I was watching last week the new wonder woman of Spanish music, RosalĂa, in an interview on TV (in Pablo Motosâ El Hormiguero) and she confirmed that, indeed, her new recording, El mal querer, deals with âel poder femeninoâ (Iâm not sure whether she means female, womenâs or feminine power). RosalĂa herself is an example of sudden artistic empowerment that I donât quite understand, as I think that weâre missing crucial information about her family background and her training as a musician. But thatâs not my point (to clarify matters: like millions of people around the world, I love what she does, itâs so thrilling and refreshing!). My point is this: why do we speak of power rather than of liberation? When did liberation stop being a keyword for feminism?
The very accomplished article âEmpowerment: The History of a Key Concept in Contemporary Development Discourseâ by Anne-Emmanuèle Calvès (https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_RTM_200_0735–empowerment-the-history-of-a-key-concept.htm) offers a very useful overview of how this term became so widespread and why. She cites as a major inspiration âthe conscientization approach developed by the Brazilian theorist Paulo Freire in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1968â. According to Calvès, the 1970s were the time when âthe term formally come into usage by social service providers and researchersâ, particularly after Barbara Solomonâs Black Empowerment: Social Work in Oppressed Communities (1976).
 The current popularity of âempowermentâ, however, sinks its roots in the mid-1990s, when,Calvès explains, it firmly âentered institutionalized discourse on women in developmentâ thanks to feminist NGOs. Calvès highlights the UNâs InternationalConference on Population and Development (Cairo 1994) as one of the main events âto give the concept international visibilityâ. Precisely, the article by Ann Ferguson âEmpowerment, Development and Womenâs Liberationââone of the few publications linking the two concepts that interest meâappears in a book published by the UNâs University Press, The Political Interests of Gender Revisited (Anna G. JĂłnasdĂłttir and KathleenB. Jones, eds., 2009, 85â103. The article itself is not available online but you may easily find the volumeâs introduction.
I have serious doubts about the word âempowermentâ because it seems to be intrinsically patriarchal. If, as I am preaching, patriarchy is a form of hierarchical social organization characterized by its placing individuals in different ranks according to the power they wield, why is empowerment desirable? If you start from a position of oppression and you manage to empower yourself, you may end up in a higher position but how do you contribute to undoing the very system of power? Could it be that we use empowerment mistakenly and we actually mean âliberationâ?
Let me go back to RosalĂa (born in 1993) to discuss next another young woman also born when the word âempowermentâ was become popularized, Malala Yousafzai (born in 1997).
As far as I know, RosalĂa has freely taken all the decisions concerning her career and has not been the object of any patriarchal attempts to curtail her artistic creativity. In short, she is enjoying the chance to develop her personal agency in freedom (within the legal and moral limits of current Spanish legislation) like any other young man of her generation and inclinations. Agency, incidentally, is a word that seems to have disappeared from the horizon, though it seemed to be ubiquitous just a few years ago. So, howâs RosalĂa a âpowerful womanâ rather than a âfreeâ or âliberatedâ woman? And how come âliberatedâ has taken on this sexualized meaning? It seems to me that the âpoder femeninoâ she invokes and maybe embodies is a position, rather than a reality, a sort of pre-emptive strike against the patriarchal power that might limit herâitâs a way of saying âyou canât touch meâ,even though, as we know, successful women like RosalĂa attract much attention from misogynistic haters. Her âpowerâ, then, is in how her popularity and public presence outdo the control that the patriarchal trolls would use, if they could, against her. Itâs not power to repress or control others.
 Now takeMalala, the 2014 winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace and, thus, also another example of empowermentâor is it liberation? Unlike RosalĂa, Malala grew up in an environment dominated by an extreme patriarchal regime, that of the Taliban in her native Pakistan. Her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, was motivated by his personal and professional circumstances to become an anti-patriarchal activist,willing to sacrifice his own life to give girls in his community an education.His sisters never attended school but he made sure that his daughter and other girls like her would have a school to welcome them: the one he himself ran. Malala learned her own educational activism from her father and almost lost her life in 2012 when a Taliban patriarchal terrorist shot her in the head. The family relocated then to the United Kingdom, from where both Malala and her father continue their task of empowering (or is it liberating?) other girls by providing, to begin with, the inspiration to demand an education.
Empowerment takes, then, as many forms as personal experience dictates and is supposed to act, as I was arguing, as a barrier against further oppression by shifting the relationships of power and introducing a better balance. This is where my misgivings resurface: if power is, say, a cake, the more I eat, the less you eatâwhich means that empowerment is necessarily finite and also that those in power will always resist giving any away. This is how things seem to be working so far: the oppressed demand a bigger share of the cake, which they seem to be getting but the ones who feel entitled to holding the whole cake under their control do not like the situation a bit (a bite?). Hence all the lashing out, from Taliban violence to online trolling, simply because we cannot all be empowered. In contrast, we could all be free, that is to say, liberated from the restrictions imposed by patriarchy if only we started thinking about who baked the cake and why we have to eat it at all for, you see?, you cannot have your cake and eat it, too.
Bob Pease writes that âThe challenge that confronts men is to find ways to exercise power without oppressing anyone. For men to change for the better, power must be redefined so that men can feel powerful while doing the tasks that are not traditional for menâ (30 in CarabĂ & Armengol, editors, Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World), such as⌠rearing children, he adds. I think these words encapsulate much of what is wrong with empowerment: what does âfeel powerfulâ mean, whether youâre a man or a woman? Isnât Pease himself suggesting that being powerful is the same as having the capacity to oppress others? How can you âexercise powerâ without controlling others? If you ask me, for men to change they should oppose the very idea of patriarchal power to liberate themselves and others from oppressionâask Ziauddin Yousafzai whether being powerful is a priority for him. He is the very example of what liberation is for men and for women under harsh patriarchal regimes. Why, then, knowing as we do that patriarchy survives because it appeals to men with a sense of entitlement to power, we want to empower women? Again: why not liberate everyone from the shackles of power?
Women who manage to choose how to live their lives, whether theyâre called RosalĂa or Malala, are, to me, not instances of empowerment but of freedom. Power, as we see in patriarchal men, does not free you: itâs the other way roundâit enslaves you to living life as others dictate. If youâre thinking that Iâm wrong and that only enjoying a great amount of power guarantees your personal freedom then you donât mean power, you mean agency. Vladimir Putin has plenty of power and heâs not using it for his personal liberation: heâs using it to compete with other men for the title of biggest living patriarch. Angela Merkel also has much powerâbut isnât she the counterexample of womenâs liberation? Perhaps sheâll feel truly liberated when she retires next year and can finally use her agency to help others rather than uphold, as she is doing, the status quo.
 I think Iâve now hit on the key of my own personal philosophy of power, perhaps I should call it anti-power. If being powerful is being in a position to cause things tohappen (and being powerless is being in a position in which you canât stopthings from happening), then I can say that the only use I see in empowerment is an altruistic ability to make life better for others. RosalĂaâs âpoder femeninoâ should ideally translate into lending a hand so that other persons can flourish,as she is doing. Malala is more clearly following this path already, as are others. I donât mean Bill-Gates-style philanthropy (though this is much better than what he used to embody and now Elon Musk embodies) or charity, not even NGO activism but a rethinking of what power is for. If, as a teacher, I am in a position to use my (very limited) power to benefit the careers of others who will in their turn help others, this is how I should use it. This may sound endogamic but thatâs not at all what I mean. Patriarchy will be undone when we,men and women, ask ourselves âhow can I help?â rather than âhow can I dominate?â
Iâll end by suggesting that empowerment is much more popular than liberation because the very idea of power is, regrettably, too glamorous. We also need to recall that empowerment is mainly a US export, pace Paolo Freire and NGO activism, and that in American culture the opposite of being powerful is not just being powerless but being a loser, which is even worse. Perhaps if we free ourselves from the obligation of being a winner that would be a step forward towards true liberation and the abandonment of the current obsession with power, which, trust me, is suspiciously patriarchal.