Abstract
This panel is constructed around the ideas of radical solidarities, feminist interrogations of exclusionary practices, and interdisciplinary exchange – intersecting art, sociology, anthropology, and history.
Stemming from a shared knowledge and academic practices specific to the Eastern European context, this panel surpasses the “East-West divide” by tacking relevant topics placed outside this dichotomy, in a transnational perspective and reasoning. The anti-gender movements across Europe and the associated strategies of resistance are relevant to the Nordic contexts as political movements and power relations continue to shift. The aim is to offer perspectives on radical solidarities that can open new ways of thinking of feminist practices and epistemologies beyond the regional dimensions.
The contributions are focused on personal experience, activism, engagement with different layers of feminism and anti-feminism, as well as on the entanglement of feminist kinship and queerness with the dimensions of care. What is the common locus of these approaches and how can gender and feminist studies transform and better address the growing need for transnational solidarity and the particularities of different contexts and issues? One possible answer can be found by looking into “radical solidarities”, a common perspective through all the contributors’ papers. By approaching this idea from different angles, the panelists draw upon relevant topics such as feminist radical solidarities and trans feminism (Maja Pan), the interconnections between lesbian art and dimensions of care (Teri Szűcs), queer belonging (Simona Dumitriu), anti-gender politics and responses across Eastern Europe (Ramona Dima), and queer feminist and decolonial perspectives on militarization and neoliberalism (Olga Plakhotnik and Maria Mayerchyk).
Organizers and panel
Ramona Dima [panel organizer] is the recipient of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship with her project “Queer Herstories of struggle and survival in Romania: From Communist criminalization to contemporary anti-gender movements in SEE spaces”. The project starts in October 2021 and is hosted by the Centre for Gender Studies, University of Stavanger, Norway. Dr. Dima’s publications and topics of interests include queer literature, sexuality and migration, LGBT+ activism, and anti-gender politics in Europe. Contact: ramonadima05@yahoo.com.
Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen [moderator] is an associate professor at the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Stavanger (UiS), and an affiliated researcher with the Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender and Sexuality, University of Amsterdam. Engebretsen convenes the UiS Queer Research Group and is a core member of the UiS-based Research Group on Populism, Anti-Gender and Democracy. With Erika Alm, Elisabeth is editorin-chief of the lambda nordica journal. Engebretsen's research is concerned with inequality and difference, gender and sexual diversity, queer history, transnational feminism, the politics and ethics of kinship and well-being, postmillennial justice activism and social movements, environmental change and sustainability. Her ethnographic expertise concerns China (PRC), Norway, and the Nordic countries, and she has further interests in East Asia, global China, and Europe's border regions (especially Nordic and Eastern European regions).
Maja Pan is a feminist philosopher, theorist and non-formal educator with a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana. She has been involved in regional and transnational activism in various political movements and intersections: lesbian, queer feminist, animalist, workers‘. She co-authored the chapter Yearning for Space, Pleasure, and Knowledge: Autonomous Lesbian and Queer Feminist Organising in Ljubljana in the volume Lesbian Activism in the (Post-)Yugoslav Space – Sisterhood and Unity (eds. B. Bilić and M. Radoman, 2019, Palgrave). She worked as an expert researcher for the international research project “Homophobic Motivated Violence as Experience of Children Growing up with Homosexual Parents in the Context of School” (University of Ljubljana – Humboldt University – Lund University). She lives between Budapest and Maribor
Teri Szűcs is a critic and independent researcher. Her research focuses on the literature of the Holocaust, and on Hungarian Romani literature. She gained her PhD in 2009 from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. She is the author of “The History of Forgetting – The Witness of the Holocaust in Literary Works” and editor of the volume “Representations of Jewish Identities in Twentieth Century Hungarian Literature”. Szűcs is a former assistant professor at Eötvös Loránd University and a former lecturer at Corvinus University. Szűcs is the co-curator of the Visual Art Section of RomArchive – Digital Archive of the Roma and of the Collectively Carried Out – Tamás Péli: Birth exhibition at the Budapest History Museum. Over the past decade she has been involved in home care, and in the last few years in dementia care. She has started her series of texts titled “My Memory Returned to Me” to collect and recount the experiences and adventures of caring for her mother who is living with dementia.
Simona Dumitriu holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the National University of Arts (Bucharest, Romania). Between 2009–2013 she was a lecturer at the same institution. Simona works as an independent curator, teacher and organiser. She has been curator for Skånes konstförening gallery in Malmö (2018–2020), GIBCA Extended Regional Exhibition in Göteborg (2021), and for different art spaces in Bucharest. She is the initiator and part of the collective which organized Platforma space in Bucharest (2011–2015), and member of the feminist group Local Goddesses (Bucharest, 2015–2017). Dumitriu currently works as an International coordinator for the residency program at Konstepidemin Art center (Göteborg) and as a Project leader for Public Art at Lunds konsthall.
Olga Plakhotnik is a Bayduza Postdoctoral Fellow at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta. She holds the Candidate of Sciences degree in philosophy from National Aerospace University in Kharkiv (Ukraine) and PhD in sociology from the Open University (UK). She taught and conducted research projects on feminist epistemologies and methodologies, feminist and queer pedagogies, contemporary feminist, LGBT+ and queer activisms in Ukraine. She is currently reworking the dissertation titled Imaginaries of Sexual Citizenship in Post-Maidan Ukraine: A Queer Feminist Discursive Investigation (2019) into a book manuscript forthcoming with McGill-Queen’s University Press. Together with Maria Mayerchyk she is the co-editor-in-chief of the refereed journal Feminist Critique: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies (http://feminist.krytyka.com/en). Their last two joint publications include a paper entitled “‘Uneventful’ Feminist Protest in Post-Maidan Ukraine: Nation and Coloniality Revisited” (in Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues, Routledge 2021) and “Between Time of Nation and Feminist Time: Genealogies of Feminist Protest in Ukraine” (in Feminist Circulations between East and West, Berlin: Frank &Timme, 2019).
Maria Mayerchyk has double affiliation of a Senior Research Associate at the Ethnology Institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and a Kule Project Archivist at the Kule Folklore Centre, University of Alberta (Canada). She holds the Candidate of Sciences degree in History with a specialization in Ethnology and a rank of Senior Scholar of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Maria taught courses on queer and feminist studies and Slavic folklore in Canada and Ukraine and was a recipient of fellowships at Harvard University, Lund University, University of Alberta, University of South Florida, and others. Her research interests include critical folklore studies, diaspora studies, East European studies, queer theory, feminist epistemologies, and decolonial option. Mayerchyk’s and Plakhotnik’s last two joint publications include “‘Uneventful’ Feminist Protest in Post-Maidan Ukraine: Nation and Coloniality Revisited” (in Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues, Routledge 2021) and “Between Time of Nation and Feminist Time: Genealogies of Feminist Protest in Ukraine” (in Feminist Circulations between East and West, Berlin: Frank &Timme, 2019).