Asja Hrvatin: Feminisms from the Margin: Criticism of Hegemonic Power from Feminist Perspective

This lecture is a sisterhood feminist critique of feminism, trying to answer the question of whether radical emancipation from patriarchy is possible without the criticism of hegemonic power. Some feminisms answer the question by arguing that we can take over the power and subvert the system from the inside: Catherine MacKinnon advocates the idea of a feminist state, whereas Betty Friedan defends a greater presence of women in ruling structures (quotas) without interfering into the existent capitalist relations. Whilst some feminists, at the beginning of the 20th century, were collaborating with members of parliaments and opportunistically took away the right to the status of a political subject to women of colour, other suffragettes were burning down houses and breaking shop windows. Emma Goldman, meanwhile, was warning us against the uselessness of the fight for voting rights if it is not accompanied by the fight against economic exploitation of women. The history of feminism is thus, in fact, the history of feminisms, a field of fight, which does not exclude the influence of power relations. In this way, the history of feminisms, which strives to realise an emancipatory project, also reproduces the same mechanisms against which we were supposed to fight, namely: essentialism (Woman Subject), hierarchy (the reproduction of Otherness), hegemony (voices of women between discourse and noise). Asja will be contemplating discursive mechanisms which hegemonic power is employing in order to take away feminist political power and turn it against itself, and, hopefully, point into the direction of how we could weaken those mechanisms.

Asja Hrvatin graduated in Social Work and recently obtained an MA in Gender Studies. But she is predominantly a feminist, who feels most at home in autonomous spaces.

Jasna Podreka: Femicide and its occurrence

The presentation of femicide will touch upon the very definition of the concept or its theoretical explanation, as well as try to explain why feminists are fighting to put the term into use. The explanations of the concept ‘femicide’ differ, in Europe and Slovenia they are rarely used, but from the activist point of view it is important that the expression becomes used in the wider public. The presentation will point out the most frequent reasons for violent deaths of women, from Latin America, all the way to Krško. Why these deaths could be termed ‘femicide’, shall be clear also from the causes of deaths, which lie somewhere completely else than the causes of violent deaths of men.

Jasna Podreka is a Doctor of Sociology. She works as an assistant and researcher at the Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana; she also volunteers at the SOS phone for women and children who are victims of violence. She has been researching the topic of violence against women and femicide since her diploma degree, for 10 years already. In her diploma thesis she investigated the problem of femicide – violent deaths of women – which are the consequence of sexually specific violence, whereas in her doctoral thesis she investigated inter-partnership murders of women in Slovenia. She has also collaborated on a few international projects with this topic. In the future, she wishes to direct her research towards an exploration of characteristics of violent men.

Location: Social centre Rog, Autonomous Factory Rog

The lectures will be in the Slovene language.