PRESENTATION

When we made the proposal to the researchers, men and women, about the theme devoted to this issue of Revista Venezolana de Estudios de la Mujer: "Gender, Daily Life and Life quality"-, we wanted to concentrate the reflection on quotidian life –that of facts repeated day-to-day– studied by Social Sciences as any day can be lived by someone at any time. This daily space is wherein the well-being and life quality can take its place, that is to say, it can happen or not, is built or not.

Life quality is a very wide concept, under the influence in a complex way of physical health of the person, psychological condition, independence level, social relations, likewise the relations kept by such subject with essential factors of the environment. Then, we ask particularly: which are the mutual influences between gender and life quality? To ask on life quality means to ask also about the way we live daily, how the well-being is built day-to-day, how women live Utopias of change, and how the gender perspective is fundamental to reach for alternative worlds. All time-Feminism has been characterised by dreaming quotidian Utopias.

Thus a set of writings came out, providing answers and experiences about these searches. Mary Judith Ress proposes the integration of body and sexuality with the spirit, breaking up taboos and rituals in order to liberate the energetic field of our eroticism, of our pleasure, our joy, and our passions. At the same time, the mobilisation of energies discharged by popular women in Communal Councils is the subjectmatter of study and reflection of Prof. Iraida Vargas, and how is then defined and built a new quality life in the road wherein the social transformation is being made.

Venus Medina and Luis Alfredo Ramírez deliver the results of their respective investigations about popular women organisations, thereby the struggles are integrated around the lacks and needs to solve practical interest, daily life interests; however, along the road the empowering is brought about, and the female subjectivity changes its own condition, gains in self-esteem, it appropriates to itself, and modifies its environment whilst changing itself; in the meantime these organisations go ahead to reach strategic interests of gender. Venezuela is today a wide field of social change and participation in which women have developed a role of protagonists that changes the daily milieu.

Nevertheless, justly because of the thing to deal with is the quotidian concretion, is not possible therefore to ignore the painful and unjust traits of the real life of women, and how the sex-gender system imposes conditions on life qualities which are unjust to the real women. The theme on multiple roles presented by Lya Feldman exposes how the jobs imposed by our civilisation upon women bear effects on the mental and physical health, hence this compels the need —always unsatisfied—for social support, which must be understood as co-responsibility for the creation of life in terms humanly good.

The violent face —and intentionally kept hidden— of daily life is studied in the papers of María Cristina González Moreno and Yamile Delgado de Smith, who attempt to show the ideological marks around the gender-based violence, as they intend to clear up the epistemological keys needed for understanding it. Silvana Dakduk studies the life and features of Venezuelan women under conditions of prostitution, being that the author has developed one of the few works in Venezuela, focused this quest on the «other side» of quotidian life.

Our reflections will surely increase in cleverness and scope throughout the collaboration of our Latin American sisters, who nourish our insight from the North (Mexico) and South (Chile); one of them, Cándida Elizabeth Vivero Marín giving us a reflection on Literature for children, a field to build dreaming worlds but which are not freed of gender conditioning; the other, Paola Jirón proceeds to the analysis of daily experiences on mobility in the city and implications of gender upon urban life quality.

As for the Centre of Woman Studies, it speaks through the participants presenting the experience gained by Community Service with gender approach allied to Infirmary School: thence the task is also to change daily life for a citizenship with inclusion and equity.

Alba Carosio.