Giugno è il mese del (Gay) Pride. Ormai viene accorciato. Accogliendo molti più “generi” di quelli immaginati in un primo momento, durante quel primo “ultimo sabato del mese” del 1970 a Chicago. Definito come una “manifestazione pubblica” ormai internazionale “per l’accettazione sociale e l’auto-accettazione delle persone omosessuali e il riconoscimento dei relativi diritti civili e legali”… il Pride è da sempre aperto a chiunque…
Femicide, men used to hate women
We can guess that (almost) all of us went through this at least once in our life. It might not strictly a violence, but maybe a boyfriend a little too “jealous” (not to say “possessive”), a husband who checks your email, the one who likes making scenes in the middle of the street, the ex who calls you a thousand times to find out where you are, the half unknown who has decided to skulk outside your house…
The stereotype, “a snap judgment against the imperfect perfection”
“Stereotypes, prejudices and discrimination are often conceived as correlated, even if they express different concepts: stereotypes are a cognitive component, it is how our brain normally handles information, often without real awareness; prejudice is the affective component of this “stereotype”; finally, discrimination is the behavioral part that follows the prejudicial reactions”…
Princesses, (social) mirror on the wall
Beautiful and thin, graceful and harmonious, romantic and always in search of love, kind and helpful, affable and loving, obliging and attentive. The Italian (and English) provide an infinite number of synonyms to describe the gender role, always the same, of fairytale princesses: characters that are basically unreal in which, however, many girls still try to mirror themselves. But it is useless to blame the choices of the last century. From 2012 things have changed more in the entertainment rather than in the women’s head…
The mad (female) scientist
Thinking about great women scientists, in these hours, we especially have in mind Katherine Johnson, the woman who brought the man on the moon, recently deceased at the age of 101, and Ilaria Capua, well-known virologist that absolves Italy from its brand new “infective stereotype”…
The evil God of multitasking (which does not exist)
The stereotype of “knowing how to do more things together”, once assigned to women because they are “forced to juggle work and family”, and once to men because “they have so many responsibilities on them” (but perhaps the women’s stereotype wins in diffusion), it is generally seen as a quality, albeit tiring. Too bad that we are not machines, and therefore the infamous multitasking does not actually exist neither for women nor men…
Jineology, the kurdish science that frees women
Jineology? Never heard that. Is it a typo? Even searching on dictionaries and internet… nothing, Google continues to correct it in “genealogy”. The term in Italian does not seem to exist, nor even an analogue in English. When the only Italian source appears, three lines on il manifesto newspaper, suddenly everything was clear: ‘ah, it’s something that concerns women, as usual we don’t know anything about it…’
Kurdish Women’s Movement: “patriarchy is not natural”
“Have any of you ever studied the origins of patriarchy at school?” Dilar Dirik asks, researcher in Sociology at Cambridge University and activist of the Kurdish Women’s Movement. The rhetorical question slips into silence, so Dilar tries to summarize only 6.000 years of humanity on Earth, when, during Neolithic, the first “modern” societies were formed in Mesopotamia, India, China… matriarchal organizations, where women carried out internal, social, economic and political functions, and men external, subsistence and defense ones. At that time women had an enormous prestige, probably stemmed from the fact that they were considered the only procreative members of the group, prestige that it was taken away from them precisely when the men discovered their paternity…
We Women: beautiful, dirty and bad
The first change for the “feminine condition” concerns women, precisely, and not men. Men will not help the preconditions, but if the woman first considers herself as a little creature given to sex, motherhood and domestic care, and if she first attacks those women who try to get out of their stereotypes that cage them, please, then don’t complain of male chauvinism. The most serious male chauvinism is that of women…
Women rights and gender equality: the case of Switzerland
Switzerland is considered one of the best examples of advanced country: neutral in wars, often turning to the main tool of direct democracy (the referendum), civil rights such as euthanasia, headquarter of the Red Cross and host of international treats like the Geneva Conventions. But they have their contradictions as well, banks who accepted tax evaders or Nazis money, a pinch of intolerance and, last but not least, an incredible delay in giving women equal rights. Perhaps not everyone knows that Swiss women got the right to vote only in 1971…