In a biographical note, you said: “A transfeminist activist and a volcano and a chunk in decolonization.” I would like to start the dialogue: How did transfeminism come about?

I come from Argentina, from the south; then I was in Buenos Aires for a few years, where I started activating a little bit on feminism; finally, as I went through the pond, I found some more autonomous feminisms, and a community of lesbian and trans women. It is at that time that transfeminism begins to strengthen itself. In 2009, the manifesto for the transfeminist revolution was written in the Granada Conference, and more and more people started to join us and fill us with content. We wanted to look for indirect answers within feminism, to take into account other axes: not only the feminism that worked on the female subject, but the current that opened that subject.

For you, what is it?

I've used it as a framework, and from there, in some moments, I've thought about the world and myself, and, of course, I've started. However, the frames change. I am still betting on transfeminism, but I have fewer issues like race.

Is that a task?

I think we need to question it and give it more space, yes. In any case, transfeminism has served me, and it still serves me, for example, to think about the body; it seems to me a very good tool. It is true that a few years ago I missed talking more about the body, and today new speeches have appeared, so I believe that new axes can be incorporated. I also believe that new approaches will emerge and be transformed, precisely when there are other women; I do not believe that a small sector, which has once been called the vanguard, will contribute anything in that direction.

Not through what is called the vanguard, how can movements be transformed and new perspectives introduced?

The important thing is that we meet. Through transfeminism, I come to the conclusion that I think we have to find ourselves and that there they are going to start moving and doing things. I don't think you can think of yourself without your body, so if there's no relationship between us, I can't know what's going on with you. I believe in the power of partnership and of being: without pretensions, things happen here.

You have spoken two words that are commonly used as insults. First: Sudaka.

It is, of course, after having crossed the pond and entered the Schengen area [border controls between countries of the European Union have been removed; controls are only carried out at the external borders of that area]. Preparing for the trip, I was very naive: I had heard of something, but I didn't really think there could be something like that, internment centers for foreigners, etc. Then I saw that the Schengen area was a really brutal limit, a death limit, and that, in this case, those of us who came from ancient colonies were not well born. And I saw, indeed, that there were detention centers for foreigners, deportations -- I didn't take the measure until I arrived, and for a long time I wondered how I was surprised by border violence. I knew the Schengen area, but in a way I knew it as part of the organisation of European Union policy. It was a fact, it was not directly related to the migrants. I didn't have the real measures of cruelty.

The second insult you have committed: the fat. In any case, you also say that you are in the process of decolonization.

I want to emphasize the decolonization of the body. One of the routes of decolonization is related to the place of birth and the migration process, but, at the same time, I believe that decolonization is something much broader that can cover a lifetime. So I think we should decolonize our own body. Anyway, all of this is a process for me, not an objective or a place to come to sometime. In that, I'm rethinking some questions about the body itself and the collective body.

What kind of issues are these?

I recently heard Guatemalan sociologist Emma Chirix speak. Natural from Maia-kaqchikel, the decolonization of the body works. Chirix said that we must stick to binomials, but not to the woman-man binomial, but to other binomials, although the first one to come to the feminists is that of women. But it's a very Western mentality: in modernity, in the 15th century, we start to radically distinguish the two genders, we start to talk about women and men, and that is considered an unquestionable doubt. From Chirix’s point of view, to address the decolonization of the body, the following binomials must be questioned: the supreme, the lowest, the oldest, the civilized, the wild, the beautiful…

I say that I am a coarse in the process of decolonization, in order to make known a certain way of constructing bodies: from these logics of binomial a vision of bodies has been built, and in the head of all these binomials there is a white, modern and Western thought.

At a conference where you talked about body mass index and its history, you showed that colonialism and the current body standard are intimately related.

Researching the medical term of obesity and obesity, I found that all the mechanisms that build this kind of body have their origin in Europe in some way. For example, I found the body mass index: It was invented by Adolphe Quetelet, the father of biostatistics. The French Government asked him to create this index, which was merely an exercise in arithmetic, but which would allow the minimum weight of workers to be calculated so that they could return to the factory every day and be able to continue producing and reproducing the workforce.

This index has subsequently spread throughout the world.

When I knew where this index came from, I asked myself: The index emerged in France, within the framework of the Industrial Revolution, in order to achieve concrete objectives. What does all this have to do with other forms of production, with other models and food more linked to the land? How is it that the weight of a 19th-century French worker has become a universal body that serves to measure all other bodies?

We know that one of the typical operations of colonialism is universalization, but colonialism is based on universalization, so, seeing that all bodies are measured by that index, it should at least seem suspicious to us. We have to see how far we take the colonial project in the body and what we can do to unlearn that.

In addition, the health of bodies is measured according to this index.

Gordophobia is an expression of hatred and health is one of the main arguments for sustaining this hatred. First of all, the medical discourse today is an unquestionable stratum, we believe that we know nothing about the health of our body, and the doctor, dressed in white coat, is the only one who can tell us the good and the bad. The relationship between the inhabitants of the Middle Ages and the cure, as we do today with doctors. We want to be autonomous and independent, but we maintain a hierarchical relationship with health, as if that knowledge were totally unknown.

What happens when a coarse person goes to the doctor?

As has been said, the power situation is completely vertical, and when fat people come to the doctor's office, the doctor will deduct that you have diabetes and hypertension and that you will probably die from a heart attack in a few years. I guess the doctor will know as soon as you see it. So in this situation, how much is science and how fat is it? The doctor, who has looked only at his tests, has seen nothing more than you, but, because he has gross prejudices, he directly links the thick bodies and certain evils, because he sees that same body as a defect, as a wrong body, which has to disappear and become a thin body, which will finally be happy.

He also said that a device that builds “normal” bodies should be called into question.

When it comes to working Gordophobia, I find it more powerful to investigate what builds a normal body and from there see why I am out of the norm. Of course, we have to know all the violence generated by gordophobia and we have to fight it actively, but I think we have to stress that the fat body is not a defect, it is not a problem in itself. This starting point seems important to me: our bodies are possible. Why is that other body a normal body? Analyzing how normality is constructed, and then questioning that this other body is correct and not ours, the rule is deactivated at the moment when it is constructed.

He recently published the fanzine Epistemology ruminant. Could you tell me where these ruminant ideas come from?

To begin with, I have a historical relationship with cows. I belong to a rural area of southern Argentina, of an extensive countryside, in which there were no more houses in the vicinity of our house, along many kilometers. Therefore, as a child and adolescent, I had more relationship with cows than with men.

In fact, cows have four stomachs and use food throughout the four -- that's why they're called ruminants.

The idea of ruminants served me to think about slowness; I'm very interested in this gesture of being cast, it's another temporality. I would like to question whether agility, agility and effectiveness are the only way to do things. I wanted to create a way of being in another way, poetically, that at least serves me to build my relationship with the world. I want to believe that slowness is possible, that we can live in other temporalities, and from there I have proposed this other method, a bit slow, a bit wrong, at least from the point of view of fertility.

You have a nice anecdote about the multitude of cows: how, when you throw hail, you start running to alert all the cows that are in the prairie, and then they all come together under shelter, with the heads down, so that the stones do not hit you any more than on the hard skin.

The cow is never in isolation, and to me that idea is fundamental. Allies are fundamental. On the other hand, there is another idea in the mud: “You don’t know how to say it, but you’re ruminating.” I mean, there's not always absolute certainty and clarity, you can feel things, pass them through four stomachs and see what comes out afterwards. Intuition prefers reflexive methods, not so much purposes. The ruminant can also be a stutterer: that's what it's all about, you can talk to bulbs, you can talk without having the total security of the world, but it's important that those voices are present. We need other voices and we need to have the opportunity to create different stories, create new stories.