Description
Women that take part in anti-base movements and campaign for anti-nuclear policies place themselves outside of military bases, in an attempt to contest nuclear politics. They escape ‘feminized silence’ (Enloe, 2014: 147), and they disrupt the carefully designed gendered dimension of military bases. Something that, following Enloe's account, is a necessity for US security. This paper places these rebellious women at the centre of its feminist research, with a provisional account of La Ragnatela protest camp and its feminist history. Following Greenham Common’s anti-nuclear movement, Italian women established a separatist camp in 1983, called La Ragnatela or “The Spider’s Web”. The feminist camp was determined to oppose the Italian government’s commitment to turn the old military airport in Comiso, Sicily, into a NATO nuclear base. My inquiry focuses on the little-known Italian peace camp, in order not only to understand its place in Italian antinuclear and feminist activism but also to unveil its transnational dynamics. Drawing on my preliminary PhD work and as-yet limited archival research into this case, I will investigate if the camp, placed outside of a nuclear base, was successful in constructing a collective feminist identity and in opposing nuclear policies, militarism and gender dynamics.
