The opera “The Mother of Us All” (Gertrude Stein, 1947) burst onto the scene in the late forties, bringing together characters from different eras to propose a new order based on women as a political body independent of men, seeking not only the right to vote and education, but also equality of civil rights, parental authority, and equal pay. The reenactment created by Miguel Ángel Benjumea, through a solitary and lost woman in the middle of a desolate landscape, who insistently repeats some phrases from Stein's opera, updates the meaning of the original text towards a feminism that reminds us of where it comes from and the importance of assuming that past to face the urgencies marked by the new feminisms, which have problematized the struggle of the man/woman binary, and which needs not only a collective body, but many bodies that share the common demands and that deconstruct the relationship of identity with the biological in order to highlight the violence that prolonging any type of hierarchy over bodies entails.

Violeta Janeiro Alfageme