Amaranntha Wass has been recognized in the campus of the UPN as a transgender woman who doesn´t need the sense of sight to observe deeply her context, so she has been well-placed as an activist and pedagogue by struggling for a more and more egalitarian society.

Currently, she is a 4th semester student of Degree in Foreign Languages, and an activist of “Resistance Bodies”, a social organization that develops community, academic, artistic and political tasks from various lines, trying to guarantee the rights of people who declare a dissidence position from bodily, sexually and gender perspective, not only as a LGBT people but also referred to minority population groups by race, class or even by distinct or divers-abilities.

She has carried herself out forceful actions, such as symbolic “takeovers” and community work in Santa Fe neighborhood, where she has focused to alleviate certain dynamics related to transgender girls who work in prostitution. She recently also contributed to a project with the National Historical Memory Center called Puppets with Memory, an effort to recover historical memory of transgender women, cisgender (a term taken from gender studies to denote or relate to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex), and gay men who practice prostitution and were victims of the conflict, using tools such as a play called Santa Fe and a video.

Female empowerment

Then the goal has been key to achieve female empowerment from different educational arena, which may be defined as, from her point of view, “starting from the feminine side to recognize certain non-normal types of violence, whether minimal or imperceptible, because we have ourselves daily accepted them.“ For her a balance of forces that does not exist right now is required.

The study of languages has reinforced Amaranntha's points of view upon inclusion and gender: “For example, the career made me realize that gender is a definitively arbitrary thing, because in French and Spanish is different; some feminine French words are masculine in Spanish and vice versa. That makes me understand that it is imposed. I also learned how within the same syntactic and semantic construction of linguistics, there are very strong power structures that are not recognized.”

Indeed the practice of the female role has led her to many reflections, because the most difficult thing is, according to her, “[…] it is normal we must endure, resist and keep quiet and maybe hide; that is the most complex thing because in any kind of oppression or hegemony, anyway the greatest triumph is in fact there, the oppressed person believes and replicates and even enjoys it; because we pretend to be happy with those assigned roles, following those structures, and take for granted that I have to do this and behave myself this.“

That is why, she values ??the fact that for example within the UPN there are female movements, composed of women who express themselves in a strong way, because for her without a radical position the social bases are not shaken and there is no way to transform them.

Although the process of admission and adaptation to the University was not easy, Amaranntha highlights the public spirit of the UPN, which makes her feel proud of belonging to the institution as well as someone privileged, since her presence in the “training of educators” institution has given her personal life a print as well as other ways in which she expresses herself in front of other colleagues from other universities and other academic arenas, scenarios where she unknowingly represents the University. From her perspective, pedagogy has given her a benchmark to teach, to build her own ways of explaining, establishing a very strong position that does not give up.

        Photography interview El Espectador