from A to Z

Verbete do Dicionário da Crítica Feminista (2005): Utopia Feminista, usado na exposição All My Independent Women 2005 // Dicionário da Crítica Feminista (2005) entry: Feminist Utopia for All My Independent Women 2005.

ALL MY INDEPENDENT WOMEN

Extractos do 'Dicionario da Crítica Feminista' (2005) // Excerpts from the 'Dicionario da Crítica Feminista' (2005):

ABORTION
The abortion as voluntary interruption of pregnancy is a crime punished by law with 2 to 3 years in jail, with the exception to situations such as malformation of the foetus, danger of death of the woman or rape. The law condemns, then, the main reasons that takes women to make an abortion, and that settles on with emotional, affective, economic and personal reasons. Portugal and Ireland are the 2 countries of the European Union with the most prohibitive legislation. Europeia com legislação mais proibitiva.

With this unjust and inadequate law, the women that come from the poorer economical and social environments, and the youngest, are the ones who take more chances, aborting secretly, in misery conditions, unworthy and dangerous.

Relevant cause of the death of mothers, abortion is not only a serious problem of public health, but also a citizenship problem in a plural society, of affirmation of the desire and the right to happiness and love: women and men should be able to plan their lives and to have the number of children planed; and if being a mother and a father should be a choice, being a wanted child is a right. In stake are violence, injustice and social hypocrisy that allows the State to interfere in the personal decisions of the citizens.

Abortion is considered a civilization analyser, evaluated item of cultural and social patterns of the different countries; therefore “the reproductive liberty and responsibility and the institutionalization of safe conditions to make an abortion” is a recommendation to the members of the communitarian Europe.

AMAZONAS
According to the Greek mythology, it is a people worrier of women, descendents of the war god, Ares and the nymph Harmony; living in minor Asia, in the banks of the themodonte river and they govern themselves, excluding men from their surroundings, only admitting them as servos…

Convenient to the patriarchal State of Athens to project an image of women as opposition to the State, that accentuates politics of women’s domination, in a state that, in other aspects, represents the maximum exponent of a such developed civilization.

ANDROGINIA
From the Greek androgynos of andro (man) and of gyne (women): that takes part of both sexes, common to both sexes…


BISSEXUALIDADE
...


WITCH / WITCHCRAFT
Witchcraft is a term that is part of the Christian tradition and designates an evil art, mainly feminine, that requires an intervention of spirits to provoke the happening on some facts.

The Word “which can have 3 meanings: “ugly and old woman”, «sorcerer» or simply «fortune teller» «healer». The first meaning refers to the appearance and it is a epíteto insultous, explained by the fact that, in popular imagination ugliness is associated to the evil, since they’re both negative elements. «Sorcerer» refers to a powerful female figure which uses her power to do the evil and whose powers come from a pact with the devil; while evil deity, the sorcerer as to exercise some ritualistic practices and her activity is mainly nocturnally. The «fortune teller» or «healer», is associated to women seen as having the ability to reed the future, of healing and of making “white magic”, that is, charms in favour of someone. From the feminist point of view, it is the second sense of the Word which is important. The witch-sorcerer is someone who rejects the integration in the community (which rule is patriarchal and Christian), choosing for the dark forces. This option puts her in an isolated position and of self exclusion that is subversive, because it is an alternative, a way of living in the skirts of the community rules, way of living that is interpreted by the established power as an example of indifference in relation to the rules which are wanted to be totalitarian and credible.

This isolation is even more so inasmuch that suggest a sexual freedom and self determination, two unacceptable characteristics to the role that are expected of women in society.

An affirmation of a strong female identity is sensed as a threat to the masculine identity.

CYBERFEMINISM
«Between the NOT anymore and the Not yet », that leads us to rethink the concept of female body as a cultural construction and a interface, a boarder of heterogenic and non continuous energies, a surface where multiple codes are inscribed (race, class, sex, age, etc,) (Braidotti 2000) … characterizes women as nomadic beings that travel permanently in between languages and cultures, intervening and interacting always, invading boarders and dissolving models and patriarchal heritages.

Ciborgues, that is, «chimeras», hybrids beings, identities fractured..

FAIRY TALES
The goal of the tale: teach a lesson of life and moulds the character of the listener. As a pedagogical content of the tale is directed to the younger generations, the protagonist is, almost always, a boy or a girl that as to face some challenges that are implicit in the transition to adult age.

The result of this division in the behaving of the characters of the tales leads that these become inhibiting to girls, encouraging them to passivity and apathy, instead of set off a balanced developing of their potentialities and personality.

BACKLASH
Counter reaction related to the rights of women, it defends that a movement as such is being developed since 1970, when of the victories of the second wave of the feminist movements. Faludi denounces the propaganda machine that intends to make believe that the independence and the power conquered have effectively reverted against women. Also Naomi Wolf (1992) emphasize the importance of the mass media, supported by the conservative forces, betted in taking back the conquered rights of women, and confer the «beauty myth» the role of cultural component of backlash
Settled on the ideological convervative, the backlash finds fertile ground for the dissemination in the mass media, being these supported by the capitalist system.

BODY
«on the old metaphor of the ‘political body’, the state of society was imagined as a human body where the different organs and parts symbolized different functions, needs and components, strengths, etc. (…) For feminism the body is itself an entity politically inscribed, being its physiology and morphology moulded and marked by historical practices of constraints and control – from feet strapping to the use of corsets, to violation and beating, to compulsive heterosexuality, forced sterilization, non wanted pregnancy (…) explicit traffic» (Bordo, 1993)

SEXUAL DIFFERENCE
The goal of feminism isn’t to deny the difference, but to recover the feminine in the sexual difference, to generate an autonomous female imaginary, beyond the existent stereotypes.

FEMINISM AND EDUCATION
The term refers to a social process that occurs whether at the family institution level or at the education institution level. Within the feminist theories, one of the concerns Related to education is to try and demonstrate the way schools tend to reproduce gender relations and the subordination of women.

STEREOTYPE
Define sexual stereotypes as a structured group of general beliefs about the attributes of men and women, beliefs that are shared by a group of individuals.

The stereotypes become then, to conceived as potentially neutral categories, acting in a way similar to other knowledge categories and, as such, having the functions of facilitating the categorization and simplification of the social environment, in a attempt to give sense and consistency to a complex reality.

On the Portuguese context, the sexual stereotypes can, then, be defined as an idealization of behaviours and actions of group, men and women, that translate into a subjective and socially shared representation of an order of relations between these groups.

The stereotype of masculine seems to associate itself with dimensions of instrumentality, dominancy, dynamism and autonomy; the female stereotypes, in its turn, associated to passivity, submission, dependency and expressivity of emotions and feelings towards the others.

EVE
She’s the first wife, mother of all mankind. According to some Hebrew texts Eve was the second wife of Adam, the one God creates after Lilith, the first wife, abandoned him. As so being, and according to this point of view, eve is the prototype of the wanted woman on the patriarchal order: faithful wife obedient, multiple and suffered mother that is the tamed woman.

FAMILY
Normally defined as a group of people emotionally bounded, that share a genealogical history, life and a territorial ground, the family is built living in a determined social, l economical, cultural and geographical context, with beliefs and shared values and with its structures, rules, rites, energy, modalities of communication, of expressions of affection, conflict management and of life style.

The evolution of the actual model of family in western society as its roots in the passage from public life to private life in the middle Ages, in Europe. Life was then more collective and communitarian in may acts, today private, the where public. The feeling of family belonging is, then, connected to the bourgeois conception of society, that is, is was constructed on isolation.

FEMININITY
Of «feminil», characteristic of women. In Portuguese , the term «feminine» can have 2 meanings, the one o mimic and conformity to the social and sexual patterns traditionally identified as belonging to women, and the discovery of oneself, that is, of ones subjectivity and difference in relation to the masculine.

That is to say a set of rules imposed to women by patriarchal society, to make her attractive (in behaviour as in appearance) to the male eyes.

«we are not born women, we become women», defends that femininity (becoming) as origin in social structures. Beauvoir

FEMINIZATION OF POVERTY
In average women earn less 30% or 40% than men for equivalent work (Naples 2002). According to this data, what we can see is that are mainly women the great victims of globalization as the international scheme of labour exploitation. Even when there are unions with a strong capability of intervention, the traditional unions have a tradition of insensibility to the specific female problems, such as: sexual harassment, or the protection of the rights related to pregnancy, or medical support.

On the western countries, during the 1990, we witness a retreat on the possibilities of professional progression of women because, namely, to reductions of the financial of social security field. For many families it meant returning to the traditional family model with one wage, the father’s, as women stayed at home taking care of the children, combining domestic life with free lance activities or part time jobs.

IMAGE
The term has very different meanings, which makes its definition difficult: from visual representation, copy and reflection, visual print, mental representation or idea, to the set of characteristics attributed to a person or class of persons.

The emphasis on women's appearance: always on stage, always observed, always visible, "the woman transforms herself in visual object: a vision". On the other hand, the frequency with which the female appears in all sorts of visual representations, from advertising to fashion, art and pornography, etc.

INVISIBILITY
Related to the social discrimination of women, by the way patriarchal society strategically addresses women to invisibility – what we don’t see does not exist –this expression is also referred as glass ceiling, that concerns the discrimination barriers that affects women in midway positions of leadership and that stops them of advancing to positions of higher responsibility and power.

MASCULINIDADE

MATERNIDADE

PATRIARCHY
On an anthropologic context it is the term that describes a system of social organization, formed from family cells structured in a way that the tasks, the functions and the notion of identity of each sex is defined in a distinctive and opposed way, being established that the position of power, privilege and authority belong to the male elements, whether on a general level or on a family level.

PROSTITUTION
Word that defines the sexual activities with a commercial nature. Women who sell sex are called prostitutes. Although there are men who carry out prostitution, the activity is still mainly developed by women.

The difficulty in defining this activity is in establishing boundaries between the behaviors that are considered prostitution and those who are not. If there are activities consensually defined as such, others question the very definition. This is the case with the 'escorting', which does not involve practical sex, but which comprises an intimate relationship in which, most often, there is an erotic physical involvement. However the traditional definitions of prostitution, which tended to mention three aspects - the existence of an interaction of a sexual kind, an economic remuneration for this interaction and emotional indifference between the parties ... is questionable in particular, the component that indicates the absence of affection between prostitute and client.


From the 1970s on, there was a broader notion of prostitution that by incorporating new practices and actors, solves part of this debate. By virtue of the movement of prostitutes, the notion of sex work (Chapkis 1997) came about that, together with prostitutes includes the porn actresses porn, strip teasers, 'escorting' women and erotic line operators. These women are no longer regarded as criminals, amoral or sick and came to be seen as sex workers. The major advocates of this position are the prostitutes themselves and argue that, in doing so contribute to dignify the work they do and to abolish the stigma they face.

Tehy distinguish free prostitution from forced prostitution and argue that the latter, as the trafficking of women, must be considered as slavery and dealt as such.

TRAVESTISMO
Adoption, by man or woman, of outfits traditionally associated with the other sex, on a temporary or continuous way.

In many occasions the travestism as function for women as a way of getting access to male domains that, in any other ay, would be inaccessible

UTOPIA FEMINISTA
Any type of human society or imaginary state, ideal, it had it’s origin with the publication of Utopia from Sir Thomas More. From the lexical meaning, all creation of an alternative society started the ground for the utopian tradition… utopia is understood as a promise of a better society or more adequate social structures that contrast with the ones in which the author or the reader is inscribed.

Can also mean a place that does not exist, except on the imagination of the author or the reader.

The term feminist utopia points to a connection between utopia and feminist elements The feminist Utopia as any other utopia is critical and prophetic. It distinguishes from other texts inasmuch it presents a critical to patriarchal society, supporting the future of women and mankind on feminist values.

VOICE
The Voice of women is often absent of the most prestigious linguistic records -  as the religious cerimonies, political speech, scientific and legal discourse, and poetry, their voices being silenced either by taboos and social restrictions or by mores and costumes.
Verbete do Dicionário da Crítica Feminista (2005): Diferença Sexual, usado na exposição All My Independent Women 2005 // Dicionário da Crítica Feminista (2005) entry: Sexual Difference for All My Independent Women 2005.