Publication details
Czech Ambivalences and Fragility of Feminism
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The Czech Republic is a European country where “Western” and “Eastern” values coexist and create a specific ambivalent mixture. This can be reflected in current nationalist and populist discourse on “European crisis” connected to “migrant crisis” and analysis of its gender and feminist aspects. The fall of the Iron curtain has not brought feminism and gender equality into the Czech Republic as a needed or positive aspect for the newly established democracy and gender equality has never been perceived as “our” Czech issue. Rather, it was an import from the West. We acclaimed “Western-like” democracy and aspired to become one very fast, and at the very same time we were suspicious to human rights, equality and especially gender equality policies. The background historical, social and cultural context for such a situation will frame our presentation. Today, this ambivalence is fuelled by “migrant crisis” and Czech antifeminism that became mainstream in politics as well as in social movements together with populism trampling human rights. In such rhetorics, feminism is associated with the EU import and clumsy policies, and is the cause of the crisis of masculinity and traditional family values, which both make European societies weaker and unable to resist Muslim attempts to colonize “us” and subjugate “our” women. Thus, the argument follows, Czech women lose their current equal status, which is a national value now to be protected. Our presentation will analyse this particular case of appropriation of (“our”) women´s equality by populist (male) representatives of Czech anti-migrant and anti-gender initiatives. Radicalization of such thought and mainstreaming of anti-feminism has consequences in various aspects of social life and structures. One of them is a newly intensified threat against institutionalized Gender Studies Programs at the university level. Circumstances of this situation will be elaborated in the second part of our proposed conference presentation as a case study of one of these programs. Attitudes towards Gender Studies have never been value free and many efforts were required to establish them as a proper scientific discipline in the Czech Republic. The existing two Gender Studies Programs were established in 2004-5 coinciding with the time of massification of tertiary education, and after substantial efforts from feminist researchers and scholars. Today, when numbers of students decrease due to population trends, these programs are under serious threat, while using positivist and neoliberal arguments and newly added populist, anti-plurality and essentialist arguments. We will argue for the need of preserving and developing Gender Studies as a study subject and a research field as one of the laboratories of critical thinking which is threatened in the situation of raising nationalism and populism. The situation of Gender Studies in Czech Republic shows frailty of recently established democratic structures in the Post-Soviet or Post-Socialist region that needs special attention from feminist scholars concerned with inequalities. Besides the anti-feminist or anti-gender backlash experienced throughout traditional Western democracies, this region adds on further specific “rules” and twisted strategies towards curtailing gender equality. And we believe a joint action is needed as time-proven trends from Western and Northern Europe do not work here. |
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