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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2012

Gender

Rachele Borghi
Monica Camuffo
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Résumé

The protests which have been ongoing in North-African countries since February 2011 have contributed towards giving visibility to that component of society often neglected by the dominant male model: women. Female bodies occupied not only the front covers of important magazines (Libération, n.9253, 12th-13th February 2011; Los Angeles Times, Saturday 12th February), but also a traditional male space: the public space. This media visibility of women has given new food for thought on gender issues as well as on issues concerning dominating relationships that the ever reigning patriarchal system continues to perpetrate on a global level. Assuming that in most of these societies such relationships largely determine people’s roles and lives, can one speak of a specificity in the Mediterranean setting? The predominant image of the Mediterranean world is that of a closed context, refractory to transformation, anchored in sexist traditions and still a long way from effective equality and access to politics and positions of power. Just such a stereotype, legitimized by Anglo-Saxon traditional studies and research on the Mediterranean city (c.f. Minca 2004) and still commonly predominant, has been put into question by the active role played by women in social movements which have lately taken place in the whole of the Mediterranean basin1. The pictures of women engaged in protest and demonstration have gone around the world. However, what do the women of the Arab awakening and the Spanish indignados women2 have in common? The presence of their bodies on town squares and streets. Virtual space has also held a starring role in the protests. The role of technology and the network in social and political change has been vastly covered both in scientific contexts (e.g. Paradiso 2003, 2006) and in popular contexts; particular reference can be made to the Green Wave in Iran (Mouillard 2009; Hare and Darani 2010). Furthermore, with the 2011 protests, attention has been focused specifically on the relation between gender and new media. However, if internet and social networks have made the realtime circulation of news and considerations possible, the presence of women within the physical space has been crucial, even on a symbolic level. Although the history of women and of feminism demonstrate how the claims to rights of women have always passed through the occupation of public space (one may refer to Cavarero and Restaino 2002; Veauvy 2004), the pictures of the Arab women have contributed to bringing the attention of international public opinion back to women and thus undermine the idea of the existence of an indissoluble binomial which binds women to the private sphere. It would however be wrong to believe the phenomenon is some kind of women’s “awakening” in the face of the regimes, considering the fact that they have always played an active role in revolutions and in change, on the same level as men3. In this work goals are set to give a few examples of relations and claims that have to do with gender in the complex Mediterranean reality. Women and men occupy physical and virtual spaces to make claims for gender and sexual identity. Through the visibility of these actions, we will try to demonstrate how the image of backwardness, immobility and oppression long associated with the Mediterranean is, once again, a discursive construction justified by a certain type of literature (e.g. Minca 2004). We have chosen not to divide cases into “Southern shore” and “Northern shore” of the Mediterranean, both not to legitimate, through a geographic metaphor, politics of exclusion implicitly born by such expressions, and because these phenomena are intimately bound and interacting. We will start from the Maghreb context due to its territory’s privileged position in the last ten years’ research, moreover for the particular attention it deserves. In this case indeed, the presence of women on the streets is only the manifestation of a phenomenon which started visibly, continuously and in the open daylight at least a decade ago: activism and public involvement of the population’s feminine element in the ongoing change process4. We will start by giving a big picture of feminine and feminist associative-life and activism. We are of course considering a non-exhaustive picture and especially filtered through our interest and the contact network we have developed during our research in Maghreb countries and the Francophone area5. We will give examples of virtual networks but also of empirical cases which concern directly gender researchers in Maghreb and activists from civil society associations and movements. We shall further evidence how, in the Maghreb as in other regions, research on gender has crosscut that on sexuality, generating numerous studies on homosexuality. In this case, the presence of these “bodies” within public space is still limited due to forced invisibility6. However, the occupation of numerous virtual spaces and the rising number of research conducted shows the desire of vindication by other than heterosexual identities and the will to react to imposed heteronormativity. It also proves the diffusion of queer theories - which are contested and considered radical also by a certain kind of feminism - in contexts which are prejudiced to be closed and refractory to change. Indeed, Anglo-Saxon queer theories have influenced not only scientific research, bringing attention to unexplored themes, some of which considered taboos until recently; but also the militant context. What may be considered more interesting still, is to see how queer theories in the Mediterranean context (in particular in Spain) have been particularly conjugated, generating cultural phenomena such as post-porn. In this new and most extreme attire, the passage from a gender approach to a queer one is, for many, shocking, revealing through the use of the body in the public sphere the contradictions of heteronormativity and the dichotomies (woman/man, hetero/homo, etc..) which determine the heteronormative order.
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Dates et versions

hal-01485207 , version 1 (08-03-2017)

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  • HAL Id : hal-01485207 , version 1

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Rachele Borghi, Monica Camuffo. Gender. Paolo Giaccaria; Maria Paradiso. Mediterranean Lexicon, Ugi-Società Geografica Italiana, 2012. ⟨hal-01485207⟩
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