Fuxia Block: free mind in free body

Abortion, fertility treatment, marriage between gay and lesbian couples…
Self-determination and control over our own bodies has been a crucial issue for months in Italy and has now ascended to a political no-holds-barred fight .
In the past few years we have watched a race between right and left wing parties, both using different approaches to marginalise those who challenge gender roles. We have seen a combination of propaganda and restrictions on freedom of choice, despite the clear societal resistance to patriarchy and unstoppable nature of gender liberation.
Our bodies have been turned into commodities for electoral campaigns and political power play. Their objective is always the same: to rule people’s life choices and resist well-established currents of social change.
There is always a big gap between social currents and laws. Politicians have tried to roll back freedoms people had already started living, even without a legislative approval. But they have made a big mistake, while some left wing parties stooped to playing the political power games used by the right wing parties, a new kind of fight had already started outside the political centre, and it aims to break the mainstream social confines of gender rights and identity.
An alternative to the mainstream political debate has arisen encompassing radical perspectives on these issues, starting with individual autonomy and self-determination as an open road for realising an infinite spectrum of desires and relationship practices within society. The realization of laicism (the process of making clerical controls on social institutions impotent) in society will destroy the powerful but illegitimate religious dogmas which ruin lives daily.
We can liberate ourselves from identities imposed by authorities to marginalise and divide us. We can experiment with new ways of self determination, permitting every form of self-expression, growth, and change. We can question society and our perception of our own identity. However we need to be wary of legislative acts which appear to be in line with the will of the people, these are often loaded with hidden agendas to curtail gender and sexual freedoms while giving the illusion of political change.
Those in power make use of propaganda to subjugate minorities, they use moralistic arguments, stigmatization, and perpetuation of guilt complexes to marginalise such groups. These practices sow the seeds of discrimination and are used to justify and pander support for restrictive reproduction laws.
These laws which rule and restrict our reproductive rights, which assign ‘public’ and ‘private’ roles, that define the limits and the approbation of OUR relationships affect every person within society. It is not possible to reduce the rainbow of human diversity to recognisable categories, the uniqueness of each human being is unclassifiable.
40 years ago the raising of women’s consciousness forced the concept of gender equality in to the mainstream, and the contradiction of universal citizenship in a world favouring the white, christian man became self-evident. This opened a fracture in society where women could fight for their right to be represented as citizens. Nowadays these fractures have multiplied as people representing innumerable gender roles and identities are willing to fight for representation whilst forming a unified solidarity movement.
Within society people should be able to choose their own identity, a hybrid of concepts and ideas as they so wish. However society and common culture is continuously defining what people should and should not be; what is forbidden and what is sanctioned. As a result it is safer for people to stay within these imposed identity confines in order not to suffer stigmatisation or the wrath of the law.
The moralising imposed by authority does not just apply to sexual orientation any more, many groups are affected whether they are people in precarious jobs, gays, migrants, lesbians, transgender, or bisexual. Authority continually defines inclusion and exclusion, legitimacy and deviance, ‘danger’ and victimisation.
This is the current order, a divide and rule strategy used under the guise of “reassuring” society from what those in power see as a threat. These categorisations plays on people’s fears and serve just to exclude those who are different.
On the contrary, we retain that to build a new society free from assigned roles, we need to start with self-determination and nurture the desires and needs of every human being. This new way of living out relationships will be flexible, adaptable, autonomous, and so resistant to political currents in which we are the protagonist and not just audience, in every moment of our existence.