Where are the women who made their lives on the sea? Sailors, activists, biologists, fisherwomen, shipbuilders… Every day, thousands of women struggle in silence to become part of the world of water, and so far we have not given them a voice.
This was the starting point for Dona’m la mar (Women and the sea), a project about how women have been made invisible in the Mediterranean. A study that aims to give voice to the women who live off the sea in order to redirect the narrative of the Museu Marítim de Barcelona and to incorporate a gender perspective into it.
We are not looking for mermaids, myths and legends, but women with voices. We are not looking for individual names; what we are seeking is a multiple discourse that brings together the voices of women who have made their lives on the sea and who can help us understand how we can look at and narrate the sea in a more egalitarian way.
We ask them: is it different working on the sea if you’re a woman? What kind of difficulties do female professionals in the world of water have to deal with? What do women learn from each other? And, in spite of everything, has their role changed much, or is the sea still considered socially to be a male environment?
Women and the sea aims to shine a light on such transversal concepts as stereotypes, the salary gap, violence against women and gender inequality.
Coordinating the Women and the sea team is Catalina Gayà i Morlà, Doctor of Communication, author of the book El mar es tu espejo (The sea is your mirror), published by Libros del KO and co-director of the programme Dones on IB3 Ràdio. She is supported by Laia Seró, also a journalist and who has a Master’s in Anthropology from the Universitat de Barcelona.
The project
We cannot begin to contemplate the narrative propounded by Women and the sea without talking about the gaze; and, above all, about how we look at things when we create tales aimed at presenting a story from the margins, but one that attempts to give sense, meaning and legitimacy to our everyday lives, to our identity, the common experience and even cultural reality.
That is why we begin with the gaze, with proposing other ways of seeing in order to generate meanings that are complex, heterogeneous and which can even contradict otherness.
How does a museum look? Understanding the museum as a centre of power, as an institution with a symbolic, cultural power that has a kind of ability to create hegemonic narratives in order to establish (at last) a process of reflection and to create stories that help us to look at the world in a way that is complex, more egalitarian and fairer.
This the point where I take the plunge and discuss how to undertake this political action that we might call a radical narrative change (and of course by “radical”, I mean getting to the root of things) in order to create other narrative forms from within museums, and the idea that museums should exist as platforms for mediation.
The gaze is inherent in the construction of the narrated reality.
It doesn’t mean seeing: it means thinking, feeling and focusing.
The gaze constructs and is constructed.
It means understanding the rules and the positioning of a specific field in order to bring them to the surface and then deconstruct them.
The gaze has to do with how we conceive the world, to subsequently narrate it and turn it into narrative form.
How can we introduce a gender narrative into the sea?
The project's conclusions
On Thursday 7th March 2019, at a public meeting at the MMB Auditorium, a report was submitted on the conclusions of the research project Women and the sea.
In early 2018 we began a research study to incorporate women’s voices into the Museu Marítim de Barcelona (MMB). Titled Women and the sea, it was based on the following transformative reflection by María Zambrano. Of course, we only had to substitute “writer” with “museum”:
“What we publish is for a specific end, so that someone, one or many people, when they know it, they live knowing it, so that they live in another way after they have learned it; to free someone from the prison of lies, or from the mists of tedium, which is living a lie. (…) A community of writer and readers who, contrary to what was initially believed, is not formed after the readers have read the published work, but beforehand, in the very moment that the writer wrote her work. It is then, when the secret is revealed, that this community is created of the writer and her readers. The readers exist before the work has been read (or not); it exists ever since the beginning of the work, it coexists with it and with the writer as such. And they will only gain readers, in fact, those works that already had them from the beginning. And so the writer does not need to question the existence of that readership, given that it exists with him, or her, from the moment they began to write”.
That said, at first we made a mistake that later helped us to understand even more clearly the implications of Women and the sea, no longer as just a one-off study of the world of the women who lived off the sea, but also something that represents the emergence of an invisible narrative in the framework of a knowledge-generating institution such as a museum.
In the first tweet we posted to launch the network (and which was our letter of presentation) we asked where the women of the sea were, without realising that this question can be quickly answered: on the sea, women are on the ships, on the tugboats, at the ports, at the scientific research stations. Women can be found on the sea; all we needed to do was to give them a voice so we could understand what living in this world has meant for them, at the same time as identifying the mechanisms of concealment and marginalisation that women have had to endure, and continue to do so.
The research method
Do you know any women who are sailors, maritime activists, biologists, fisherwomen or shipbuilders? Probably not, or maybe just a few. Because while women have always been present on the sea, their role has been very much marginalised, stereotyped and, in many cases, silenced.
The data show that women’s presence in maritime and fishing-related labour stands at about 1%. That said, it should be borne in mind that such data are based on a patriarchal way of understanding work: the productive data is published, but not the reproductive data – that is, the data that have to do with care-giving.
This is why, in the coming months, we will be using Women and the sea to explore what women’s true role was on the sea. And we will do so through talks dealing with subjects that focus on five contemporary discussion areas concerning the sea today, and which are giving new meaning to the role of women in the maritime world.
Women and the sea is organised around a study that is structured into five round table discussions, each of which tackles a subject area that has to do with the contemporary debates on the sea today:
– The professional Navy
– Tourism
– Science and environmental activism
– Fishing
– Conflict
In all these areas we will cover the following:
a) The shared social knowledge and the rules for each field. We aim to show how women are present, what difficulties women professionals have, and the challenges for women in their field.
b) The narrative – that is, how women have been highlighted or made invisible in this field, and what this marginalisation means.
c) The possible narrative in the museum; that is, which points should be highlighted in order for women to become present in the narrative of a maritime museum.
Why these debates?
– Because they allow us to show both the individual experience and the collective one through different consensuses.
– Because they bring alive the shared social discourse for us
– Because they allow us to identify where the story comes from
– Because they highlight the negotiations made with the particular field
– Because in a narrative that takes place in the present day, we come into contact with a world that is built socially (women are able to fathom the unwritten rules, and reveal to us their positioning)
– Because the narrative that is created is a matter of deconstructing in order to construct.
– Because the questions and subjects that we present allow us to think about what we know about the sea and how we can know about things in other ways.
And as we want to involve you in this whole process of reflection, the round tables featuring experts on the subject and first-hand testimonies will be open to the general public. They will be held on the first Thursday of every month at the Museu Marítim de Barcelona. Come and join us!
How to redirect the narrative?
Narrative is a polysemic term that refers to the process by which a story is created, to the cognitive framework that lies behind this creation, and to the final product. The narrative proposes social and individual stories that provide orientation and meaning for present experiences, but which also can also enable us to give meaning to these experiences.
In this regard, Women and the sea no longer only refers to the presence or absence of women in the world of water. Nor does it intend to analyse how women have been introduced or depicted.
It attempts to create a story, a sea-based narrative that includes women.
Narrative and knowledge have common roots, both in Latin and in Sanskrit. The term “communicate” derives from the Latin word communicare, which comes from comoin, or common. Therefore, when knowledge is made into narrative and it is communicated, it represents sharing a way of understanding and seeing the world.
Communication is a basic process for constructing life in society, as a mechanism that produces feelings, activates dialogue and encourages coexistence between social actors.
This is why we ask, through Women and the sea, how we have shaped the human experience into an equivalent form of structures of human meaning.
We could talk about the number of women who have lived and worked on the sea throughout history, we could look back at all the female pirates, patrons and travellers, but our aim with Women and the sea is to try to achieve a deeper, more painful approach.
Talking about the art world, Siri Hustvedt sums it up very well in The Blazing World: “All intellectual and artistic endeavours, even jokes, ironies and parodies, fare better in the mind of the crowd when they know that somewhere behind the great work or the great spoof it can locate a cock and a pair of balls”. We have no alternative but to embark upon an exercise of deconstructing the narrative in order to subsequently reconstruct it.
Where do we start?
We begin from the standpoint that narrating is as political as living: because we narrate who we are in a shared context, and so narrating with a gender perspective involves generating a knowledge that questions the official version, the shared social knowledge (the doxa) that is incorporated in the form of habits, and is therefore a knowledge that determines how we live and what it is that explains how we have lived until now, given that it shapes the symbolic imaginary of us as a collective, as a community and as individuals.
Therefore, if we begin with the idea that narrating is political, then narrating from a gender perspective implies:
a) making a political commitment to the visibility and acknowledgement of women, who have been historically hidden or under-represented in the official narratives;
b) a political option: a commitment to denounce the position of inequality and subordination of women in relation to men;
c) creating another agenda of subjects: highlighting areas such as care-giving, working together and sorority to explain other ways of living that are divorced from the neoliberal narrative that has become hegemonic;
d) generating narratives of possibility, change and solution;
e) narrating the periphery, fleeing from the centre of power and moving towards the margins to seek the actors who inhabit the margins.
f) narrating the context: returning to the actor and, through the context, choosing to stop viewing her and narrating her as an object.
g) being able to understand that the person who is narrating already forms part of the research and of the subsequent narration.
Women and the sea is, quite frankly, an attempt to create a transformative political narrative.
MMB
Let's set sail
First round table discussion: women in the professional Navy
The first round table of the series, Another way of looking at the sea: women in the professional Navy, was held on Thursday 3rd May 2018 at 17:00 h at the Museu Marítim de Barcelona.
The round table participants were Carla Salvadó, Head of Marketing and Cruises at the Port of Barcelona; Cristina Caparrós, owner of one of the few vessels still moored at the city’s dock; Núria Obiols, harbourmaster of Tarragona, and Eulàlia Pujol, head of Sea Rescue at Barcelona.
Second round table discussion: women sailors and tourism
On Thursday 7th June 2018 at 17:00 h the second round table of the project Women and the sea was held at the Museu Marítim de Barcelona. The participants included women who have traversed the seas carrying tourists in all kinds of vessels. As captains or as crew members.
Featuring Marta Ribot, deep-sea captain and manager of Experiències Nàutiques; Eva Octavio, coastal captain and owner of Son A Mar; Lola Jansana, maritime chef and author of the book Cocinar en el mar; Loli Piedra, director and teacher at Terramar nautical academy; Belén Martín, manager of Evolution, and Clara Montejano, deep-sea captain and naval mechanic.
Third round table discussion: women and the sea, science and environmental activism
On Thursday 5th July 2018 at 17:00 h the third round table in the project Women and the sea was held at the Museu Marítim de Barcelona. Titled Another way of looking at the sea: women scientists and the sea, it featured women who have taken part in scientific expeditions at sea all over the world.
The round table was led by Catalina Gayà Morlà, together with Dolors Vaqué, research scientist at the Institut de Ciències del Mar de Barcelona (ICM); Raquel Vaquer, researcher at the Global Change Research department of the Institut Mediterrani d’Estudis Avançats (IMEDEA); Conxita Àvila, lecturer and researcher at the Universitat de Barcelona and an expert in the study of marine invertebrates; Joana Vicente de Bobes, researcher and head of diving teams on Antarctic expeditions, and Cèlia Marrasé, research scientist at the Institut de Ciències del Mar de Barcelona (ICM) specialising in the ecology of plankton.
Fourth session: women and fishing
In the fourth session of meetings on the subject of women’s presence on the sea, we spoke to Natzareth López, fisheries observer, Cristina Perelló, shipowner, fisherwoman and the descendant of a fishing family, Cristina Garriga, fisherwoman and Maribel Cera, a sailor involved in small-scale fishing techniques at Sant Carles de la Ràpita. The session was held on Thursday 13th September 2018 at 17:00 h at the Museu Marítim de Barcelona.
Fifth session: women, conflict and the sea
On Thursday 4th October at 17:00 h we closed the series with the fifth and final debate in the project Women and the sea. This round table featured the participation of women who have worked in the field of humanitarian aid in organisations that provide assistance to the launches containing migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean. There were female sailors who put to sea as well as female nurses and chiefs of communication. Women who, once again, have had to struggle on a daily basis to make their lives on the sea. Also participating: Laura Lanuza, Chief of Communication for Open Arms; Emma Segú, sailor and cook on board rescue vessels; Pat Rubio from the NGO Lifehouse Relief, and Pilar Pasanau, ex-volunteer sailor aboard rescue boats.
The sea and women, changing the gaze
Understanding otherness
First challenge: the sea and women. So far away and yet so near! First of all, it must be said that women have always been present on the sea and in maritime communities, but their role has become highly marginalised, stereotyped or silenced by the official narrative. Secondly, the woman is highlighted outside her context in a narrative process that is quite similar to the way in which the man is narrated on the sea: she is decontextualised, as a pioneer, as an adventurer.
If we return to the idea that narrating with a gender perspective is a political action, and we understand narrative as a cognitive framework and way of thinking, then we need to apply a method and a methodology that is different to the ones developed until now that have the sea as their setting. Therefore:
If we make a political commitment to the visibility and recognition of women, who have been historically concealed or under-represented in the official narratives, we will start to understand the mechanisms of concealment and the normalisation of these mechanisms.
If we accept that this is a political option, we will understand this story as a commitment to denounce women’s position of inequality and subordination with respect to men.
If we create another agenda of subjects: highlighting areas such as care-giving, working together and sorority to explain other ways of living that are divorced from the neoliberal narrative.
If we generate narratives of possibility, change and solution, we can deconstruct the hegemonic narrative and even the hegemonic discourse and generate other narratives and other narrative imaginaries.
If we narrate the periphery, fleeing from the centre of power and moving towards the margins then we will find the community.
If we narrate the context, returning to the actor and through the context stop viewing her and narrating her as an object.
If we are able to understand that the person narrating is already part of the research and the subsequent narration, then we highlight the research process as part of the result and we can be honest with the questions.
The story includes new frameworks of cognition and thought that question the narrative hegemony of the winner – the man – the one who goes off to sea, the adventurer, the one who is alone, the one who pays for the expedition… For a question and to seek a method!
If we accept the aforementioned points a, b, c, d, e, f and g, then the sea will no longer be narrated from the man’s perspective. If the gaze and the questions are different, then new voices are incorporated, new perspectives and the sea can be narrated by the community; the sea can be narrated by a woman. The sea will no longer be narrated from one single viewpoint!
What do we need to do? To ask non-hegemonic questions and use research techniques that help us understand otherness.
"Never at sea"
The title of this section refers to the 5,500 British women – the Wrens – who went to sea during the First World War. ‘Never at sea’, was their motto.
They were the on-board nurses, ships’ cooks, carriers of information to different shores, the barge pilots… who voyaged with the sailors but even so, were “not there”.
It was a case of “being there” without being allowed to be there; “being there” while accepting that you would not figure in the official narratives.
When we visited the exhibition at Portsmouth this summer, we found a tiny factual exhibition: facts and more facts, but with no questioning, not even of the motto: ‘Never at sea‘.
The exhibition was held at the amazing Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, and it was titled: ‘Women and the Royal Navy – Pioneers to Professionals’, a reflection on the contribution made by women to the British Navy over the past 250 years.
The exhibition showed anonymous heroines, it showed unnamed Wrens, but without questioning the narrative; it simply incorporated them into it.
How are women portrayed on the sea?
Over the past three years, and especially in museums in English-speaking countries, there has been a desire to highlight women who work on the sea, and to turn her into a pioneer, an exception, something exotic, someone who confronted the established social system and opened up a breach that has turned her into a symbol.
Here are a few examples:
– 2015. United Kingdom. National Maritime Museum: ‘Mermaids, Women at sea’: the exhibition focuses on the specific histories of women who “challenged the establishment and made their mark on a world dominated by men”.
– 2015. Ireland. National Maritime Museum. ‘Women and the sea’: the proposed project is based around a two-day symposium in which experts and witnesses discuss the role of women at sea in different fields: culture, history, industry and science. The project is jointly organised by the National Maritime Museum and the University College Dublin. The presentations can be consulted online and in most cases, they reveal how the woman that works on the sea is shown to be, once again, an exception.
Other exhibitions on women’s presence in a specific historical period and a geographical area have been organised.
A few examples:
– 2015-2017. Iceland. Reykjavik City Museum. ‘Women at sea’: an ethnographic exhibition on Icelandic women who work on the sea, reflecting on their present, past and future, and placing particular emphasis on the historical perspective.
– 2017. United Kingdom. National Maritime Museum. ‘Haenyeo: Women of the Sea’: an exhibition on the lives of the women divers at Jeju in South Korea.
The exhibition also features an attempt to deconstruct the myths and beliefs around women and the sea.
– 2016. Euskadi. Untzi Museoa- Museo Naval Donostia. ‘Women and the sea’, an exhibition on the role of women in the maritime economy, and which criticises the prevailing androcentric perspective in maritime research.
And finally, a female character has been used to reflect on a specific historical period, though without the woman having anything to do with the sea. This most extreme case, the exhibition ‘Emma Hamilton, seduction and celebrity’, was held at the National Maritime Museum in the United Kingdom between November 2016 and April 2017.
