In recent years, there has been a growing anti-feminist, conservative movement across many parts of the world known as the anti-gender movement. This movement has been especially strong in Central Eastern Europe, where anti-gender actors have framed ‘gender’ as a static, foreign concept imported from ‘the West’ and destructive to ‘traditional’ societies. Utilising a postcolonial feminist approach, I examine the concept of ‘gender’ in Czechia, drawing attention to the role played by Czech academics, activists and policymakers in negotiating the use of the term ‘gender’. This article traces the history of the term from the 1990s when ‘gender’ was first introduced to a Czech academic audience, through public seminars and lectures hosted by the Prague Gender Studies Centre, to the present-day inclusion of gender mainstreaming discourse in Czech policy documents. I reveal that ‘gender’ is not a timeless, clearly defined, fixed term wholly imported from ‘the West’ but rather a concept with a variable and complicated history. Thus, this crucial term, first developed in Anglo-academia, is not uncontested or uncritically accepted, contrary to the claims made by anti-gender actors. The findings presented in this article hold implications critical to transnational feminist dialogue and activism during the current period of growing global anti-feminist sentiment.
This special issue is the outcome of the collective effort of many international queer scholars, activists, and artists who come from diverse backgrounds and fields of expertise and work in various contexts. Many of them met at the "Fucking Solidarity: Queering Concepts on/from a post-Soviet Perspective" conference that was held on 20-23 September 2017 at the University of Vienna, and a part of this special issue is made up of conference proceedings. We want to thank Saltanat Shoshanova, Masha Godovannaya, Sasha Skorykh, Masha Neufeld, and Tania Zabolotnaya for co-organizing this event with us and express our gratitude to all the conference presenters, artists, and participants who inspired our thinking about and through queer solidarity.The conference was Part VIII of the international conference series Queering Paradigms. We want to thank members of the academic and activist Queering Paradigms network, in particular Bee Scherer, Betty Wambui, K.O. O'Mara, Patrick de Vries, and Leonardo J. Raznovich for their support.We thank Tania Zabolotnaya for copy-editing some of the texts and translating the Introduction of this special issue into Russian. We thank Yevheniia Polshchykova and Olenka Dmytryk for translating the Introduction into Ukrainian. We thank Lucy Melville and the team from Peter Lang for their friendly cooperation of printing some of the original ideas collected here in the English-speaking publication Queering Paradigms VIII: Queer-Feminist Solidarity and the East/West Divide, edited by Katharina Wiedlack, Saltanat Shoshanova, and Masha Godovannaya (2020). Last but not least, we want to express our special gratitude to the two editors-in-chief, Maria Mayerchyk and Olga Plakhotnik, and to the editorial team for collaborating with us to produce this special issue of Feminist Critique: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies.
This article examines the collective action frames of violence against women put forth by women’s organizations in the gender equality community in Slovakia during the current period of heightened conservative activism against gender and sexual equality. This study finds that women’s organizations in Slovakia overwhelmingly deploy a Gender Equality frame with distinctly feminist-oriented content to resist violence against women during the current period of anti-gender activism and accompanying state hostility toward feminist goals. This differs from previous studies that find women’s organizations in Central Eastern Europe historically deploy gender-neutral frames, providing evidence to the theory that anti-genderism can contribute to more radical activism as a response. Frames are contextualized through a discussion of the anti-gender movement in the country utilizing the concept of discursive opportunity structure.
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