Discussing Gender in the Romanian Protest Movement 'Save Roșia Montană'

In the last few years, the landscape of Romanian civil society has been marked by emerging protests regarding a wide range of issues, from ecological concerns to the denunciation of bad policy and political corruption; a new activist awareness seems to have mobilized a civil society that had been previously described by academics as fragile and dispersed. The overall increase of protest activity has opened new sites for signifying gender, both by dealing with gender issues and reinforcing sexist stereotypes. Feminist protests in the last few years remained small-scale in comparison; women-centered grievances have not generated a mass mobilization as strong as other grievances in Romanian society. This paper aims to research the gender dynamics and representations of the Romanian protest movement Save Roșia Montană, focusing on the aspect of the large civil protests regularly held in Bucharest during the fall of 2013. The campaign mobilized against the building of a large open-pit cyanide gold mine in a village in Transylvania, called Roșia Montană. The gender question is even more intriguing in this case, because the protests have been supported by organizations and activist groups that hold opposing political views, ranging from leftist, feminist and alter-globalization standpoints to nationalist, conservative and religious ones. In an increasingly divided world, these protests can be read as a micro-scale experiment in the cohabitation of opposing social and political views in order to reach a common purpose.