“ Women ’s emancipation is a decisive factor in building a better quality of life .”
This is what Herbert Marcuse argued in Eros and Civilization (Marcuse, 2001), yet the feminist struggle has always had a troubled existence. It has been denigrated and misinterpreted, even by women themselves, who have sometimes distorted its message and intent.
Lotta
With the #MeToo movement, women made their voices heard against all forms of abuse and compromise. It was the explosion of a powerful need, a desire to reaffirm their vital spaces, the denial of any kind of differentiation.
Regardless of one's cultural origins, a person's sex cannot and must not be a conditioning variable, but a homologating peculiarityThis thought still meets with much resistance today, but as often happens in media narratives certain changes, certain ideologies pass and spread more or less covertly. They present themselves as stories that are both alternative and full of a verisimilitude to our everyday realityFor some years now, cinema, television and video games have been offering atypical stories, new compared to the classic plots characteristic of modern literature.
Fairer sex
The woman in danger, the defenseless, fragile, noble, princess woman, the portrait of candor, of desire, and in the worst cases of a mere sexual object, is today perceived almost as a nuisance, a serial repetition of the female figure that does not fully reflect our times (see Brodesco, Destreri, Giovanetti, Zanatta, 2009). Mario's Princess Peach, whose only function was to give a purpose to the adventures of the moustachioed plumber (1996), the skeletal beauty contested by Popeye's Olivia (1936), are among the countless figures that best represent this classic figuration of the fairer sex . Some of them still survive today in their re-mediated forms, masking or revealing deeper character and physical elements, but in recent times there has been a notable change of direction within the narratives . In practice, the need for women to play a leading role has emerged, a desired and desirable transformation of the idea of femininity.
The body is political
Bodies are the fundamental elements from which to launch a new self-determination . They are not only ours, but act as a link to the rest of the world and are irremediably conditioned by it. Everything begins with the female body, which becomes the very physical space in which to wage revolution: the right to abortion , the recognition of trans identity , and protection from gender-based violence (re)become the fundamental building blocks of politically defining oneself as a woman through the structuring of a process of institutionalizing these demands. However, if the perception of the body and the way it is represented by the media alters the perception of our value as people, we must work to emancipate ourselves from it.
Male and Female gaze
To do this, we must transcend the canons of evil gaze , the male gaze that permeates contemporary capitalism , and conceive a gaze that is not simply a correction of the stereotypical and sexualized image of women, but a shift in perspective (Guerra, 2020). The female gaze is the principle through which an identity reappropriation can be achieved (see Marchesini, 2017) by showcasing, in discourse and practice, all those aspects that the male world constantly tends to obscure, namely the menstrual cycle, the female orgasm, and mental health when it does not fall within the preconception of hysteria.
Gender is political
The challenge to the standardized image of the female body in narratives and the collective imagination thus becomes an opportunity for discussion and study. This lays the foundation for transcending binary conceptions of masculine/feminine, man/woman. We tend to link our identity to gender , whether or not it corresponds to our biological sex. Indeed, genderfluid, non-binary , and queer people embody a rejection of classic dualisms, emphasizing the need to clarify, as John Stuart Mill argued in his 1869 text The Subjection of Women , that gender is a concrete entity, a political device that conditions and shapes our lives. It can be embodied, more or less coercively, in cultural biases, in behavioral and aesthetic models that become customary.
Bibliography
- Alberto Brodesco, Luigi Destreri, Silvia Giovanetti, Sara Zanatta, A Pink Galaxy: Research on Women's Consumer Literature, FrancoAngeli, Milan, 2009.
- Jennifer Guerra, The Electric Body: Desire in the Feminism of the Future, Tlon, Milan, 2020.
- Roberto Marchesini, Emancipation of animality, Mimesis, Milan, 2017.
- Herbert Marcus, Eros and civilization, Einaudi, Turin, 2001.
- John Stuart Mill, the subjection of women, It was new, Perugia, 1998.
Lecturer in Communications and HR Management. Journalist with a degree in Sociology (cum laude). Editor-in-Chief of Sociologicamente.it.
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