L'urlo Di FEMEN

Corso di Laurea Magistrale in RELAZIONI INTERNAZIONALI COMPARATE ordinamento ex D.M. 270/2004 Tesi di Laurea L’urlo di FEMEN: l’attivismo femminile fra Russia e Ucraina Relatrice Ch.ma Prof.ssa Bruna Bianchi Correlatrice Ch.ma Prof.ssa Emilia Magnanini Laureanda Veronica Stefani Matricola 837108 Anno Accademico 2016 / 2017 INDICE Abstract ____________________________________________________________________ 5 Introduzione _______________________________________________________________ 17 I. L’EREDITÀ SOVIETICA NELLA CONCEZIONE DELLA DONNA _____________ 21 I.1 La donna e il socialismo ________________________________________________ 21 I.1.1 Riproduzione, sessualità ed emancipazione ______________________________ 24 I.2 Il genere e la società civile _______________________________________________ 31 I.3 Gli women’s studies e i movimenti femminili post-sovietici ___________________ 33 I.3.1 Gli Independent Women’s Forum ______________________________________ 38 II. LE DONNE UCRAINE DOPO L’INDIPENDENZA ___________________________ 41 II.1 Il ritorno del femminismo ______________________________________________ 41 II.2 L’influenza delle donazioni straniere _____________________________________ 47 II.3 Le donne e la Rivoluzione Arancione _____________________________________ 51 II.4 Nazionalismo e femminismo in politica ___________________________________ 54 III. FEMEN: L’URLO DI RIBELLIONE _______________________________________ 59 III.1 Per un femminismo “politico” __________________________________________ 59 III.2 La risposta alla prostituzione in Ucraina _________________________________ 62 III.3 Se non c’è domanda, non c’è offerta _____________________________________ 66 III.4 Il caso canadese ______________________________________________________ 72 III.5 La sessualità libera ___________________________________________________ 74 IV. DIVERSI GRADI DI SUCCESSO __________________________________________ 77 IV.1 La velocità di diffusione _______________________________________________ 78 IV.2 Il potenziale sovversivo________________________________________________ 82 IV.3 Il corpo come manifesto parodico _______________________________________ 84 IV.3.1 Il caso Elmahdi ___________________________________________________ 88 IV.4 La libertà di espressione _______________________________________________ 90 IV.4.1 Le accuse di esibizionismo sessuale ___________________________________ 94 V. ACCENNI SULLA RELIGIONE ___________________________________________ 99 V.1 Il dogma di Femen ____________________________________________________ 99 V.2 Le reazioni del mondo islamico _________________________________________ 100 V.3 Tra velo e topless ____________________________________________________ 105 V.4 Il mancato confronto _________________________________________________ 108 Conclusione _______________________________________________________________ 113 Appendice A ______________________________________________________________ 119 Appendice B ______________________________________________________________ 125 Appendice C ______________________________________________________________ 135 Bibliografia _______________________________________________________________ 145 Filmografia _______________________________________________________________ 157 iii ABSTRACT Arguably the most prominent, and also the least popular, activist group to emerge after the Orange Revolution, Femen represents a new type of feminism, Made in Ukraine. In 2008, a few young ladies gathered together to address the situation of women in their country. They began discussing the stereotypes they witnessed in their daily life, they read Women and socialism by August Bebel and decided to stage some theatrical demonstrations to draw attention to various facets of gender inequality in Ukraine. Soon they improved their tactic and decided to use their own body to produce shock and challenge the norm of subjugation of women. They noticed that the key to the enslavement of women by men is control over their bodies. Not only the glamour of the beauty industry and the use of women’s sexuality to promote every type of product but also barbaric acts, such as genital mutilation and acid attacks, are consequences of the ongoing male economic, cultural and ideological occupation of the world. Disappointed by what they call «classical feminism», Femen members began to use their own bodies to reclaim female sexuality. Appearing topless on the streets was the most powerful tool to reverse the patriarchal norm; their breasts became their weapons: through their own nudity, they wanted to start a sexual revolution. In this paper, I use an intersectional analysis to examine Femen’s protest in the hopes of raising questions about the explicit use of the gendered body in struggles for women’s emancipation. Tracking Femen in the media and on the Internet, in the past few months, I have observed the creative methods with which the activists try to challenge the dominant model of femininity and stereotypes surrounding women worldwide. My data are photographic images and video footages of their protests, texts from their critics, and especially Femen’s original documents that contain their arguments. In thinking best how to research the group, I tried to contact present and former members, and regardless of a general mistrust, I had the chance to speak with the current leader of the Femen American branch, Jordan Robson, and with the woman who helped the founding of Femen International in France, Safia Lebdi. As a matter of fact, Femen was born in a post-soviet country, but soon received international attention and has now become an international organization, locally based in France, Spain, Sweden, Germany, Canada, United States of America and Turkey. 5 Femen protesters seek to be feminists in inclusive yet revolutionary ways, and they represent a useful case to clarify our knowledge of how gendered bodies might best be used as sites of resistance. Their basic assumption is that, in this world, a woman is deprived of ownership of her own body, and since complete control over the woman’s body is the key instrument of her suppression, the woman’s sexual démarche is the key to her liberation. Female nudity becomes the symbol of the defeat of the patriarchal system and naked breasts are converted into an active and political instrument in confronting patriarchal institutions. There are not many academic studies on Femen, and it must be noted that most of them come from western scholars. The group never tried to find a connection with Ukrainian NGOs or feminist associations, and they also rejected conversations operating within academic institutions. They aimed at causing a rupture in the Ukrainian society, and believed action had to prevail on analytical theory; conferences, lectures, and publications did not receive public attention, but nudity could. In order to contextualize their activism, in the first two chapters of this paper, I convey a summary of the situation of women since the Russian Revolution, both in Soviet Russia and Ukraine, and I investigate the Ukrainian post-soviet context which inevitably shaped Femen’s point of view. It might be argued that socialism never found a strict application in the Soviet Union, and despite recognizing their rights, the Communist Party tended to consider women as workforce or as mothers and wives, not granting them real public space. To address the «woman question» and introduce measures to guarantee formal equality, the Central Committee of the Communist Party established Zhenotdel in 1919. But Stalin abolished it in 1930, declaring that problems of gender inequality had been completely solved in the Soviet Union. While feminist theorists in the West discussed the public/private dichotomy in relation to women, the operative dichotomy in state socialism was that of state/family, in which the family was an ersatz public sphere. There was certainly no feminist philosophy under state socialism and even the well-known Russian Communist revolutionary, Alexandra Kollontai, in her «socialist feminism» tended to believe that is was necessary to make the revolution first, before dealing with women’s issues. However, she also theorized that true socialism could not be achieved without a radical change in attitudes towards 6 sexuality; relationships between men and women were to be recognized as social relations among individuals and love could help women affirming their right to be a social subject, equal to men. Political and socioeconomic transformations help the rise of gender issues, but without critical approaches and factual accuracy, and with a poor marketing of academic publications, they are destined to remain silent. Therefore, the idea of universal motherhood enhanced even during perestroika and post-perestroika eras, and the narrative of women as guardians of national culture and ethnic identity, which in Ukraine is connected to the myth of Berehynia, prevailed and still shape a precise image of the female role in the society. As a matter of fact, women were just another element in the history of post-soviet nation building, confirming the subjection of feminism to nationalism both in Russia and Ukraine. On the one hand, glasnost allowed the press to discuss many issues affecting women’s health and reproduction as well as issues which concerned male behavior, such as domestic violence and rape, especially in the 1990s; but effective interventions on women’s issues were rare and daily life was still hard for many women. Moreover, although the concept

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