Eva Amaral has raised a stormy wind on social networks. Like the north wind of her native Aragon. The singer slipped her red sequined bra while performing at the Sonorama Ribera festival in Aranda de Duero (Burgos), intentionally leaving her breasts in the air to sing Revolución It was, as she explained, a tribute to other artists who have used the nudity as a complaint (Rocío Saiz, Rigoberta Bandini, Zahara, Miren, Bebe). “For all of us. Because no one can take away the dignity of our nakedness, the dignity of our fragility, of our strength."
The local public, who cheered her at the moment, was 35,000 people, but the action has gone beyond the mere town and millions have already seen it through social networks. And unlike her concert, she's not getting the heat from all of them.
There is the group of the offended who believes that showing the breasts denigrates the image of the woman and "objectifies" her body. There are those who think that it is a marketing coup to achieve a larger audience. And there are also those who show indifference, downplay it, remembering that there was a precursor, the Italian singer Sabrina Salerno, who in 1987, in the middle of a performance on TVE's New Year's Eve, a breast of her white top slipped out of her bodice while she was dancing (the reminder of this story is trending topic in X this weekend). These voices insist that it has rained a lot since then and a body no longer scandalizes because it lacks meaning. That the advances achieved have no turning back.
But the wind blown on Twitter, to criticize or support, a sign that the image of a pair of tops in the air moves something. Of course, those who feel that Amaral's naked torso, à la Delacroix, is a powerful image that inspires and strengthens them to face a reactionary movement of the extreme right that is spreading its ideological layer in Europe. And that, despite the puncture in the last Vox general elections, the far-right groups are also ruling in Spain.
Since their arrival in the town halls and autonomous communities they have made decisions about the withdrawal of the rainbow flags, the arrest of the singer Rocío Saiz in Murcia for taking off her shirt at a concert on LGTBI pride day, the censorship of a work by Virginia Woolf or the stoppage of the Buzz Lightyear movie...
"Historically, women have shown their breasts as an act of dissidence in the face of attempts to curtail rights," explains Alba Alfageme, a psychologist specializing in sexual violence, "it is a very powerful symbolic act that still generates, as we see, social impact," she continues. . "It's sad that we are like this," she admits, "but at the same time women have a very powerful weapon to make opposition, and that weapon is their own body, without artifice."
Alfageme maintains that it is not a question of showing the tits but of why they are shown, in what context, what does that action that is still subversive mean. And that only corresponds to the breasts, not to any other part of the body.
“The intention to build a containment dam is clear,” he assumes, “to say that it will not pass to the extreme right, which deploys its political ideology in the body of women. Without going any further, we are seeing it with the anti-abortion policy in European countries.
For Beatriz Gimeno, a feminist researcher, Amaral reinforces female sisterhood. And that is especially important after the general elections of last July in which "the vote of women was decisive in stopping the reactionary right who thought that 23-J would be a military parade."
The forces of progressivism coincide. This is how they express it on social networks. The Minister for Equality, Irene Montero, has paraphrased Amaral in X: “For the dignity of our fragility, of our strength. We are too many”. So does Vice President Yolanda Díaz "we are too many and they will not be able to ignore the life we want to inherit."
And the socialist Adriana Lastra states: “Attacking artists who are considered progressive, censoring them in their town halls and/or communities, is intended to be instructive, disciplining. Thus 'they will not dare to do it anymore'. Their only goal is to silence freedom of expression. That is why Amaral has offended them so much."
Different feminist and progressive sensibilities can be recognized in the action of the vocalist of the Aragonese duo. “That encourages us to understand that we are all together against the extreme right”, considers Beatriz Gimeno.
