Civiltà all'italiana

Quando per la prima volta sono venuta a Bologna, anni fa, ed iniziavo a farmi capire in italiano, le domande erano le tipiche che si pongono sicuramente ad ogni studente erasmus: Come ti chiami? Cosa studi? Di dove sei? Rispondendo a quest'ultima, quasi invariabilmente il dire ”Danimarca” veniva seguito da un'altra domanda ancora: lì al nord sono più civili, non è così?

Da buon'antropologa non capivo proprio la domanda, perchè sentivo la parola 'civile' nel suo senso scientifico; esseri umani si organizzano insieme, vivono insieme in gruppi più grandi di un certo minimo, c'è un certo livello di organizzazione, magari uno stato, ma forse anche no. Nei nostri tempi difficilmente si trovano umani che non vivono in civilizzazioni in una forma o altra, perciò siamo tutti civili. O no?

Troy: The National Order of Things 3000 Years Ago

For reasons not to be elaborated upon here (full disclosure: they involved Eric Bana) I recently chose to use 3 hours of my precious holidays watching Troy again, after spending approx. 7 years on forgetting why I didn't like it. It's (very loosely!) ”inspired” by the Iliad, but I have no intentions of going into all the reasons why I think that was not a successful venture – let it suffice to say that when I studied “knowledge of ancient times” (aka “old-øvl”) in high school, when asked to let us watch Troy in class as “relevant to the subject” (we had been reading and analysing excerpts of the Iliad), our teacher actually preferred to let us watch Disney's “Herkules”, as that was deemed closer to its original source material. Yeah.* But before I digress even further, to what I want to treat you today is a lecture on nationalism and the National Order of Things, inspired by how it was allowed to seep into a film that is supposed to take place more than 3000 years ago, where the very concept of nation would not make any sense whatsoever. Spoiler warning: I am not impressed.

Me, Myself, and My Gross and Hairy Legs

So, let's get to the good old debate on whether it is fair to expect women to shave their legs. Nay – whether it is actually expected of women, or they just all (or approx. 99% of them) do it because they feel like it and no societal pressure whatsoever involved.

The entire depilation debacle comes up once in a while, but today I'll only focus on the leg part.

The Patenting of Human Genome as an Issue of Women's Right to Health

In the 1990s the new science of gene technology was proving to give answers to many previously unanswered questions regarding hereditary diseases. One of these answers was the discovery of the genes BRCA1/2, mutations on which increase the likelihood for breast and ovarian cancer in women to up to 85%. There was a race among scientists to first identify the gene (originally it was thought to be just one) and sequence it, and in 1994 University of Utah filed a claim for the first patent in the name of Myriad Genetics, which has since held a practical monopoly on research into both genes and the testing for mutations on them. The patents cover not just specific mutations or methodologies of testing for these, but the entire genes, involving any use and research related to them. They were contested early on for a variety of reasons, relating both to the ethics of patenting human genome and to whether it is even reasonable to do so from a legal point of view. In 2009, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) with others filed a suit against the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and Myriad Genetics in order to have the patents declared invalid. They won the first case, which was since appealed by Myriad. The case was brought before the United States Supreme Court early in 2013. The gene patents were also contested in Europe for reasons related both to the effectiveness of the Myriad tests and to the ethics of patenting human genome. This text will focus on these ethics, specifically relating to treating parts of the human body as property, and how this in the BRCA case disproportionately affects women.

The Day Someone Assumed I Was a Lesbian

One day I was having tea with a friend, as you do, and told him one of my super-funny stories (about telling a guy who was bothering me in a bar to get lost), at which point my friend stopped me with an incredulous look, exclaiming, ”wait, are you...?” He then proceeded to tell me in great detail how and where to find the only bar in Aarhus specifically catering to lesbians. Slightly confused, I nodded along and put in the occasional ”ok”, not really picking up why he was telling me this. Only later that day did it click that he was talking out of an assumption about my sexuality.