Feminist Antifascisms. Weak resistance and post-artistic strategies.
In the presentation Ewa Majewska will talk about an understanding of contemporary feminisms as antifascist which follows the transversal scenario of social and theoretical mobilizations.
The feminist mobilizations of last years can be seen as constitutive for the core of today's antifascist struggles. Such observation requires a shift in the strategies of doing and theorizing antifascism, where – until very recently – feminism was a separate struggle, sometimes allying with the fights against fascism. Today, the situation shifted, and while the International Feminist Strike and similar initiatives in some 70 countries globally prove the increasing popularity of feminism, also the organization of other movements, including Black Lives Matter, where the main organizers are women, show an important predilection for combining antiracism and feminism. Thus we need to see today's antifascism as largely a feminist mobilization, where the discussion of gender inequality often influences the perspectives and resistance practices in other contexts, be it racism, homo- and transphobia, as well as the more general critique of the resuscitations of the doctrine of the state of exception, practiced by the Trump administration, as well as the governments in Russia, Brasil, Hungary and Poland, just to show a few examples.
Within the feminist movement, new strategies emerge, as those involving social media, performance and participatory art elements massively enter political organizing. The Covid-19 pandemic made if even more explicit, as the physical presence at large demonstrations is often limited or impossible.
Dr Ewa Majewska – is a feminist philosopher and activist, living in Warsaw. She taught at the University of Warsaw and the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, she was also a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley; ICI Berlin and IWM in Vienna. She published four books and 50 articles and essays, in journals, magazines and collected volumes, including: e-flux, Signs, Third Text, Journal of Utopian Studies and Jacobin. Her current research is in Hegel's philosophy, focusing on the dialectics and the weak; feminist critical theory and antifascist cultures. Her next book, Feminist Antifascism. Counterpublics of the Common, will be published in 2021, with Verso.