Feminism / s for beginners
If someone in Slovenia says to
you,”You are a feminist” the chances are quite great that they did not mean it
as a compliment. To be called a feminist is to be stigmatised. Even people you
consider (or who proclaim themselves to be) progressive, are very reluctant to
call themselves feminists.
In her lecture “Reasons for
Anti-feminist Views in Central and Eastern Europe and Ways of Changing Them”
Vlasta Jalušič opens by saying that she carried out a little investigation by
asking some of her female intellectual acquaintances —who work to achieve goals
which would be considered feminist in many places in the East— whether they
considered themselves to be feminists. “In most cases the answer was rather
ambiguous: it depends on what you understand by this term, on how you define
it.” Jalušič distinguishes two kinds of anti-feminist positions: “The
principled position is a negative attitude towards the issue of the equality of
women. The pragmatic position is about the relation towards images of what
feminism is supposed to be.” But what is feminism supposed to be? “It often
turned out that the image of feminism was too homogenous and that the attitude
towards it and towards feminist activities was defined through stereotype and
prejudice”.
Feminism is considered to be
monolithic; it’s a lost cause; a cause from the past, it can’t deal with the
technological challenges of the moment; it can’t win the media-war; science has
proven that feminism — just like Marxism— is based on false assumptions; we
don’t need feminism, because we have equal
opportunities; etc. etc. In short: it’s a movement or an ideology we’d like to
forget, or else it is best relegated to the footnotes of history-books.
But the backlash against feminism
has also been hitting hard in the West. Conservatives a la Paglia and Katie
Roiphe go as far as to accuse the women’s movement of all the evils of late
twentieth-century American society: from the crisis of the family, the high number
of teenage pregnancies and male
depression, to drugs.
Not only is the backlash not the
exclusive ‘privilege’ of the East, it is also not a new phenomenon. As Rosi Braidotti
comments: every feminist generation has known its Paglia. The negative media
image persists for a long time. Virginia Woolf reported in her time that
feminism had become obloquy. Since the
thirties the arguments of opponents have obstinately remained the same.
However, Braidotti remarks that, in a sense, it is the function of the feminist
to be the bad girl, the bad girl who frightens those who have every reason to
be frightened.
Although the different points of
view and resulting polemics between the different approaches to feminism (the
‘gender theorists’ of the Anglo-American tradition, and ‘sexual difference theorists’ of the French school,
feminists and post-feminists, cyber-feminists, first, second, third wave-feminists and so on)
are very much alive (above all in academic circles), this panel will focus on a
number of concrete questions dealing with the significance of feminism today. How can feminism formulate an
appealing and challenging agenda for the future? Is post- or cyber-feminism an adequate
response? Are post-feminism and cyber-feminism radical breaks from earlier
feminism, or its direct continuation? How do/can feminists tackle the backlash?
How can ‘principled anti-feminism’ and ‘pragmatic anti-feminism’ be dealt with?
What are the principal and immediate concerns and tasks of the feminist
theorist today?
In the morning session a number
of leading feminist theorists will give introductory talks. The afternoon session will be devoted
to a panel-discussion.
Participants: Rosi Braidotti (Utrecht), Biljana
Kašić (Zagreb), Branka Arsić (Beograd) Marina Gržinić, Vlasta Jalušič, Tatjana
Greif, Svetlana Slapšak, Eva D. Bahovec (Ljubljana) and others.
