Male dominance or supremacy (machismo) is a social phenomenon rooted in time and affects both sexes equally. The deficits of equality and freedom are grounded in the way some forms of power are structured in education, religion, work, and domesticity with vague memories of the hunting and burning of witches in the Middle Ages as «dangerous women» to moral standards.
Representations of men and women are not constructed per se. Thanks to the «enforcement» of gender identity, they are aligned with norms of appearance and behaviour, thus establishing social classification and hierarchy. Men have to behave «like» men and women develop or adopt survival strategies in public and private spaces: from silent suffering and passivity to the expression of patriarchal behaviour. From Jean de La Bruyère’s (1687) adage «women are of the extreme, they are either better or worse than men», to Virginia Wolf’s observation that «men are more concerned about their superiority than about the inferiority of women», we end up, if anything, with the synchronic prominence-publicization of the violent/criminal behaviors of pater familias and, to a lesser extent, silencing.
The series of works «The Egg (of the Rooster)» raises questions about anchored life, palpates the state of internal conflict of the ego, and the physical and symbolic violence of male socio-justice. Moreover, although we overemphasize the notion of European citizenship, «the right to have rights» is probably not appropriate for migrants and refugees, wherein the search for new places, femininity, and children are at higher risk, especially in times of war.
The strategies of the perpetual feminine, the repulsive burden (for men themselves) of masculinity, and the laborious attempts at self-realization in the end in vain?
That feminism is perhaps one of our last chances to democratize democracies – according to Chantal Mouffe, it probably doesn’t sound quaint.
