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RESEARCH PRODUCT

European Mediterranean Women and the “Showdown” Between Public Emancipation and Private Self-oppression

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description

This chapter emphasizes the unfinished nature of a form of late-modernity still hanging in the balance between frameworks of representation and legitimization regarding women and the roles they play within the public sphere in virtue of the emancipation that has taken place and the contradictions which emerge when trying to reconcile old and new models of femininity. We shall, therefore, try to disengage some of the knots linking gender violence and “cultural representations” but, above all, the “adaptive preferences” and “corrosive disadvantages” found in European women’s private lives, which clash totally with their social achievements and are attributable to emotional oppression and, simultaneously, with the amphibiotic habitus of which present-day women are unaware bearers. Like a Chagall “tightrope walker”, women continue to seek balance between oppressive emotion and emancipatory reason.