UkrEngMUL

Women's or Feminist Event: What Happened to the March on 8 March 2018

Feminist Collective
Daria Popova
March 2018

Feminist marches on 8th of March have been held at least since 2010 in Ukraine. This year, however, the organization of the event has gained massive criticism from inside feminist communities. Daria Popova rethinks the current situation and raises difficult questions. How did it happen that the march was captured by several resourceful NGOs and foundations? Why were the grassroots feminist activist initiatives excluded? How does the focus on the massive participation in the march depoliticize it and leads to silencing of urgent problems? What is the connection between neoliberalism, NGO-ization of resistance and depoliticization of feminist movement? How is feminist resistance against nationalism and neoliberalism possible here and now? (The full text is available in Ukrainian).

UkrEng

“European Others”: Сonstruction of Europeanness and Logics of Racialization

Review
Lesia Pagulich
https://doi.org/10.52323/299882
January 2018
The book European Others, by pointing out race as inherent to current European thought, disrupts the dominant narrative of Europe as a raceless continent and reminds that the concept of race and race-based policies inherent to colonial empires originated in Europe and were exported all over the world, while Europe remains marginal in discussions of race and racism, especially in relation to the U.S., which is regarded as a center of racism. The book contributes to scholarly and activist discussions of European forms of racialization that obtain little attention because of their deviation from the dominant discourse around race, whereas racelessness maintains racial thinking and its effects invisible. In its discussion of race, the book situates Europe within the wider context of colorblind ideologies and characterizes it by the combination of race and religion, and the externalization of racialized populations, while producing a homogeneous European entity, however, portrayed as an “inclusive” and “postnational” community.
UkrEng

Co-Optation of Feminism: Gender, Militarism and the UNSC Resolution 1325

Issue Article
Anna Nikoghosyan
https://doi.org/10.52323/fc1-1
December 2017

Abstract

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 is often referred to as a landmark resolution. Despite its revolutionary potential, I argue that the Resolution was developed through gendered discourses that allowed its use for militarist purposes. Informed by poststructuralist international relations feminist theory, I refer to the Resolution as a discursive practice and claim that the ways in which the UN conceptual apparatus understands and interprets gender and security open up possibilities for states to co-opt the very radical meaning of the Resolution by legitimising and normalising militarist practicing and silencing anti-militarist critique. In order to show this, I examine the gendered discourses behind the creation of the Resolution and address two major ways (including the ongoing militarisation processes in the Republic of Armenia) by which the Resolution is being militarised. (The full text is available in English and in translation into Ukrainian).
UkrEng

Justice Comes After the War? War Related Sexual Violence and Legal Nationalism in Four Countries of Former Yugoslavia

Public Talk
Adriana Zaharijević and Gordana Subotić
September 2017
In our paper we showed in detail that the proclaimed goals promoted by women’s groups – the reconstruction of society in general, with a special emphasis on eradicating sexual and gender based violence, disarmament, and furthering peace and anti-militarist values – remained in the shadow of the gender-mainstreaming aspect of Resolution 1325, limited to inclusion of women in the military and police (Subotić and Zaharijević, 2017). The way Resolution 1325 was implemented decades after the wars were over, testifies to a failure of women’s groups hopes and expectations. The successor states of Yugoslavia have not only failed to implement consistent and collaborative measures in order to provide justice and prevent impunity according to UNSCR 1325 point 11, but they have used those very mechanisms to promote a certain form of legal nationalism.
UkrEngMUL

The Failures of Successful Transition

Feminist Collective
Fritz von Klein
May 2017

Every time I keep an eye on Mom while applying black enamel on my nails - I am wondering whether she thinks that I made a mistake and want to get back but don't confess. Or she considers me being stuck between genders as if genders were gangways. And I don't look at Mom when applying coloured enamel. Because either I don't apply the coloured one, or apply but remove immediately and get the black back: an anxiety for the identity turns out to be stronger that desire to experiment. Every time I tell that now I have difficulties to get acquainted with someone and the transition made me - trans*gay - lonely so badly, I feel my shame and condemnation or compassion of others: oh yes, trans*people are always lonely and no one needs them. As if I ought to be a model, happy person; so, if I am not one, then my transition is a lie, a fiction and a self-delusion. (The full text is available in Russian.)

UkrEng

How to Embroider Feminism: Schemes and Technics

Review
Nataliia Martynenko
May 2017

"TEXTUS" is not a propaganda of gender inequality with an opposite meaning, notes Oksana Bryukhovetska, the curator of the exhibition. Instead, it is a field for feminist reflections of Ukrainian contemporary artists on a socially constructed patriarchal image of a woman. Embroidery and textiles are the artists' tools for expressing their critical views on what is perceived as a "norm" that, simultaneously, can be painful, defeating or unjust. (The full text is available in Ukrainian.)

UkrEng

Don’t Forget Foucault

Feminist Collective
Halyna Herasym
May 2017
Those, who fantasise about the almighty gay lobby, are always eager to point out that homosexuality was excluded from the ICD and DSM “not in light of any scientific evidence but rather under the influence of the LGBT-community”. This claim, however, is far from being true: there had been at least forty years of the research prior to homosexuality being excluded from ICD. Nevertheless, my point is this respect is that we should be concerned less with the question of how homosexuality was excluded from ICD and DCM, but more with that of how it made to the lists in the first place. (The full text is available in Ukrainian.)
UkrEng

«Troubling Education», Activism, and Academia: Notes on the Margins of the Useful Book

Analytic Review
Olga Plakhotnik
April 2017
The book "Troubling Education: Queer Activism and Antioppressive Pedagogy" (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002) by Kevin Kumashiro belongs to the classic publications in anti-oppressive education. A queer activism is conceived there as a broad spectrum of anti-normative strategies, including LGBT +, feminist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist politics and so on. Antioppressive pedagogies are aimed at forming socially sensitive people, which are able to see multilayered oppressions in the society and to resist, to fight against injustice. (The full text is available in Ukrainian.)
UkrEng

Autoethnography as Feminist Self-Interview

Translation
Sara Crawley
February 2017
Translated by: 
Olga Plakhotnik
Maria Mayerchyk
This is a translation into Ukrainian of the chapter “Autoethnography as Feminist Self-Interview” by Sara Crawley from "The SAGE Handbook of Interview Research: The Complexity of the Craft" (SAGE, 2012). To read the Ukrainian version, please click on the language switch button above. In the paper, Sara Crawley justifies the autoethnography method from the position of feminist standpoint theory. The author's goal is to outline an epistemological basis for autoethnography as they has understood and practiced it—one that honors methodological hybridity, troubles the perceived divide between modernism and postmodernism, and focuses squarely on theorizing social phenomena, rather than curtailing projects according to the rules of received methods. In its best usage, autoethnography can shine a light on the relations of ruling and connect members' voice to theory. How? Read the chapter “Autoethnography as Feminist Self-Interview” by Sara Crawley.

Listen to the audio-paper in Ukrainian.

UkrEngMUL

From the Editors of Feminist Critique: On the Launch of the Journal’s Website

Feminist Collective
Maria Mayerchyk
Olga Plakhotnik
December 2016
"Feminist Critique" is a feminist journal. We consider feminism to be a political positionality and methodological toolkit that are specifically sensitive to power relations and inequalities. As the recent international events show, we still do not have an effective language to grasp political realities. Feminist Critique is our attempt to establish a platform for creation and development of such a language (or, to be precise, languages). "Feminist Critique" is a queer-theoretical journal. We seek to problematize universalist and a-historical claims and ways of thinking, binaries and normativities. Instead, we call on heteroglossia, the transgression of neoliberal, progressivist, and triumphalist frameworks. The first publication of our journal is a translated excerpt from The Queer Art of Failure, and this is not a coincidence. We consider it to be a pivotal text for our project because Eastern Europe does lag behind, not successful and not progressive enough for the dominant "Western eyes." But we can ask in Halberstam's vein: What if we question the very logics of progress and success, or, at the very least, show its historicity? (Available in Ukrainian, English, Russian).

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