On Calle San Luis, in one of Seville’s oldest  neighbourhoods, a large purple banner hangs from a grand, tiled house.  Painted on it: the outline of a vulva and the words La Casa Revolucioná de Mujeres (La Revo). It is a Casa Social Okupa,  established for and by the women and non-binary people of the barrio.  The building itself is striking, its reds and yellows burnt and faded by  the unrelenting sun. San Luis is a typically Andalusian street, lined with orange trees, flamenco peñas  and churches that were once mosques, their minarets turned bell towers  with the fall of Muslim-ruled Al-Andalus. The barrio is known for once  being home to Cervantes’ lover; local legends describe him scaling San Marcos  church tower to woo her from the balcony. Centuries later it would be  Seville’s last Republican stronghold, and site of the massacre of  hundreds of communists and anarchists by Francisco Franco’s nationalist  forces during the Spanish Civil War. Now there’s La Revo.

La Revo is Seville’s first non-mixed occupation. It was  established in 2015, not intended for permanent habitation, but as a  social centre that would be home to community workshops, debates,  fiestas, a crèche, a kitchen and a library. I got involved with La Revo when  it was still an idea and not yet a concrete project. I had lurked in  awe around the project’s authors and architects for about a year after  moving to Spain. I had seen their involvement in other actions, like the  2012–13 pro-choice campaigns responding to the government’s attempts to  outlaw abortions, and I was attracted to their confidence and  creativity.

Those at the centre of the project gradually came to trust that I was  not a police informer and began to include me. Alongside  practicalities, we had to face doubts and dilemmas that were rooted in  Seville’s history, concerning queer and feminist theory and our own  experiences. Was it inconsistent and hypocritical to seek gender  equality in the public sphere through championing separatism though we  were a women-centred house? Why bother occupying a building and risking  police repression, when one could just pay rent? And finally, would La Revo  — could it — survive, despite its inherent contradictions and the  resistance it was already facing? These questions framed my involvement  with La Revo.

We discussed these indecisions at our initial meetings, when La Revo  was nomadic and still a name to be whispered. At this point, we were  unsure of almost everything, including where we’d like to be. To the  feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti, nomadism characterises the  contemporary postmodern subject, especially the feminist subject. Her  nomadism does not refer to physical displacement, but rather points to  the metaphysical travel done across established conventions of thought  and behaviour via an itinerant critical consciousness.[1]  To us, being nomadic meant code names and cafés, paranoia and promise;  at this early stage, we had to remain exclusive and elusive for security  reasons. If the guardia civil — the Spanish police — had  sensed our plans, that would have been it. But our attempts to remain  obscure was complicated by the goals of the project itself. Our idea was  to build an open and inclusive project that was designed for and around  the community’s women. We wondered, however, if this was possible to do  on such well-concealed foundations.

La Revo was born of rage. Groups of female and trans  activists — mostly self-identifying anarchists — had become incensed by  the hypocrisies of the squats, cooperatives and communal gardens where  they’d spent much time and energy. Alongside their male counterparts  they’d asserted their rights to these spaces and to greater freedoms  generally, yet they often found their own liberties curtailed by the  other project participants. They were excluded from certain tasks,  activities and decisions — expected to perform unrecognised emotional  labour, and often implicitly or explicitly undermined. The recurring  inconsistencies between the ideas and actions of their male companions  compelled them to act.

No cis men allowed?

Feminist activists have repeatedly asked, and been asked, how they  can demand equality while advocating separatism and difference. In the  West, women have faced this fraught question since their first entry  into the public sphere. The notion of the ‘public sphere’ was initially  established in opposition to the ostensibly feminine ‘private’ domain: a  distinction crucial to Aristotle’s understanding of the relationship  between family and state. With industrialisation and urbanisation,  shared conceptions of space became more acutely partitioned through  social practice and the division of labour. According to Doreen Massey,  as men departed a their personal abodes to enter the public sphere, they  came to characterise that place as ‘home’ and framed it around those  who had stayed. The identity of a place, Massey concludes, is derived  from the specificity of its interactions with the ‘outside’, as the  private become inextricably intertwined with the domestic and  femininity. [2]

During the ideological turmoil of the French Revolution, social  spectators began to think about, or rethink, women’s relationship to the  public sphere. Contemporary political thinkers Nicolas de Condorcet and  Olympe De Gouges presented antithetical arguments for why women had the  same rights to citizenship and public life as men. De Gouges argued  that women’s unique attributes were compatible with new ideas of the  ‘nation’, asserting that femininity could enhance its strength and  defence.[3]  She was killed on the guillotine for her provocative views. Condorcet  conversely claimed that women could learn to be like men, and in doing  so, they would eventually be entitled to play with the big boys.[4]

Both approaches place women in an impossible position. In De Gouges’s  position, women must draw on an abstract feminine ‘essence’ — often  seen as maternal and passive, and therefore at odds with ‘the public’ —  to attain more influence, or, qua Condorcet, must adopt the  conventional masculine way of being and banish any ‘feminine’ traits.  This conundrum still exists today. Female politicians are encouraged to  take vocal coaching, lowering the timbre of their voice to give it more  ‘authority’; they are also publicly vilified for not being sufficiently  motherly, gentle, or ladylike. Many women who daily navigate public  space, whether at work, in the media, in politics, or at university,  will recognise that sensation of having assumptions made about what they  will say before they have opened their mouths to speak.

These women will be familiar with the feeling that they must work  harder to show they are as intelligent as their male peers, and can be  as assertive. They then risk being labeled as ‘oversensitive’,  ‘overbearing’, ‘whinge’’ or ‘hysterical’ when their passion is  displayed. Instead of trapping people into these dichotomous categories,  we ought to open up our understandings of what we consider to be  powerful, authoritative and influential, thereby broadening the  possibilities of action for women, non-binary people and men. The  historian Joan Wallach Scott, in her landmark essay ‘Gender: A Useful  Category of Analysis’, urges us to reject the very idea that  equality-versus-difference comprises an opposition:

It makes no sense for the feminist movement to let its arguments be  forced into pre-existing categories, its political disputes be  categorised by a dichotomy we did not invent… The only response is a  double one: the unmasking of the power relationship constructed by  posing equality as the antithesis of difference, and the refusal of its  consequent dichotomous construction of political choices.[5]

These were the kinds of challenges we confronted when imagining the future of our project, and I felt excited by how La Revo seemed  to represent a response to Scott’s admonitions. It sought to embrace  contradiction and upset Manichean binaries from its very premise. Its  aim: to become a house — a home — for women, but one that was firmly situated in the public and, as an Okupa, a challenge to the very rationale of private property.

Unlike the French revolutionaries or even second–wave feminist predecessors, we in La Revo were  not attached to the uncomplicated category of ‘women’. That concept had  been disrupted and troubled by intersectionality and queer theory, and  by our own lived experiences.[6]  Many of us identified as queer and would have ultimately liked to see  gender divisions banished completely. Though others didn’t agree,  discussion, whilst heated, remained playful and productive. Does my  stance as a feminist mean that I am reaffirming essentialist categories  that I simultaneously seek to undermine? I do recognise the apparent  contradictions in aiming for the eventual erosion of the simplistic sex  and gender binary while advocating for women’s rights. But as Braidotti  says:

In feminist theory one speaks as a woman, although  the subject ‘woman’ is not a monolithic essence…One speaks as a woman  in order to empower women, to activate socio-symbolic changes in their  condition: this is a radically anti-essentialist position.[7]

In 2015, we agreed that a female-run (if not female only) space was  important, and emphasised three main arguments in favour of our stance:

• To redress an imbalance. In the Andalusian capital,  masculinity still dominated public space: in the bars, the hermandades  (Catholic brotherhoods), and sites of politics and sport. Even though  women were supposedly welcome, these places were often built for and  around men, giving them a distinctly masculine feel.
• To change. We were of mixed ages, but those who  were older and had experiences of mixed activism told us of difficult  interactions: being overlooked, undermined and dismissed. Many argued  that by organising separately, women could gain the confidence to become  more assertive and vocal in mixed spaces. Personally, I’m more  convinced by the inverse argument that we should work on transforming  society itself; to think about why and whose voice fits public spaces,  and attacking the ‘faultlines and fractures that underlie dominant male  discourse’.[8]
• To care. If there is one woman who, for whatever  reason — perhaps because of a particularly traumatic or violent  experience — feels particularly uncomfortable around men, surely she too  has a right to a public space. La Revo would offer a kind of private refuge that allows women a form of escape from the relentless masculinity of the public sphere.

The process wasn’t straightforward. From talking with a  non-heteronormative male friend who defined as a male feminist, for  example, I found myself coming round to the idea of men’s entry to the  space. He made the case that if he was denied entrance, he would be  deprived of learning and the company of friends. After hours of  meetings, we decided that once La Revo was more established in  the community, self-identifying males would be allowed to contribute.  They would not maybe be free to attend every event, and they would never  be the principal organisers, but they would be granted entry.

Why occupy?

People occupy spaces to free themselves from market or state  dependencies and because they have no alternative. While Barcelona and  Madrid’s reputations as radical sites of squatting have been firmly  established, Seville’s tradition in the practice is less recognised. In  1978, during the Spanish transition to democracy, a group of Spanish  Communist party members was released from prison and sought a space in  which to socialise. They found and occupied an abandoned hut,  transforming it into their collective’s hang-out, which still stands  today. Since then, various groups and families have occupied empty  buildings, in which to both live and organise. Despite the introduction  of repressive anti-squatting laws, the 90s saw a surge in these  activities.

In 2006, it took police 36 hours to evict occupants of Casas Viejas, an Okupa  named after a nearby town where insurrectionary anarchists were killed  in 1933. The eviction involved a fierce showdown, with hundreds  protesting and two activists chaining themselves inside a secret  underground tunnel they had built under the house. The activists later  said brutal tactics were used to remove them, while the police defended  their actions by claiming the squat was connected to the Basque  organisation ETA, for which there is no evidence. The title of a  documentary made about this episode, ‘London Isn’t Seville’, indicates  the pride in Sevillana resistance many felt.

El Pumarejo, an 18th century Mudejár palace converted into  a residential home and community centre became the site of another  success story. In 2000, authorities tried to expel the building’s  residents, some of whom were elderly, to sell the old palace to a hotel  chain. The occupants refused to leave and were supported by their  neighbours, who delivered food and care. Such acts of solidarity  continue today, with neighbours looking after those who still live  there, and making sure that the building — abandoned by the local  authorities — doesn’t deteriorate. While many of the original  inhabitants had to move out to get more specialised care, El Pumarejo is  now home to dozens of meetings, community events and cultural shows,  and has its own currency. Close by, too, is Rey Moro urban  community garden, established in 2004 by local residents who had refused  to allow their beloved bit of wild wasteland to be sold off and built  on, and converted it instead into communal allotments.

These examples of grassroots neighbourhood resistance challenge  popular assumptions that Spain’s recent political mobilisation — the  post-2008 economic crisis Indignados movement —  represented a radical break with the past. In reality, recent activism  in Spain is constructed from the residue of previous mobilisation, going  back to the dictatorship and transition years. To emphasise the novelty  of contemporary activism is to ignore its contingency on past  radicalism and previous struggles, and to view current politics through  an ahistorical lens.

Spain has seen a huge political mobilisation since 2008. Over one  million people were involved in the protests and occupations in May  2011, in a phenomenon known as 15M (15th May). According to one poll, 70% of the population was sympathetic to the Indignados movement.[9]  Around a thousand organisations, platforms and assemblies coexisted by  2012, most of which were responding to austerity measures brought in  during a recession that deeply affected Spain along with Greece and  Portugal, countries which had also undergone transitions to democracy in  the mid-70s.

Housing and unemployment were particularly sharp areas of conflict.  The decades preceding the crisis had seen a credit-fueled boom in  property and construction, partly driven by increasing levels of  tourism. The financial crash left millions of people with insurmountable  debts due to rising mortgage prices, and without employment. In 2012  alone Spain witnessed 100,000 evictions, and rates of youth unemployment  soared.[10]  The tragic irony of multiplying empty houses occurring alongside rising  homelessness prompted many to get involved with anti-eviction  organising or Okupa projects all over Spain. The left-wing  Barcelona mayor, Ada Calou, owes many of her votes to her support for  anti-eviction and anti-gentrification initiatives, drawing from groups  like V de Vivienda and Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH). By 2015, PAH had stopped 2,500 evictions.[11]

In May 2012, 38 families in Seville occupied four empty buildings owned by a bank, calling it La Utopía.  In the following months, 200 families squatted 12 more buildings. These  were mainly working-class families — with children — who were  unemployed and homeless.[12]  Within Urban Studies this activity is described as ‘deprivation-based  squatting’, and is therefore distinguished from political squatting. Yet  the reasons why people squat are entangled. What might at first seem  like a response to primordial needs can become profoundly political. The  thousands of illegally-established makeshift homes that constituted  Spain’s chabolas — shanty towns —  in the 1950s came into life  as sites of survival, inhabited by impoverished families who had  internally migrated to work in newly-established factories. They would  become hot-beds for anti-Francoist dissent and were key settings in  Spain’s 1970s citizen movement that accompanied the transition to  democracy.

The house occupied by La Revo serves as a metaphor for some  of Spain’s recent history. Until six years ago it was one of the five  properties owned by a banker called Antonio Pulido. After the bankruptcy  of Pulido’s own firm, the house — with a mortgage of nearly 100% of its  value — passed from one almost-insolvent bank and insurance company to  another. Meanwhile it lay empty and decaying from lack of care. We  plotted and prepared for a year. I even had an abseiling lesson, which,  given my clumsiness, was luckily not put into practice. When we got in,  we danced. Then, I thought of some words by Emma Goldman: ‘If I can’t  dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution’.[13]

How to stay open?

Can La Revo remain open? By ‘open’, I mean both operative  (not closed down) and inclusive. In the first weeks we camped inside,  keeping guard from the police, and considered how linked these ideas of  ‘operational’ and ‘inclusivity’ are. With the broader community’s  backing and involvement, it would be harder for the authorities to kick  us out. We set to work, trying to make the house welcoming. We cleaned,  made furniture, wired up electrics and gardened. We politely (-ish)  declined the numerous offers from male amigos of support with the  ‘harder’, ‘heavier’ tasks. And some of us called on the neighbours,  updating them on our progress and inviting them around. Yet this  question of how to incorporate the community was complicated, and began  to provoke internal divisions.

On the one hand, a group emerged that felt the house had to remain  true to the anti-capitalist, anarchist, ecological values held by many  of its original members at all cost. It would become a platform to  expand these values and teach other people of their importance. On the  other side was a camp which felt that strictly maintaining these values  and establishing a proselytising ethos in the house might alienate some  women and non-binary people.

What if a neighbour comes along wanting to make a tortilla —  the classic Spanish omelette — or organise a cake-baking competition  and can’t because of the proposed vegan premise of the house? Is only  serving locally-brewed beer turning the place into a hipster house and  possibly excluding certain members of the community, out-pricing them or  making them feel guilty for their own life choices? I wondered how many  groups had imploded on debates like this. Jane Mansbridge discusses a  paradox central to many organisations: ‘To change the world, a movement  must include as many people as possible but to attract devoted  activists, a movement must often promote a sense of exclusivity’.[14]

Those in La Revo who prioritised openness and diversity over  political or anti-capitalist integrity were often assumed to be less  radical, more mainstream. I saw this as problematic, and worried that  the group thought of as inherently more extreme could come to dominate,  backed by an unspoken understanding that that is what they deserved.  Some members mentioned that they felt not conforming to the more extreme  group’s ways would lead to their exclusion, sensing judgment from some  members for pursuing heteronormative relationships, for example.

When old norms are challenged, ‘alternative’ orthodoxies sometimes  emerge that can work to conserve the newly-established power structure. A  few people from the neighbourhood said they felt intimidated by La Revo  because their clothes were not punky enough or were too feminine. That  we could be perceived or imagined to exclude or discriminate based on  something so superficial was disturbing and far from our initial  intentions. But these sentiments are a feature of many organisations,  often inadvertently creating their own uniform. Groups that address the  issues of race, class, and gender as they relate to the topic of ‘image’  are brave, and probably last longest. When I left Spain, La Revo  was just beginning to address these big questions. I think the project  will only survive if its participants can stay open  and honest about  these issues and others that emerge.

People ask if I was happy to leave Spain and return to education, to  begin a Ph.D. They have no idea of the education I’m missing. On the day  I write this, activities that will be happening at La Revo  include a variety of classes, a talk on Colombian feminist art and a  film screening. But I carry many of the questions raised by my  experience with this project into my academic work. It challenged me to  reflect on how to unsettle neat categories, resist established codes and  try to blur boundaries while remaining sensitive to the new ones I  might create along the way. La Revo unsettles classifications.  It is an occupation that is not inhabited; a feminist house that seeks  to undermine the gender binary; simultaneously a home and a public space.

La Revo will continue to break down its own internal and  invisible boundaries and divisions only if its participants keep  talking. Coming to see the importance of communication, and what happens  when this is impeded, were La Revo’s most important lessons to  me. Some – not all — of its members showed or reminded me of the power  of doubt; the merit of raising questions over the repetition of answers,  and the value of collaborating. If La Revo encourages these  qualities I think it could endure a forced eviction, a return to  nomadism, the hunt for a new home and other challenges it might face. We  turned La Revo from an idea into a physical space, but it  remains an idea, bigger than the building it inhabits, as important now  as when it was first conceived. In promoting its core values and  remaining open to new ones, it will persist as a fertile conceptual site  for further interrogations, pushing past the four walls it now  occupies.