Contribution short abstract:

This paper applies an ethnographic lens to contemporary feminist resistance against the planned bridge across the Strait of Messina. It asks: How does anti-bridge resistance rethink the Messina-Reggio connectivities through care? What alternative visions of regional futures arise?

Contribution long abstract:

In the discourse surrounding the unbuilt “ponte sullo stretto”, the bridge across the strait of Messina, the proponents of the mega-infrastructure project emphasize how, if realized, it would connect two economically disadvantaged regions - Sicily and Calabria - and create a greater one “as if there were no longer a sea dividing them” (Gattuso 2024). This rationale echoes hopes and anxieties lodged in the long-standing socio-cultural imaginary of Sicily as both part of and cut off from (Schneider 1998) the Mediterranean space of cosmopolitan interconnection. The most recent version of the plan, however, has been met with robust resistance: Ever since the unbuilt bridge resurfaced on Italy’s current far-right government’s budget planning agenda, feminist collectives - among others - have flagged its planned construction as a transfeminist issue, warning that the plan, if materialized, would result in a domination of the earth, and, with that, a further domination of the marginalized bodies living with and lining the strait.

Through an ethnographic lens on current debates around the “ponte”, this paper asks: What does it mean to rethink the Messina-Reggio space through contemporary feminist resistance? What are (feminist) visions of care that “burn the bridge” over the strait, and let different futures rise in its stead? Departing from these questions, I put in conversation feminist attention to spatialized culture and the cultural-architectural history of the Sicilian island (the “Siciliano Incompiuto”), shedding light on the speculative connectivities that emerge from alternative future imaginaries for the regions that the strait straddles.