“THEand women from childhood are accustomed to being a body and men to having a body.” It is the topic that Professor Rossella Ghigi will develop at Dialogues of Pistoia, Festival of contemporary anthropologythis year’s edition also dedicated to the theme of the “body”. Professor of sociology at the University of Bologna, Ghigi also deals with gender education and violence preventionsubjects developed in many publications. «The female body is a topic very dear to me» explains the professor. “These reflections obviously don’t originate with me, there is a whole tradition behind them that is not only philosophical but also feminist.”
Women’s bodies: the burden of having to please versus the duty to act
What did the discussions focus on?
Basically, on the fact that men and women are socialized differently, they live their bodies within a culture which, to put it in the words of Elena Gianini Belotti from 50 years ago now, tells the girl from an early age you have to like it, the boy has to act. So, he says to her: aim for the relationship, to him: aim for performance. I also translate this principle in terms of the relationship with one’s own body, in the way in which the little girl, growing up, is induced to think of it as available to others, both in pleasure and in pleasing others. Mary Wollstonecraft said that women are trained in vanity. Wollstonecraft made a specific speech on beauty: women, she said, are induced to think of beauty as their scepter, the form of power they can have, and their mind is caged in a golden prison: adhering to vacuous values, they do not manage their reasoning, unlike male children.
That strange social expectation that becomes possession
Why do you, professor, maintain that the different perception of the body is at the root of gender violence?
The thought initiated by Wollstoncraft then also focused on the way in which we women don’t just think about being liked, but also about being available to care for others. The deep foundations on which gender violence is rooted are exactly in the way we relate to others, to ourselves and to ourselves. Starting from the difference between being a body and having a body, there is a different social expectation that will then regulate the relationships between men and women. Having a body means having an instrumental relationship with oneself and with others and therefore being led to the performance from which it follows that one will be able, in one’s life, to try to have control over the environment and take advantage of all opportunities. The little girl, on the other hand, is induced to be a body, that is, to make her energies available to help the world. The two poles are on a level of power asymmetry, one at the disposal of the other, to the point of becoming its property.
Rossella Ghigi, professor of Sociology at the University of Bologna, deals with feminist theory and sociology of the body. He will be at the Pistoia Dialogues on Saturday 23 May.
The deep roots of a silent dominion
At the Pistoia Dialogues you will talk about “Violence before violence”: what are the basis of your speech?
We must start long before the violence is violent. If we combine the words body and violence in a sentence, we tend to think of the body beaten, wounded, sometimes killed. A powerful image, but also a limiting look at the problem, because it blocks working backwards on what makes it possible for a man and a woman to be in a violent relationship even for a long period. If we look at the problem of the body as immersed in power relations, and we evaluate how in the moment in which we establish what a man is, what a woman is, we are already inside an asymmetric dimension, the answer to these questions becomes much simpler. Understanding that violence against female bodies is a political issue that has more to do with inequality and domination than with the simple difference between males and females makes us understand well how it does not arise suddenly, but very soon: it arises with socialization, it arises with childhood.
Dismantling the messages between toys and languages
An inequality therefore not natural, but cultural…
Studies now go beyond this simple dichotomy: we are neither just structure nor just superstructure, nor just materiality, nor just discourses. A sort of constructivist extremism has denied the materiality of bodily constraints. On the other hand, however, the essentialist and only biologist discourse has led to the opposite extremism according to which everything is destiny and nothing can be changed. The concepts of equality and inequality, and asymmetry of power, are structural and cultural at the same time, so if I want to work on gender violence I have to do it both culturally, therefore with languages, with education and school, and research tells me that the sooner I start the better to undermine certain messages (“don’t be a tomboy, stay composed”, dolls for her and guns for him…), and with structural work.
The freedom to report violence comes from work and services
That is, how?
By acting on resources, on the dimension of care at home and outside the home. Through economic policies that help women to stay in the job market if they want it and men to stay at home with leave if they want it, with different working times. To simplify, I can very well say to a woman: report your violent husband, but if that husband is the father of her children and her only source of income and I do not foresee places in the nursery, I do not foresee the possibility of training to access a stable and decent job, if I do not foresee a whole series of measures the problem will not be solved.
Regarding the externality of the body, feminism has gone from the rejection of vanity to an almost overbearing affirmation of female beauty. Is there a “positive use” of the body?
The answer is nuanced. It is true that a certain feminism, between the ’70s and the early ’90s, lashed out against beauty practices, seeing them as the tool with which the patriarchy kept women “in their place” at the moment in which, in Naomi Wolf’s words, they appeared on the job market and became possible competitors. It was as if a false self-consciousness distanced them from their true needs, taking on those that patriarchy grants them. From the second half of the 90s to the first ten years of the 2000s, much feminist literature has revised these positions: beauty, or erotic capital, therefore all that set of practices that have to do with how attractive and pleasant a person manages to make themselves, are in fact a capital in which to invest rationally and which a woman has every right to use to assert herself in the world of work, in the marriage market, etc. The focus was to change our gaze, try to see how much margin for action a woman has if she wants to use this capital she can invest in, just as she invests in the books she reads.
The ambivalence between self-care and external diktats
Many authors state how the use of the body is a means of expression and power. Personally I see the potential and limitations of both approaches. Why?
Because if we then go and see in the field, interviewing women who access even extreme surgical practices, we see how they experience them with ambivalence. They are aware, on the one hand, that they are adhering to an external diktat, but on the other hand they say “it makes me feel better”. So, something that gives them power individually, but continues to take it away from women as a group, as a practice. They know it’s not the right war, but it’s a battle they want to win.
A new look to be free to act
Does the natural body exist? Without cosmetics or surgery?
The untreated body does not exist in any population. We all intervene, men and women, in all latitudes and at all times on our bodies, even just with physical training or shaving.
In your opinion, what is a free body?
It is a question of grammatical propositions too. We have always experienced freedom as freedom from constraints, therefore a definition that starts from the negative, as freedom “from” constraint. Feminism and many approaches close to me lead me to say: let’s revolutionize the concept and talk about freedom to do something, therefore a positive vision of bodies “free to do” rather than “free from something”. Not only free from being acted upon but free to act.
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