From November 2022 to January 2023, MALAS, the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences program hosted Elisa Toffanello, Ph.D. a visiting scholar from the Department of Political Science at the University of Perugia, Italy where she is pursuing research on law, political cultures and democracy. We asked her to leave us with a statement focused on her scholarship while with us with MALAS and here is what she sent us.
Reflecting on my research
My interest concerns the panorama of political studies about non-conventional participation, with the focus on active citizenship of women and associationism. Based on reference literature and regulatory contexts, efforts will be made to bring out the political space of women’s non-standard and informal action.
Let’s proceed with order, what we mean with the term ‘active citizenship’? Beginning from the Nineties of the last Century, active citizenship refers to all forms of organization of citizens, who to mobilize resources, protect rights, and defend common goods, intervene in public policies.
An important factor of the phenomenon concerns its voluntary and self-organized character: it is the citizen, in fact, who in their daily life decide to take the field to become in effect leader of their own social and political action. We are facing a multiform, dynamic, and plural phenomenon: neighborhood committees, self-help groups, social enterprises, voluntary organizations, listening centers, environmental groups are just some of the main forms that active citizenship can take.
The common characteristic of all these realities consists in the desire to influence the public scene and to affect reality. Therefore, what are the motivations that drive people into civic and social activation? It can be argued that they are numerous and that they are rooted in recent phenomena. A turning point in the contemporary political and social landscape is the birth, and subsequent spread throughout Europe, of welfare systems, that set of practices and initiatives aimed at ensuring safety and improving the welfare of the population activated by the State. Health, education, and social security have become real social rights, becoming the prerogative of public responsibilities. This new guarantee of protection of fundamental rights by the State has also meant, in the event of a deficiency, the possibility for citizens to claim them.
This process has also been changing the actual concept of citizenship: new and complex phenomena - such as globalization; new challenges dictated by progress; environmental issues; economic sustainability; issues related to the protection of privacy; the development of new social movements - have led to the emergence in public life and in the paradigm of citizenship of a new type of subject, no longer attributable to the ordinary previous schemes of sociality and organized solidarity. Gender equality, minority’s empowerment and the new needs arising from the LGBTQ+ community are also part of the new rights that many active citizenship organizations project and support.
My research interest focuses mostly on women’s participation, because a politics - and a policy - for women, made by women, is still absent in Italy, and female active citizenship is a kind of policy made by way of real request. I am working in my research with nine associations in Umbria, a Region in the center of Italy, and my final purpose is to understand how they deal with feminism, gender violence, and politics. But doing feminist research means also considering your positionality and your position of power in relation to research participants. Recognition of your positionality as a researcher is a fundamental part of understanding the situated nature of knowledge. Nonetheless, reflexivity involves doubts, uncertainties, and misgivings as well; all these aspects become part of your contemplation, and moreover, part of your research.
This is what I have been started doing throughout the years of my PhD: reflect on my own research and my methodology. In my study I used interviews and focus groups, and I understood that my positionality – being a woman researcher as well as an activist like them – puts me in a situation of comfort and openness with them. In this way, I have been extremely advantaged in my research, but also in my future findings. As a woman and a researcher, I knew beforehand the problematics with female active citizenship and politics, Institutions, oppression and violence.
During the months that I spent in California at San Diego State University, I started working on a lecture called “A Room on One’s Own in 21st Century. Female spaces and Virginia Woolf in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Beyond” for the SDSU College of Arts and Letters, and, my hosts, a wonderful class #Papermirrors23. Starting from the Woolf’s famous book, I tried to demonstrate how the space of women has changed throughout the years.
A Room on One’s Own, published for the first time on October 24th, 1929, is based on two lectures Woolf delivered in October 1928 in two women's colleges at the University of Cambridge. According to Woolf, the main reasons that women have been excluded from cultural history are two: economic dependence on men and the lack of a tradition that can only be defined as feminine. The first point is treated as an effect of the material condition of women: they depend first on the father and then on the husband, and this has also affected the intellectual and literary production of women, almost absent in the past. All these aspects have meant that the formation of a female cultural history has found it very difficult to break away from the male one. There is a material reason, according to Woolf, behind the apparent inequalities of talent: the unequal division and distribution of space. Woolf’s conceptualization of the room works to reclaim space for feminine creativity by reconfiguring the relationship between the room and the writer in order to imagine an author who does not simply occupy space but is indistinguishable from it.
After almost two centuries, we can say that things are decidedly different: not merely in literature and fiction, women are now present in the institutions, in politics, and in the work field. Nevertheless, we can not still say that gender equality is finally reached in every part of the world and in the same way. According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2022, at the current rate of progress, it will take 132 years to reach full gender parity. Moreover, none of the 146 covered by the 2022 index have reached gender equality. As a result, women still have to work – and fight – to achieve a space that they can call their own.
In my research with grassroot associations I started noticing that where the politics for women were absent in the local and regional sphere, this is where the active citizenship intervenes. Women activities, amenities, courses, libraries; but also, antiviolence centers and shelters, places for listening and helping women in need.
Keeping on reflecting, I started asking myself, but are these spaces for women inclusive for all women? Thanks to the studies from queer and transfeminist theory, we can state now that feminism has to comprehend all the new subjectivities and individualities; therefore, the space of women becomes wider.
It is important to underline that, for the transfeminist movement, violence -- physical, psychological, economical -- against trans women is not different from that suffered by non-trans women; indeed, it is the fruit of the same system, the patriarchal one. As J. Rogue (2012) states, in the various waves of feminism there are numerous examples of trans, gay, non-western or other women who denounced the women movement - predominantly white and bourgeois - to have silenced their demands in the name of the common cause, since their needs would have alienated the struggle for emancipation and equality.
Moreover, the new identities and sexualities represented by the acronym LGBTQ+ put scholars to face issues of intellectual coherence because they must deal with multiple, overlapping and fragmented arguments. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, non-binary definition is: “Some people don't neatly fit into the categories of "man" or "woman," or “male” or “female.” For example, some people have a gender that blends elements of being a man or a woman, or a gender that is different than either male or female. Some people don't identify with any gender. Some people's gender changes over time.” People whose gender is not male or female use many different terms to describe themselves, with non-binary being one of the most common. Other terms include genderqueer, agender, bigender, and more. None of these terms mean exactly the same thing – but all speak to an experience of gender that is not simply male or female. Thus, we know now that gender identity is different from gender expression. The first term signify each person’s internal and individual experience of gender. It is a person’s sense of being a woman, a man, both, neither, nor anywhere along the gender spectrum. A person’s gender identity may be the same as or different from their birth-assigned sex. Instead, gender expression is how a person publicly expresses or presents their gender. This can include behavior and outward appearance such as dress, hair, make-up, body language and voice. A person’s chosen name and pronoun are also common ways of expressing gender. Others perceive a person’s gender through these attributes.
As a result, the space of women do not become just bigger, but also blurred. Just being totally inclusive and open “women” active citizenship can overcome the stagnant surface of things, making also more room to all the thoughts, art, fiction, that come from the figurative space that we share. For the moment, I’ll keep on reflecting…
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