A HUN-REN Társadalomtudományi Kutatóközpont (MTA Kiváló Kutatóhely) 

Szociológiai Intézete 

tisztelettel meghívja 142. Jour Fixe eseményére

 

Lost in Discourses.
Representations of Violence against Roma Women
 

Előadók: Vidra Zsuzsanna (HUN-REN TK SZI), Virágh Enikő (ELTE-TÁTK), Kóczé Angéla (CEU)

Hozzászólók: Galántai Júlia (HUN-REN TK SZI); Balogh Lídia (HUN-REN TK JTI)

Időpont: 2024. október 24. csütörtök 13:00

Helyszín: Az eseményt hibrid formában tartjuk meg.

Személyesen: Szociológiai Intézet 1097 Budapest Tóth Kálmán utca 4.;  B.1.15 tárgyaló

Online: Zoom link: 

HAMAROSAN

 

Absztrakt

Illiberal parties and regimes tend to weaponize gender and women’s topics to create ideological battlefields where they can play out their strategy of polarizing society. Women’s issues thus often become divided according to political sides. 

In the illiberal Hungarian political context, gender became a highly politicized and weaponized issue around 2017. The war on gender ideology pursued by the government evolves mainly around questions concerning the rights and legitimacy of the LGBTQ community. However, women's issues are also in the spotlight of this political strategy, as in the non-ratification of the Istanbul convention. 

While the gender question and some of its women’s related aspects are highly weaponized, the Roma issue is rather invisibilized through using patronizing strategies. At the same time, both the women and the Roma question have similarities in that they both can be seen as part of the regime’s illiberal paternalist objectives to maintain the existing suppressive gender and ethnic hierarchies.    

Based on these assumptions, the paper addresses the following questions: how do Romani women appear in gender discourses, that is to say, how does the weaponized gender aspect intersect with the invisibilized Roma one? How do Romani women, invisibilized, appear in the strongly weaponized or manipulated gender battlefield, focusing on the one related to gender-based violence? How do the paternalist ethnic and gender conceptions play out in these discourses?  

In our research, we study political, activist, and civil society discourses appearing in media texts portraying gender-based violence against Romani women. We are interested in revealing what discourse types can be identified based on different dimensions such as the attribution of responsibility, and the ethnic or non-ethnic labeling of victim and perpetrator. We also intend to reveal who the main representatives of the different discourse types are, and how Roma women are visibilized or invisibilized in the discourse. Finally, we look at how these discourses appear in the different media types (pro-government or independent) and how these can be interpreted in the framework of intersectionality, the illiberal war on gender ideology, and the neo-liberal invisibilization of the Roma.