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PIKARA MAGAZINE
Pikara Magazine is a monthly Spanish-speaking online magazine created in 2010, mostly read in Spain and Latin America. It aims to analyze all kinds of social, political and cultural issues with a feminist perspective.
Photo of a shopping cart abandoned in the woods
Green
Martina Di Paula, Sara Navarro and Juventud por el Clima

"Slow-Burn Consumption," A Feminist Model To Reconcile Economy And Ecology

Mass consumption is encouraged in the West, but people, particularly women, and the planet pay the price for exploitative capitalism. So, we need to be clear that taking care of each other and tackling the climate crisis are inextricably linked.

Discussing consumption is never easy. The conversation gets even more complex when you consider the political action (or lack thereof) of the person who is consuming. How do we manage the instinct of somehow holding the individual solely responsible for the climate crisis.

There is a capitalist system that drags us towards mass consumption, but when more than one person rethinks the consumption model, we sow a seed that will bear fruit if we all water it.

Leticia Toledo and Maria Victoria Coronado drew attention to this in their article 'Slow-burn Consumption': “We live in a capitalist and patriarchal economic system, the existence of which is based on unlimited growth, which consumes raw materials and human energy to generate money," they write. "In this context, the only jobs that are considered to exist are those that produce goods and services that can be monetized."

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Photo of a hand in a pocket
Society
Julia Amigo

Kleptomania, How A "Women's Pathology" Was Built On Gender And Class Bias

Between 1880 and 1930, there was a significant rise in thefts in department stores, mostly committed by women from the middle and upper classes. This situation brought with it the establishment of a new pathology: kleptomania. A century later, feminist historians have given new meaning to the practice as a protest against the social structures and oppressions of capitalism and patriarchy.

Kleptomania is defined as the malicious and curious propensity for theft. The legal language tends to specify that the stolen objects are not items of necessity; medically, it is explained as an uncontrollable impulse.

What seems clear is that kleptomania is a highly enigmatic condition and one of the few mental disorders that comes from the pathologization of a crime, which makes it possible to use it as a legal defense. It differs from the sporadic theft of clothing, accessories, or makeup (shoplifting) as the kleptomaniac's impulse is irresistible.

Studies have shown that less than one percent of the population suffers from kleptomania, being much more common among women (although determining exact numbers is very difficult).

The psychiatric disorders manual, DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) has included kleptomania since 1962. Previously, it had already received attention from, among others, Sigmund Freud. Like nymphomania or hysteria, kleptomania became an almost exclusively female diagnosis linked to the biology of women's bodies and an “inability” to resist uncontrollable desire.

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Photo of two wooden figurines
Society
Sara R. Gallardo

Facing Down The "Violence Stigma" Of Mental Health Illness

Sensationalist TV coverage and even experts still often link mental health struggles and violent crimes, even though people with mental health difficulties commit fewer crimes comparatively. It's time to end the stigma.

People like me who have mental health disorders suffer more violence than we inflict on others, yet we continue to carry the stigma of being unpredictable and aggressive individuals.

In the "events" section of a morning TV program I saw, for example, there was some news with sensationalist overtones. The first was about a son who had killed his father and the second was about an individual who had beaten another and left him in a coma.

The journalistic decisions in the presentation and commentary of both events were as follows: in the first case, the alleged perpetrator must necessarily have "mental disorders" to justify his conduct. But in the second case, it was not "necessary" to jump to that conclusion because the information focused on the bad reputation of the alleged aggressor, nicknamed "The Nazi".

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A masked female doctor examining the belly of a pregnant woman for an echographs
Society
Abril Castro Prieto

Colonialism Of Childbirth: How Racism Slammed Into My Surrogacy Experience

In Mexico, it's common to hear the term "improving the race" when a darker skinned person dates someone who is white. The author came directly in contact with these prejudices — and Spain's discrimination of people from its former colonies — when she went through surrogacy.

On my 26th birthday, my black, lesbian artist friend Kara Lynch gave me Angela Davis' autobiography. Together with Lynch and several artists and writers from the borderlands of Tijuana and the United States, we formed the first openly feminist collective in Baja California, Mexico, in 2002 — the Interdisiplinario la Línea. We wanted to make visible the work of great undiscovered Mexican writers and artists.

When she handed me the book, I remember Lynch telling me that it was an indispensable text “for us, as women of color”. At first, I didn't understand if her "we" was really for me.

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Pride March of the​ Arenas Arcoíris collective
LGBTQ Plus
Laura Alvaro Andaluz

Spain's Small Town Transition! Fighting Depopulation By Becoming LGBTQ+ Haven

Small Spanish towns are struggling with mass exodus to cities. But some are trying to turn things around by making them safe spaces for LGBTQ+ people who could return from urban areas.

Arenas de San Pedro is exactly what you picture when you imagine a small Spanish town: small tables on terraces, a castle, and mountains in the distance. But this town in the province of Ávila with 6,500 inhabitants also has a feature of many similar Spanish ones: depopulation. And it is conservative, which seems unlikely to change in the short-term future.

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