These days I often think about it, there are phrases that I really struggle to stop saying.
Although I am a person who has started for some time a path of awareness and deconstruction of certain biases on one’s disabled bodyI realized that in my life I have spoken the words many times “Yes, I can do it” even if this was not true. The need to demonstrate that I can keep up with other people’s rhythms and the desire not to disappoint expectations are issues I still have to work on. I am also convinced that I am not the only one to adopt certain behaviors and that there are many people, and in particular women, who push their bodies to the limit due to a society that always asks for the best.
These reflections began to whirl in my head later the recent statements by Elisabetta Franchiand in an event dedicated to the participation of women in the fashion sector, organized by the newspaper The paper in Milan, he said of having often focused on men because “when you put a woman in an important position then you can’t afford not to see her arrive for two years”, and that women hire them when they are “anta” because “if they had to have children they have already had them »And they can thus work 24 hours a day.
Beyond the gravity of certain statements that reflect neither more nor less the thought of Italian entrepreneurship, I realize that at the basis of this there is not only a cultural heritage that unloads all the care work on women, but a employment system based on the performativity of the body at very high levels.
In fact, motherhood undergoes the same treatment as disability: women of childbearing age who could (or would like to) have children are discriminated against in the workplace, a bit like it happens to people with disabilities, because they are associated with a decrease in productivity in the event of pregnancy. Similarly, companies often choose to hire disabled people only if they are legally “obliged”, because they start from the assumption that we make less. And it is in this way that instead of supporting people with appropriate tools, paternity leave equated to maternity leave and work rhythms more just and suited to everyone’s needs, the figure of the multitasking woman is enhanced, who manages to reconcile family and career , which, engaged on a thousand fronts, magically achieves the gift of ubiquity. Individual sacrifice thus becomes a value that has the sole purpose of making all domestic and care work fall into a single social category, then generating an enormous sense of guilt when physically and psychologically the body tells you to stop.
It is with dynamics like these that instead of changing a fundamentally wrong system, the same patriarchal and capitalist principles are used to continue penalizing women and anyone who cannot somehow achieve certain standard of performativity. This way of conceiving hiring is not an isolated case, and it is not even limited to the fashion sector alone, but it flourishes in numerous environments, even very different from that of Elisabetta Franchi. This shows us that having a woman in positions of decision and power does not change things at all if that woman chooses to move using the same rules of the hostile environment in which she is immersed. Because real change begins first of all with refusing to be complicit in a system that favors only some people, stifling others.
Source: Vanity Fair
