only in Argentina but across Latin America.

Regarding this situation you’ve described, how do you think it will change in ten years? Will it change for better or worse? What could the new challenges be?

I am of the opinion that we must have hope; we must cultivate hope and cultivate the future. Women are the primary cultivators of the future. I believe this is our century—a century in which women have been able, throughout history, to create a point of strength to stop a macho society that did not allow for thinking about issues of equity or what it means to be a woman in the world today.

Here, we see that women have more opportunities to lead projects, companies, and public policies. But we still see that wages are not equal to men’s, and we see that violence against women is far too widespread: in Argentina, a woman dies every 23 hours.

Regarding people in disadvantaged situations, the focus here is still on seclusion and on not speaking freely about desired and supported sexuality. Despite this entire context, I think the next 10 years will be difficult, at least for a Latin America experiencing a massive push toward neoliberal policies. But I believe we will be the engine of the transformations that Latin America needs. Just as I believe Palestinian women will lead the transformation processes for their people, I think the same of European and African women.

Yes, we have so much to learn. Can you give me three names of people or organizations that inspire you in your work?

The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo are the first I choose because they were fundamental to my social, political, and professional choices. Here at least—and I say this with pride—it was the women who were the first to go looking for their children who disappeared during the last military dictatorship. They were the ones who stood up to the police and the army. They even looked specifically in psychiatric hospitals, because they knew the worst places in our society were the psychiatric wards; they thought that’s where the people who were later “disappeared” might be.

So, the first are the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. Next, given my socialist approach, Simone de Beauvoir and Rosa Luxemburg were fundamental.

Then there was a woman who always seemed so “giving” to me, someone who touches me deeply: an Argentine named Myriam Bregman. She is a lawyer who collaborated to find the identities of many young children—the children of those who disappeared in Argentina. Even today, 400 are still missing; 40 years have passed, they are no longer children, and they still haven’t recovered their identity or have had their identity changed. She is now a congresswoman and works tirelessly for human rights.

Another woman who has always truly moved me was Assunta Signorelli who, in the deinstitutionalization movement alongside Franca Basaglia, was able to express the experience of being a woman in various ways, at a time when “the revolution” was being led by men.

The last question: is there anything else you’d like to say that I haven’t asked?

In my work, I deal with women in disadvantaged situations, and I can say that, in my daily practice, women are still being questioned on how they want to live their sexuality—especially women with disabilities. There is often a male doctor who decides for them whether or not they will have a sexuality, how they will live it, and if they can have children or not. There is still no talk of support on these issues, just as there isn’t much talk about other supports for women with disabilities: whether they want to study, whether they want to envision a life with more autonomy, or if they are always viewed as little children.

We are working very hard on this issue—not just for women inside psychiatric institutions, but also for new people who need support: women with autism, women with physical disabilities, who have the right to have fun, to study, to live a full sexual life, and a full life in general.

So, on these topics, we have a lot to learn and a lot to explore among women from different parts of the world. After all, the recommendations from the UN and the Commission of Experts on these matters state that this is not just an issue here in Latin America, but in every part of the world.