Fourth-wave feminism in Spain

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Fourth-wave feminism in Spain is about digital participation in virtual spaces, encouraging debates and using collective force to enact change. It is about fighting patriarchal systems, denouncing violence against women, and discrimination and inequality faced by women.  It is also about creating real and effective equality between women and men. It has several major themes, with the first and most important in a Spanish context being violence against women. Other themes include the abolition of prostitution, the condemnation of pornography, the support of legal abortion, the amplifying of women's voices, ensuring mothers and fathers both have access to parental leave, opposition to surrogacy (Spanish: vientres de alquiler), and wage and economic parity.

Major influences in this wave include Andrea Dworkin, Chilean feminist Andrea Franulic and works such as How to be a woman by Caitlin Moran, Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf, The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, We should all be feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and El diario violeta de Carlota by Gemma Lienas.

Fourth-wave Spanish feminism came out of a response to conservatism in the 1980s and a broader problem of feminists in Latin America and Europe succeeding in their goals, with feminism then largely coming under state control. These forces converged in the 1990s, as lipstick feminism, consumerist feminism and American queer theory were rejected and women started to make demands around gender and sexist violence in response to events like the murder of Ana Orantes in Granada on 17 December 1997. This led to media discussions around the portrayal of women and violence against women. Jokes about women being hit by boyfriends and husbands were no longer acceptable on television. This violence against women, coupled with female activists using the Internet to mobilize women to act, led to the fourth-wave advancing in Spain. 2018 would be the year that fourth-wave feminism began its peak in Spain as a result of a number of different factors, with women mobilized on a large scale to take to the streets. In 2019, issues important to fourth-wavers would be at the heart of many political conversations and the 2019 Spanish general elections.

There were a number of important events that helped spur this wave.  This included the 2009 murder of Marta del Castillo, 2014 Tren de la Libertad, the first International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women march in 2015, the murder of Diana Quer in 2016, the 2018 International Women's Workers Day general strike, and the 2018 La Manada rape case.  Many of these events represented a first for Spanish feminist in that they represented the first period where women mobilized to protest against and condemn the institutional sexism of Spain's judiciary. Previous waves had focused on being allowed into the political sphere.