Files

The Mediterranean basin is vast. Its scenes of everyday life, with women busy in the streets, are numerous. Despite the rights and freedoms that women have won in recent decades through feminist struggle, public space in many towns and villages on both shores of the Mediterranean is still a territory dominated by the masculine plural.

The impact of the Israeli war has been even more severe on the women in Gaza. According to the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR), over 90% of women in Gaza have been forced to leave their homes to be housed in centers with no amenities. As a result, these women have found themselves having to live, work, and survive on the streets, with all the difficulties this entails.

On both shores of the Mediterranean, one constant emerges: women's bodies are a social, political, aesthetic, ethical, and economic issue. Caught between social control, submission, and emancipation, how do women navigate this tyranny of appearance? Here's an in-depth exploration of a topic that has deeply inspired our editorial team.

From ancestral traditions to contemporary standards, the path to self-acceptance is one taken by women in general, and Maghrebi women in particular. Below is the story of a journey from tender childhood memories to internal rebellion against established norms.

After being kept on the sidelines of sporting activities for centuries, women made a massive entry into the world of sport. Still now, however, this world continues to heavily discriminate against them: from the hyper-sexualization of their athletic bodies to the negation of these bodies as experiencing menstrual cycles, types of discrimination against female athletes abound.

In Italy, racist incidents against female champions of African origin representing the country in national and international competitions are increasingly frequent. With the Paris Olympics coming up, it is as good a time as any to reassert that racism is a serious threat to women’s right to sport, a right which was hard-earned over the course of a good hundred years.

Over the month of Ramadan, from Lebanon to Tunisia, Syria to Palestine, passing through Algeria, Egypt, and Morocco, viewers across Arab-Muslim countries share an almost sacred ritual: watching soap operas produced mainly for consumption during this month of fasting.

A study carried out in 2015 by the Tunisian Independent High Authority for Audiovisual Communication (Haute Autorité indépendante de la communication audiovisuelle- HAICA) in collaboration with the Belgian Superior Audiovisual Council (CSA) recorded 225 utterances of insults over nearly 69 hours of Ramadan fiction shows. Insults and threats all addressed to the female characters of these series.

The show Bab Rezek (Doors of Livelihood), broadcast on Tunisia’s El Watania 1 television channel, is one of this year’s soap operas that addresses the suffering of Tunisian women working in agriculture and fields.

“Hello to the newlyweds, we’ve brought you sweets on a tray. Tell us, how did that first night go? Show us the proof of honor.” It is with this sentence that a mother congratulates her daughter on her marriage in front of the family and the whole village, demanding proof of the bride’s “honor”..