Empowering Roma women in Romania – gender or/and ethnicity
Empowering Roma women in Romania – gender or/and ethnicity

Summary/Abstract: The condition of Roma women in Romania can be well summarized as one that brings together, in a strengthened way, all inequalities based on gender, starting from low access to education, to labor, to social and health services, early marriages and ending with almost no access to decision making. The intersection between gender and ethnicity generated for Roma women a position of impossibility: - denying/ hiding their ethnic identity and trying to integrate in order to reduce gender inequalities by adopting “the Romanian model of emancipated women”. This way of positioning oneself is also coming together with the risk of losing the power of representation – they became “Romanian” women (“românizare”) that could not substantiality stand for “Roma women”;- denying/ neglecting gender identity and thus taking upon themselves the burden of a patriarchal ethnic construction that can deprive women of any power of effecting change from inside. “How can Roma women’s empowerment be possible in the context of intersectional representation of inequalities?”, this is the question I will try to answer in this paper. In answering my question I will underline the fine line between empowerment, essentialism and paternalism which arise in an intersectional context and which should be kept in mind in order to minimize the aforementioned risks.

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