Body, Self and Space: How Women’s Fear Articulates in Milanese Public Spaces

Research shows that women experience discomfort or feel unsafe in a variety of situations to the point that this becomes a “gender specific tax” that limits their right to the city (Andreola & Muzzonigro, 2021). Moreover, studies have reported that women feel the most vulnerable or in danger when in public spaces, especially if unknown and at night; while most gender-based crimes actually happen during the day, in familiar populated places or behind closed doors. After decades of feminist analysis of the relationship between marginalised bodies and public spaces, this discrepancy between the social structuring of women’s fears and the actual circumstances in which gender-based violence occurs needs to be investigated as social sources that limit women’s freedom of movement have not been identified yet and the heteronormative “masculinization of public spaces” still goes unchallenged (Kern, 2020). Influenced by a range of existing studies across different disciplines, the research develops a conceptual lens that is based on the hitherto un-theorised nexus of relations between body-space-fear, where the three dialectically linked, to investigate the existence, persistence, resistance and social structuring of women’s fears and their implications for women’s daily lives in Milan, Italy. Aiming at the production of new counter-hegemonic forms of knowledge that resist the dominant gender-space paradigm and weaken the prevailing space-gender determinism, a feminist methodology is adopted and data are being collected through ethnographic observations, semi-structured one-to-one in-depth interviews and focus groups structured around collective walks, participatory photovoice, community and emotional mapping rethinking the concept of security.

The term “women” refers to everyone who identify as such or was assigned female at birth.