Marica Longo *
The two days of the School of Politics, which were held in Catania on 26 and 27 September, testify to the ferment that reigns in this specific historical moment within the Anti-violence Centers where there is a strong desire and also the need, even more so. 'urgency, to confront and listen to each other our thoughts, our words, our practices to revisit them, to put them back into circulation, to re-cross them, scrutinizing the results and the present meaning of these sediments of historical, political, cultural memory, methodological.
The choice to continue to give substance and words to the reflection begun in Reggio Emilia, and to trace a link of continuity, constitutes the incipit that has given concrete form to those sediments of memory that have been stirring indistinctly inside the Thamaia Anti-Violence Center for some time. .
Only the relapse of them was perceived, that imprecise and uncertain search for answers to our confused questions, which subsequently became a distinct need to circulate our reflections and then finally give substance to our narratives.
We start from here, we start from each of us, operators, members, volunteers of Thamaia, we start from what unites us in the narration between women, eager to put ourselves in a circle and place the Association at the center, impregnating us and making the sense of those practices resonate. policies from which we were born, which we inherited, both inside and outside the walls of the Center, we younger generations compared to the older ones, we Center younger than historical realities that were the first places of welcome and sharing between women.
The search for those traces, the reconstruction of the sediments, constituted our personal revolutionary, personal and therefore political act, which allowed us to revisit the meaning of our professional and personal choices, the restlessness of those compromises that we are called daily. to realize on the ridge between the choice to be there as women with other women and the need for recognition in the wider circle of the political, of the institutional, between the desire to accompany women in the construction of their paths of freedom and the anxiety of having to rely on their work to gain credibility and therefore funding, in the face of the threatening looming of services and institutionalization of practices, today as yesterday.
This is what was breathed during the two days, where the indissoluble intertwining between the methodology of the Centers and the perspective vision of a look turned to the historical-political-economic-cultural complexity, to the reflection on how today, as well as yesterday, feminist practice can affect macro-economic dynamics and how the women's movement can bring about change.
On how the strength of the practice can constitute a point of countertrend, a moment of contrast with the looming perversion, liquid, disruptive, exactly like the logic that presupposes it, of this new facies of capitalism, so-called "financial" that breaks down the barriers before the unbridled commodification and raises them in the face of the request for the presence and recognition of bodies that migrate in search of a universal right of citizenship.
Question marks suspended on concentric circles, on the micro and macro, other levels united by the negation of subjectivities, by the flattening of differences, by the exercise of the power of the institution which, behind the trappings of professionalization and technical competence, ends up imposing control over what has been methodologically acquired by the Centers at the hands of feminist practice.
Also in this exercise of appropriation the violent power of patriarchal domination bursts which, in plundering and disavowing voice and body to the practice of the Centers, disregards the collective political subjectivity that determined it.
Many ideas, many considerations, many shares, in the space of suspension of reflection: from the search for new meanings, new words circulating in the Anti-violence Centers that can tell the roots of violence, new meanings that can still explain the exercise of the practice today. of the relationship between women at the Center and of us "women at the Center with women", to the need-need of time because time is running out and is never enough.
Time for the exercise of finding traces, time for the need-desire to recognize oneself and to be recognized, outside the relationship with the institution, with the places of power and decision, but also inside the Centers, in the suffered dialectic and conflictuality of the multiple generational differences, between those who have concretely breathed it in feminism and keep a living trace of it and those who have known the already given, the established, having perceived the echo in the transmission of those memories.
And what words do the meanings of new forms of opposition say?
How much the inclusion of women in the production process, being se-learned in the logic of enhancement and their multiplying in "multitasking" functionality, revitalizes the patriarchal domination by subjecting them to new forms of male equality and to new corporate models that end up making them alien to themselves, realizing once again "whose desire"?
And how much contribution it can offer, in this moment of precariousness of the new generations, a precariat that unites in equal measure, overlapping them, the generations of young women and the generations of young men, declining in the symbolic imagination new representations of gender and new scenarios in the private sector relationships.
Other question marks therefore, new suspensions on how feminist practice can affect today in the public sphere of macroeconomics, macro politics, macro culture.
Heirs of a methodology and a practice, which is that of not taking for naturalized what is the result of cultural construction, the solution that we envisage is to remain vigilant, attentive, exploring new paths, new scenarios, to identify new meanings of subjectivity and new practices of struggle.