Abstract
The 2020–2025 gender equality strategy presented by the European Commission has set out key actions in order to put an end to gender-based violence and stereotypes, to ensure equal participation and opportunities in the labour market and in policymaking. The European Parliament called for support for women's rights campaigners as well as women's rights organisations in the EU and worldwide, including organisations dealing with LGBTIA + people, by providing them with more substantial and targeted financial support. On this basis, the first part of this contribution aims to shed light on the way in which Italian populist institutional actors deal with gender issues within their government programmes and on whether their representations of gender correspond to the values defined at European level. A second part of the work aims to analyse the tension between institutional populist actors and antagonistic feminist associations, which act in an anti-populist sense. The contribution will examine the practices and political discourses of the movement Non una di Meno in Italy, focusing on how and in which specific areas it takes action as an anti-populist force and on the relationship that can be identified between its objectives and values and those set by the European Commission on gender issues.
The essay is the result of a joint effort. For a formal recognition of the sections: the paragraphs 2.1. and 4 are to be attributed to Valentina Raffa; the paragraphs 2.2 and 3. are to be attributed to Milena Meo and remaining paragraphs are to be attributed to both at 50%.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The activists interviewed are women belonging to the local networks of the movement “Non una di Meno” from Messina, Roma and Bologna.
- 3.
The analysis is part of the Project of Relevant National Interest (PRIN 2017) «The Transformations of Democracy: Actors, Strategies and Outcomes in Opposing Populism in Political, Juridical and Social Arenas». The project is funded by the Italian Ministry of Research. The national research network (University of Trento, University of Tuscia, University of Messina, University Suor Orsola Benincasa of Napoli) is led by prof. Carlo Ruzza (University of Trento) and coordinated by prof. Milena Meo in the local unit of University of Messina.
- 4.
- 5.
Ibidem.
- 6.
The analysis that is proposed refers back to the period before the political elections in 2022, when Giorgia Meloni was leader of the party Fratelli d’Italia and not Prime Minister yet.
- 7.
The word intersectionality starts to be used in its most common meaning in feminist environments in the 90’s but its origins can be traced back to the times of the American anti-slavery movement of the previous century, starting from the famous speech given by Sojourney Truth in 1851 at the Women’s convention in Akron (Ohio). Some time later in Boston, the organization of black and lesbian feminists Combahee River Collective will renew the urgency of keeping united the oppressions of class, race and sex to understand what happens in the life of black women. Starting from these ideas, the reflection will then be led by writers such as Davis (1981), Anzaldùa (1987), Hooks (1998), etc. It is in this already mature conceptual framework that Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, taking advantage of a powerful metaphor, will use for the first time the term intersectionality: “An analogy can be made with the traffic at a crossroads, coming and going in all four directions. In the same way, discrimination can follow one or another direction. And if an accident happens in correspondence of a crossroads, it can be caused by cars travelling in one of all four directions and, sometimes, by all of them. In the same way, if a black woman gets hurt at a crossroads, her accident could be caused by sexual discrimination or racial discrimination […]. But it is not always easy to retrieve the causes of an accident: sometimes the marks of the brakes and the injury are simply indicating that these two events have happened simultaneously, saying little about which driver has caused damage” (Crenshaw 1989, pp. 136–167). With this meaning the term will gain step by step more density and fame up to be officially included in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2015.
- 8.
- 9.
Ibidem.
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Meo, M., Raffa, V. (2024). Gender Rights and Opposition to Populism. In: Antoniolli, L., Ruzza, C. (eds) The Rule of Law in the EU. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55322-6_10
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