Romnja in the Struggle for their Voice

For a long time, I have been writing about the mobilization of Roma women, about their struggle for spaces of action, about finding and raising their voices, about their fight for a better life for themselves and their communities. In doing so, I always consider my own position in relation to other experts in the field of Roma studies and to the topic I am writing about. Roma activists have been oscillating between two movements for almost two decades: Roma rights and women’s rights. The spaces available to us to raise our voices have been reduced and in some ways controlled by two essentialist discourses: the identity and the gender discourse. For us Roma women, even where we had created our own spaces for expression and gathering, these spaces were questioned, again by a part of the same two social movements.