173 Letter from Alicia Orea-Giner
From the margins to subversion
My earliest memories are linked to a desire to discover and learn; escaping from a room to observe my mother, then 29, run her small rural business. In return, she had to give up watching me grow up, but I have been lucky enough to see how she has done so. She lived on the fringes of a reality that took place in the big cities or in those places where the elite could afford to have heating and rest on Saturdays and Sundays. Many times, I have accompanied my mother to work in patriarchal and heteronormative spaces where she was the only woman and where, in addition to being mocked from the beginning, she had to learn to move, to claim those spaces, to feel safe being at that time an “intruder”. Now, I am writing this text from my computer in a room of my own. However, in order to get here, both of us have only been able to achieve this through subversion. A subversion that we didn’t even know what it meant in the 90s and even less so in the 2000s, because in my house, we couldn’t afford to buy books or sit down at night to read together.
In the meantime, I always dreamed of escaping from that rural environment that combined machismo with heteronormativity in all spaces. Why could I only read books “for girls”? Why was I not allowed to read books “for grown-ups” in the library? Why has it always been like that? But then the Internet came, obviously, also to the library. At home, we couldn’t afford it. I developed my patience waiting for videos, images, and texts to load… Then came the moment, a new form of subversion. I learned to use audio and image editing tools, I started creating a podcast (in 2008, podcasts were also on the margins), and I found my true vocation: to generate discomfort, to be, as a language teacher used to say to me: “the defender of lost causes”. And if they are not lost? I read Machiavelli, Nietzsche, I became interested in history and especially in poetry, in Lorca… But what space did women occupy? I wasn’t aware of it at the time.
At the age of 17, I had to move from the countryside to the city, continuing a life of precariousness but at least with books, high-speed Internet, and a new world to discover. I read The Glass Bell by Sylvia Plath, and I was never the same again. It was the beginning of getting to know me/us. I was studying history and tourism at the time, the latter being particularly uninteresting to me because the perspective was purely economic. What was I doing there? Did I want to be a businesswoman? I tried to find my position, my place. Thanks to my Erasmus year in Paris, I discovered anthropology and its link with tourism, and it became clear to me: all this time, I had been wrong. Why? Why had nobody told me about anthropology? And this is where subversion also becomes understanding otherness.
After finishing my PhD focused on sustainability and my access to the heteronormative space of university classrooms and research, I have been an o