Tuesday 8 April 2008

The Nino/Nina

The issue of climate change is usually accompanied to the debate on the need to transform our way of life, our way of production, our progressive vision which is day by day called into question by scientific data. Actually in this last decade one has witnessed a global warming that led to a complaint of this situation, but this spring, and summer as well, will be cold because there will be a "natural", cyclic, climatic condition which will increase cold by lowering temperatures, even for a while, and which will slow down global warming that start to grow again passed this period, breaking our vain illusions of a general better weather conditions.
This cooling phenomenon is qualified under the name of Nina which is the female equivalent of the Nino, climate phenomenon that brings warmth to planet earth and is best known.
So even in climatic appellations we can find the typical dichotomy of good/bad, dry/wet, heat/cold of that "natural" vision of woman that from the XX century has spread in the predominant culture. This vision has characterized woman as antithetic to man, a man starring qualifications of a highly, beneficial, positive value and a necessary contrary female value. This vision has dominated culture that has so influenced the status of women until considered them unable to testify because too emotional and therefore unreliable, or untill to call into question their membership or not to mankind.
And so here in XXIth century raises the old but clearly present dichotomy of the "natural" of good/bad applied to meteorology where is not a coincidence that we find the male phenomenon linked to the heat that benefits of a common wellness vision even if for our days is in reality degenerative while watching a cooling phenomenon which has generally a negative perception one has give a female designation which, beard to common view, is today a good thing because stops a negative one, in this case represented by the male phenomenon, so we are indeed facing a full representation of reality in which women are defined in negative irrespective of their social contribution, always and in general positive and essential compared instead of a positive male consideration which in practice is excessive and harmful and which is the guilty of the overheating and of the natural, that is, environmental decline.
Here is the overturned of the natural, sexist and climatic vision of the dichotomy represented by the Nino/Nina.

Tuesday 1 April 2008

That is why we are still in nineteenth century

The US elections this time more than ever focus our attention as they refer us to a wellknown ancient "querelle".
In XIXth century, the condition of women was claimed as for the slaves, women were a political issue whom vastness and importance affects all the nation, becoming a fondamental issue for the entire US society as the slaves issue as well, this was for Mary Wollstonecraft, for Jhon Stuart Mill as for William Thompson.
Nowadays we are at the same point, we assist to an electoral match where there is a man who is a symbol of social redemption for those slaves mentioned in the past and who had progress and a woman symbol of other significances and fights.
The true is that we will attend to an epochal changing in the same way but as the black people issues were noted, disclosed and supported, from women themselves, more clearly from the beginning, the issue of women was dealt on a secondary level and overshadowed by the first one. As racism is still alive is already present a common, shared condemns of this phenomenon, otherwise the anti-feminism is still more hidden, sly and got more detrimental cultural features which concerns more people because if is true that many will be the moral beneficiaries seeing at the White House an ancestor of those slaves came without rights or dignity recognized, it is already true that a woman presence would gratified twice that person as well because black women are usually double affected, a time because they are black, twice because they are women.
If is it true that slaves came without rights or dignity, woman (also the white one) had suffered for centuries before that exclusion from human race which precluded her dignity, rationality and for consequence equal rights but not only civil, political or legal rights but human rights as well.
One started with a fight for civil acknowledgement of one part and then from this it has developped a new, different asserting also for the other part, they divided but only for meeting again two centuries after struggling for a power which will be a symbol of a compleate redemption. That is why after two centuries we are still in nineteenth century where from the slaves problem born the feminism mouvement for civil women rights and which are nowadays contending an important position for the redemption of both. Again after two centuries we are still in front of the two issues which see in their more important symbol of representation not an end but a further unknown propulsive beginning.