In-depth

In one day’s time, from July 26 to August 11, the Paris Olympic Games open. For the first time in history, the Games are welcoming an equal number of male and female competitors. Despite the various obstacles, here and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, more than ever before sport is an engine of emancipation for women. This dossier on Women and Sports demonstrates as much.

After being kept on the sidelines of sporting activities for centuries, women made a massive entry into the world of sport. Still now, however, this world continues to heavily discriminate against them: from the hyper-sexualization of their athletic bodies to the negation of these bodies as experiencing menstrual cycles, types of discrimination against female athletes abound.

In Italy, racist incidents against female champions of African origin representing the country in national and international competitions are increasingly frequent. With the Paris Olympics coming up, it is as good a time as any to reassert that racism is a serious threat to women’s right to sport, a right which was hard-earned over the course of a good hundred years.

It’s the second consecutive season in which the Cannes Film Festival has honored women and their struggles. This high mass of world cinema also seems to be intent on highlighting works lensed with the female gaze, even when they are produced by men.

Emna Mrabet is a lecturer in the cinema department of Paris 8 University, where her teaching focuses on the aesthetics of cinema, documentary production, and film analysis. The emphasis of her research is on the question of identity among filmmakers with a background of immigration from North Africa, particularly in the films of Tunisian female directors. Together with Ons Kammoun, professor and researcher in cinema in Tunis, she is currently organizing a conference in Tunis on June 13-14 on “Gender and emancipation in Arab cinema.”

Despite its popular and… anti-fascist origins, the high mass of international cinema which is the Cannes Film Festival has become utterly inaccessible. This is what around ten young women from the region confided to our journalist. On the other side of the barricades, these women from the Côte d'Azur struggle to find their place in their own city, faced with the people “from above”: the “others,” the movie stars, models, actresses, influencers. A Medfeminiswiya report.

Women and women’s resilience were at the forefront of the fourth edition of the Annaba Mediterranean Film Festival, which made a sensational comeback after several years of absence. A Medfeminiswiya report.

Washington, D.C. – Formerly incarcerated women from across the United States, together with their families and allies, marched on Wednesday, April 24 in the nation’s capital a few weeks ahead of Mother’s Day in the US, with an urgent message for President Joe Biden: bring moms home for Mother’s Day, and stop building new federal prisons for women and girls. Invest the money in communities instead, so they can thrive and heal.

Over the month of Ramadan, from Lebanon to Tunisia, Syria to Palestine, passing through Algeria, Egypt, and Morocco, viewers across Arab-Muslim countries share an almost sacred ritual: watching soap operas produced mainly for consumption during this month of fasting.

A study carried out in 2015 by the Tunisian Independent High Authority for Audiovisual Communication (Haute Autorité indépendante de la communication audiovisuelle- HAICA) in collaboration with the Belgian Superior Audiovisual Council (CSA) recorded 225 utterances of insults over nearly 69 hours of Ramadan fiction shows. Insults and threats all addressed to the female characters of these series.