News of April
After a lengthy work behind the scenes, we are finally glad to unveil the newest addition to Lunàdigas: Mediterranea, the Live Archive where the testimonies of women from Mediterranean countries who have entrusted Lunàdigas with their stories, thoughts and desires on their rights to self-determination and freedom of choice are collected.
The continuous movement of our collective to meet other women, collect testimonies, build networks, also constitutes the essence of the Lunàdigas archive: a live archive in continuous development and updating that gives life to an online multimedia album of voices, faces and lives of women of different ages, geographical origins and social conditions. A safe space for sharing and researching on the theme of women’s reproductive choices and self-determination. The testimonies, in original language, are subtitled in Italian and English.
The Mediterranean basin is overlooked by countries where women’s living conditions are different in some respects and similar in others, but even in this area, which embraces several continents, as in others around the world, what has strengthened our motivation not to stop collecting testimonies, is to have met so many women who put in place very strong forms of aggregation, resistance, mutual aid, rebellion and transformation, personal, collective and social.
Hence the project ‘Mediterranea – Archive of Mediterranean Women’, realised with the support of the Mediterranean Women’s Fund – Fonds pour les Femmes en Méditerranée: a space for self-narration by women living in this area, a loudspeaker for voices that are often little heard, a research tool to increase knowledge and awareness of the patriarchal socio-cultural taboos at the root of so much discrimination suffered by women, but also the energy, strength and determination of women to achieve full freedom.
We begin with the testimony of Mounia, editorial director of the Tunisian webzine Inkyfada, who recounts the difficulties she encountered in finding women to give testimonies for Lunàdigas in Tunisia, where the issue of free choice regarding motherhood is one of the strongest taboos to be undermined; and that of Irem, who lists the implicit and explicit judgements suffered by childfree women in Turkey.
Also new in the International Live Archive Series are two men’s testimonies: that of Marcel, a German man and separated father of two who reflects on parenting within marriage, experienced by him as a natural condition, and Gerard, who in Washington answers a point-blank question on what he thinks about childfree women. Still from Washington, we offer the brief testimony of Giulia, a student at the Catholic University.
In the Stories section, a new review enriches our (by now very rich!) lunàdiga library: Claudia Mazzilli reads Donne che allattano cuccioli di lupo. Icone dell’ipermaterno (Women nursing wolf cubs. Icons of hypermaternal) by Adriana Cavarero (Castelvecchi, 2023), an essay in which the author bypasses the bright – and all patriarchal – representations of oblative motherhood and explores the dark, exuberant and visceral side of giving life and being born.
