A fragile shield for protecting civil rights: The European Union in the eyes of Italian feminists

ABSTRACT

The article explores how feminist and LGBTQI organisations frame the European Union (EU), the claims they address to the EU institutions, and the actions they put in place at the continental level. Challenging previous beliefs of a linear increase in the Europeanisation of progressive social movements, this study reveals a more complex picture. Heavily affected by the economic and political crises, Italian women and LGBTQI activists share the radical criticism of EU austerity policies put forward by labour and youth movements. Nonetheless, they reject any option for breaking down the EU, as they conceive of it as a source of multilevel opportunities and a field for struggles from below, in which mechanisms of cross-national horizontal diffusion have facilitated the return of mass protest. While chances to realise the ‘other Europe’ project are perceived as low, activists hope that the EU is a potential ally against domestic conservatism.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist movement
• LGBTQI movement
• multilevel opportunities
• horizontal diffusion
• European Union
• Italy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The acronym LGBTQI stands for ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersexual.’ ‘Transgender is an umbrella term used to describe a wide range of identities whose appearance and characteristics are perceived as gender atypical – including transsexual people, cross-dressers […], and people who identify as third gender. Transwomen identify as women but were classified as males when they were born, transmen identify as men but were classified female when they were born, while other trans people don’t identify with the gender-binary at all […]. Intersex people are born with physical or biological sex characteristics, such as sexual anatomy, reproductive organs, hormonal patterns and/or chromosomal patterns, which do not fit the typical definitions of male or female. These characteristics may be apparent at birth or emerge later in life, often at puberty’ (United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner [UNHRO], 2013).

2 To give some examples, in 2009, Berlusconi insulted the PD MP Rosy Bindi in a TV talk-show for her physical appearance, and in 2011 it was discovered that in the past he had made offensive sexual allusions regarding the German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

3 Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain.

4 The full list of interviewees is reported in the appendix.

5 Hosted at the Scuola Normale Superiore, the ‘Critical Young Europeans’ (CRY_OUT) project is funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) as well as the Scuola Normale Superiore (Principal Investigator: Donatella della Porta; see http://cosmos.sns.it/projects/critical-young-europeans-cry_out/).

6 It is worth noting that some scholars in the field of gender studies have criticised the concept of ‘feminist waves’ as it can produce a sense of feminist history as a straightforward process (Nicholson, 2016, p. 44). Hemmings (2011) has asserted that progress narratives are damaging because they tend to flatten difference within each ‘wave.’ For Hemmings, the story of feminism should not be the story of one school of thought displacing another; rather we should draw links between the common feminist features of these approaches and treat feminism ‘as a series of on-going contests and relationships’ (2005, p. 131).

7 More than one million people took to the streets in Rome and tens of thousands in the other 230 Italian cities (and even abroad).

8 The social clinics were part of a broad set of self-organised solidarity structures set up by Greek anti-austerity activists after 2012 to provide food and other goods to the population in need (Vogiatzoglou, 2016).

9 The CoE is an international organisation whose aim is to uphold human rights, democracy and the rule of law in Europe (see https://www.coe.int/en/web/about-us/values). Founded in 1949, the organisation has 47 member states, and is formally distinct from the 27-nation EU. Most EU citizens, as well as the activists interviewed for this article, tend to assimilate the CoE to the EU construction, partly because they share the same flag and anthem. Moreover, no country has ever joined the EU without first belonging to the CoE. Unlike the EU, the CoE cannot make binding laws, but it does have the power to enforce select international agreements reached by European states on various topics. For these reasons, I include the action of CoE in the complex of multilevel opportunities opening up for feminist and LGBTQI movements.

10 The name of this group is a play on words that cannot be translated into English. It expresses the idea of a laboratory to unmask the social impositions that stand behind gender identities and roles.

11 Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (Italian General Confederation of Labour).

12 These (CGIL, CISL, and UIL) are the largest and oldest trade unions in Italy, which aim to represent all types of workers and try to cover all economic sectors. They are distinct from both the autonomous and rank-and-file trade unions, which are much smaller and conflictual.

13 An ancient Greek word, Ireos means both ‘lily’, which is the symbol of Florence, and ‘rainbow,’ which is the symbol of the LGBTQI movement.

14 Monica Cirinnà is a politician of the Democratic Party; she was elected Senator in 2013 and again in 2018.

15 This refers to the centre-right politician Beatrice Lorenzin, who was Minister of Health from 2013 to 2018.

16 The interviewees mention both the European Court of Justice (ECJ), which is the supreme court of the EU in matters of EU law, and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which is an international court established in 1959 by the European Convention on Human Rights, which was ratified by all the 47 Council of Europe member states. Having been adopted within the context of the Council of Europe, the ECHR, technically, is not a EU body (see footnote 10).

17 LGBTQI Prides represent a partial exception as they ask for the official support of local administrations in order to obtain a greater political legitimacy (Int.IT.G10).