“Feminist Media Reconsidered: An Interview with make/shift“
… It’s about making – making media, making change, making communities, making movements, making art, and making shifts – shifting power, shifting paradigms, shifting society. And it’s about doing it with what you’ve got, in a non-institutional, resourceful, do-it-yourself makeshift way.
“A reckoning for the women victims of the Bosnian war?”
… We will never know how many women were raped in Bosnia and Croatia. What we do know is that mass rape occurred and it was not a specific aspect of Serb brutality. There has always been rape in war. What this war did was to bring it out of the shadows, out of the dismissive inattention that accompanies the phrase “war propaganda”, or “the fog of war”. Rape is as much a fact of war, of the control of civilian populations, as ethnic cleansing. It took a modern women’s movement to collect the data and a critical mass of women journalists to insist on writing about it. From then on, rape in war would be taken seriously.
With the arrest two days ago of Radovan Karadzic, and his forthcoming trial in The Hague, there might now be some debate about justice for the women so abused.
“Hărţuirea sexuală în Spitalul Universitar, interzisă prin regulament”
Invitaţiile compromiţătoare şi gesturile indecente vor fi pedepsite
Asistentele din unitatea sanitară, încurajate să depună plângeri
(articol din 21 iulie in Gandul, cu o ilustratie absurda) – h/t c.
ps: legislatie contra hartuirii sexuale la locul de munca exista deja (desi nu multi stiu acest lucru, iar primul caz a aparut abia anul trecut)… o resursa utila (de la centrul parteneriat pentru egalitate): managementuldiversitatii.ro
Easter 2009 an All-European Autonomous Feminist Womyn’s Gathering will take place in Vienna, Austria. We invite you to participate with workshops, actions and more.
Find details online on http://feministgathering.wolfsmutter.com
We are looking forward to your suggestions and ask for forwarding this invitation to interested women. Thanks.
feminist greetings from Vienna
the organizers
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Autonomous Feminist Womyn’s Gathering
April 9 – 14, 2009 – Vienna, Austria
http://feministgathering.wolfsmutter.com
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Romani Women Campaign around Forced Sterilisation Practices at the 2008 Women’s Worlds Congress in Spain
http://www.errc.org/cikk.php?cikk=2965
Information also in česky, español, magyarul.
3 July 2008, Budapest, Madrid, Ostrava, Prague: Today, a coalition comprised of the Ostrava-based Group of Women Harmed by Sterilisation, the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC) and the Peacework Development Fund launch a global campaign seeking support for Romani women victimised by coerced sterilisation practices in Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia.
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The 11th AWID International Forum on Women’s Rights and Development
www.awid.org/forum08
The Power of Movements
November 14-17, 2008
Cape Town, South Africa
The struggle for women’s rights continues to face formidable challenges.
Fundamentalist forces have gained ground around the world, exerting an increased control on women’s lives. The Millennium Development Goals alongside the new aid architecture have restructured development assistance with women’s rights taking a back seat. The HIV and AIDS pandemic has continued to spread, with women being disproportionately affected. Migration has become an increasingly feminized phenomenon, particularly in relation to issues of labour and sexual exploitation. Militarization has increased, with particularly devastating impacts on women, while at the same time “security” agendas have obscured global strategies for human development and the eradication of poverty. Continue reading
A feminist midwifery ‘zine’:
Is midwifery a feminist issue? How do feminists practice midwifery? What are feminists currently thinking about childbearing? What do feminists think about midwives?
This is a ‘call out’ to feminists who would like to contribute to an upcoming ‘zine’ about feminism, midwifery, pregnancy and birthing. A ‘zine’ is an informally published / DIY magazine. If you’ve never seen one then imagine a cross between a leaflet for a local jumble sale, a comic and a text book.
This particular zine will be distributed free or for donations – via free PDF documents and cheap printed copies… contributors will retain original copyright but agree for ‘copy-left’. This means anyone is welcome to copy the zine as long as it’s not for profit and says where the info comes from.
[*Contributions deadline – first draft = 30th August 2008]
You can contribute anything printable to the zine – writing, rants, poems, cartoons, drawings, photos, quizzes and crosswords, origami birth plans, cut out and keep guide to your womb, birth in the NHS self defence tip cards… anything flat!
Please think about making your writing understandable to a wide audience – how you write is up to you, but it might be useful to avoid midwifery jargon or writing in a very academic style.
We are interested in the views of student and qualified midwives; doulas; mums and other parents; birth activists and feminist health folk – if you don’t want to use your name you’re welcome to use a nickname.
Some ideas so far…feminist midwifery: birth without borders? – refugee women birthing in the NHS; queer parenting; freebirthing; trans-men birthing; techno-birth ‘v’ ecofeminism; independent midwifery radical or elitist?; dykes midwives and homosexual panic; earth-mother consumerism; birth as power; birth crisis and birth trauma; sexuality and breastfeeding; dads in the labour room; babybonding – myth and reality; Where are the male midwives?; midwifery, horizontal violence and sexism… Continue reading
Ladyfest Romania contribution to the book:
Are you talking to me? Discussion on Knowledge Production, Gender Politics and Feminist Strategies,
eds H.arta/Katharina Morawek
How to intervene?
Practices of her-stories
A conversation between Veronika E., Regina W. and Andreea, Ruxandra from the Ladyfest Collective Bucharest.
“A grrrl from Timisoara—who is involved in the local “underground” scene there—decided to start a Romanian Ladyfest after attending the one held in Amsterdam in 2003. Impressed by the premise of a feminist festival showcasing woman artists and by her whole Ladyfest experience, she felt that it would be a good idea to also try something like that, infused with the riot grrrl spirit, at home. Finally, in late 2004, she started planning the festival together with a girlfriend of hers who is the bass player of a political punk band from Timisoara and a few other grrrls they knew; in time the two of them were able to spread the word and get more help from several Romanian girls and women living in different regions and even outside of the country. Ladyfest Timisoara 2005 was a small scale event, but it was a much needed action that brought together Romanian feminists of various ages and younger ones especially, and everyone involved felt that it should be kept going. Afterwards, the organizing collective decided to stay together to plan more events and ultimately a second Ladyfest in October 2007.” Ruxandra
Ladyfest is one example of (re)claiming feminist/queer spaces through a collective process where different structures enable self educational space. For us Ladyfest is an intervention which re-appropriates and re-claims (public) space to inscribe an anti-discriminatory space to secure a feministic queer space that is able to provide structures through which “counter” knowledge is transmitted and produced. It can and should work as a tool, backed by a big network. There are different Ladyfest events with local priorities which are shaped by the people who plan it.
Most of them have in common that they are self organised gatherings with non hierarchical structures working non-institutionalised and including workshops, bands, talks, performances, debates, films, marches to struggle together against homophobia, sexism, racisms, anti-semitism, capitalism, discrimination…
The first Ladyfest in Romania was in 2005 in Timisoara. The second Ladyfest was organised in 2007 and took place in the capital of Romania. We talked with Ruxandra and Andreea about their experiences organizing Ladyfest Bucharest 2007…
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“Razboi impotriva femeii”
Heleen Mees, Femke van Zeijl
Romania Libera, Marti, 03 Iunie 2008
— link de la crina
REFLECTIONS ON ‘ARTEMIS’ – A ROMANIAN FEMINIST PROJECT (PDF)
by Maria Diaconescu
… Even so, with these East-West differences, violence and sexual abuse against children and women is a reality in Eastern European countries, as it is in the Western countries. The East and the West share the same patriarchal ground that makes possible the cultural and structural violence that we live in. Violence of any kind means taking advantage of the power difference. The societal/ cultural or structural violence refers to all actions, attitudes and values of a society which block or delay the development of the other who has no “voice” in society, or who is not heard (children, women, people from a different ethnic or religious background, etc.). This kind of values and attitudes are responsible for inequalities of chances, and violence against women, children, Roma people, etc.
What do I want to highlight in this paper? There is a high support of patriarchal culture via the educational environment, the political environment, and the church. In the name of the so-called national and traditional values, strongly supported by the church, there is a high support of patriarchal culture. In my opinion, patriarchal values have to do a lot with the skin of religion – the temporal and social norms, known in Romania as “the national and traditional Christian values.” The patriarchal values have nothing to do with the core of spiritual and religious meanings. The spiritual, transcendent, essential part of any religion of the world has to do with the essence of the human being which transcends any skin: gender, culture and religion differences; this is the core part of any religion. According to Peseschkian, the religious externals that are influenced by time, the rituals and dogmas – the skin – are put in the foreground, while the actual religious contents – the core – are put aside. This produces a shift in form and content, misunderstanding and confusion because of the lack of differentiation between faith – religion – church.
My hypothesis is that the religious skin ideology – put in the foreground – patterns in a paradoxical way any other subsequent ideology/ politics or philosophy of life, even if (and especially when) people reject or ignore the core religion. This is what happens after any revolution. Subsequently, the revolution patterns the relationships in the same way: another form of patriarchal, changed roles. …