Agenda: Who holds feminist festivals in Russia
In March, the feminist agenda broke out in top public discussions. The culmination was the scandal around "FemFest" - a festival about "feminism and uniqueness of everyone", which was organized by DI Telegraph and the magazine "Theories and Practices". The event is scheduled for March 11, but already the publication of the program and the list of speakers led almost to a boycott by the femso-community. The organizers were accused of not being invited to the festival by real feminists, the program was censored, and the political agenda was simply excluded from the discussion, explaining that the policy requires special coordination with the state.
The plot developed in several directions at once. The activist Oksana Vasyakina was the first to refuse to participate in the festival - she explained that the organizers considered the topic of her performance to be too harsh (on sexual abuse and the rights of the LGBT community) and did not admit her poetic cycle “Wind of Fury” to the program. After that, one of the key speakers of the event, Kirill Martynov, provoked a sexist and offensive discussion of the participant, according to the femso community, by publishing a piece of her poem taken out of context.
Later, the text of Lyubava Malysheva came out on Radio Liberty with a whole set of claims: the organizers were accused of earning points on the fashionable topic of women's rights, the speakers are too bourgeois for feminism, there are many men among the speakers, but they cannot be born get rid of the habit of splicing and, most importantly, the event itself is held with the filing of the presidential administration and the FSB, to emasculate his essence from feminism.
Finally, the official appeal of femactivists to the curator of “FemFest” Irina Izotova was published on the site Colta.ru, where they summarized the claims to the festival and called for an open discussion. The festival management has responded and even included in the new program a debate on "real and unrealistic feminism", inviting to discuss well-known activists: Darya Serenko and Bella Rapoport. And the festival's chief producer Anna Gileva made an open letter in which she said that her position had been distorted (while confirming that the event was non-political) and for her the news that a special examination for feminism was required.
The scandal around "FemFest", despite the degree of mutual insults, led to a definite result - the feminist agenda, on which there is no consensus, was widely discussed. We decided to give the floor to various feminist movements, asking the organizers of festivals and feminist meetings about their ideology, audience and feminism to the masses.
Our group has positioned itself as a left-wing feminist. This means that among us there are anarchists, Marxists and girls, who are not yet fully defined, but who, on the whole, share left positions. As for the audience, it is very different - both in terms of age and in terms of preparedness: girls from the subculture, women with children, activists, students.
Our organization arranges a holding group where we study large academic texts on gender theory. The group meets once every two or three weeks, does its homework in the text, and parses it according to the prepared questions. In this way, we help women who find it difficult to independently master the theoretical basis. We also organize film screenings, after which we hold discussions. Usually we twist a movie, one way or another connected with the left gender or just a gender issue, and films are selected by voting. Sometimes we give lectures - large semi-academic speeches dedicated to historical events. For example, last May Day there was a big lecture on gender segregation of labor. We also help to organize festivals: FemFrontier in Nizhny Novgorod in 2014 and "Floor surface". Our group also did several large photo projects. The biggest one is the “Female face of labor”, aimed at enhancing the subject representation of a woman in the visual space.
We try to ensure that the speakers at our events are still women, but men are also allowed as an exception. For example, if we are talking about some very cool historian. Or if we have a plan to organize a male statement about the problems of patriarchy, the addressee of which will be other men, as a rule, unable to hear women.
In our opinion, pops (no matter in what area) is inevitably ideological: it helps people without reflection to take for granted slogans and images without even understanding the conceptual, historical and political context of their origin. This is how, for example, feminists with persistent nationalist views, consumerist positions or even great-power chauvinism in the form of a basic identity are obtained. We do not want feminism to become a fashionable form of consumption. We want him to be what he should be - one of the tools for detecting the relationship of power to the surrounding reality and the method of resistance. We believe that pop feminism excludes all this and only contributes to discrediting feminism as a powerful liberation movement. The 20th century has shown us that everything can be turned into a chewing gum that is harmless to power: sexual freedom, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and even punk rock. It is possible and feminism.
Eva's Ribs is a social and artistic project dedicated to gender discrimination and the fight against it. Our main event is the annual festival of documentary theater, cinema and performance in St. Petersburg. But, besides this, we constantly hold film screenings, lectures, in the summer - an on-site school. The task of the project is not only to identify problems, but also to share with activist groups the experience of how to make their thoughts understandable to a wide audience. To do this, we hold seminars and workshops. Now offline feminism in Russia is basically something available in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but the country is huge, and everyone should have opportunities.
The first festival "Rib Eve" was held in June last year. There were documentary performances, a play in the genre of forum theater, video works and performances, as well as lectures. We believe in the power of documentary and forum-theater, when non-professional actors themselves make productions about things that concern them, involving representatives of various audiences into the work, and discussing important social problems in the process. Documentary films are shown at the festival, and this year we will include such a genre as installations. The larger the set of tools, the larger the audience can be reached.
Last June, the festival was attended by only about three hundred people. However, for the "Rib of Eve" festival - only one of the events. In total, since the beginning of last year, we have held more than twenty-five lectures, film screenings, as well as a summer visiting school. Each event had between thirty and one hundred participants. We try to disseminate information through different channels, so come those who do not consider themselves to be feminists or pro-feminists. But overwhelmingly, it is all the same those who are interested in the topic of equality. As part of our project, we do not see anything terrible in the fact that the speaker or coach of one or two events was a man, if this is a theatrical training or a lecture on building a campaign. But it seems to us obvious that a woman should give a lecture on the women's movement.
We try not to attribute ourselves to any of the currents of feminism. People in Russia, in principle, know little about what it is, why should they be frightened with terminology. Our festival provides a platform for expressing feminists of any direction. The only thing we do not cooperate with those who are fighting for the legalization of pimping and the purchase of sex.
Pop feminism can only be treated as neutral, as inevitable. It only shows that feminism is becoming an important force in which more and more directions appear. True, there is a danger that under the "feminists" representatives of the sex industry will start to mimic, who will receive a huge income from it and will seek any means to preserve the current state of affairs. Transnational corporations like Nike, using pennies, denying social guarantees to their employees, but arranging themselves on PR on the topic of feminism, are also incredibly hypocritical. Their profession of commercials can be useful in terms of coverage of feminist subjects, but this is simply wrong when people who earn discrimination against the poorest women and men speak on the topic of feminism.
Our festival appeared thanks to the old ideas of the organizers and the support of the them. Heinrich Böll. In Nizhny Novgorod, feminist and queer initiative groups have long existed, and in 2015 even the feminist festival FEM FRONTIER was organized, which was heavily criticized for its one-sided levofeminist position. In the two-day festival "Floor Surface" we wanted to present different points of view, giving everyone the opportunity to be heard, including leftist, postcolonial, and queer feminism. The events were held in the form of academic lectures, discussions, games, film screenings, performances. I am glad that the activity of the audience was on the same level, regardless of the formats and themes of the events.
Since the festival is of a queer-feminist theme, the working group included representatives of the Nizhny Novgorod LGBTQ + community, the feminist initiative group LeftFem, and the Russian Socialist movement. It seems to us crucial to include in the festival the maximum number of representatives of civil society so that each point of view in one way or another is reflected in the agenda. In addition to the main team, more than twenty people from different areas were involved in the creation of the festival: artists, designers, photographers, PR managers, security guards, psychologists.
The audience of the festival, as it was supposed, was formed from representatives of completely different areas: academic, activist, medical, journalistic, arts and civil society. People who are completely unfamiliar with feminism and queer have come, but are eager to understand the subject. I was also pleased with the geographical spread - participants came to us not only from Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also from the regions. In total, the festival was attended by over a hundred people.
In Nizhny Novgorod, after the closing of our festival, we launched a free informal educational course on feminism and queer "Floor Surface" and organize regular events (lectures, seminars, performances) with the participation of experts from Russia and abroad.
Popularization of the ideas of feminism is necessary and possible through completely different channels. On the one hand, the emergence of feminism in the masses is unthinkable without the activation of mass culture and the formation of a certain fashion. Pop festivals increase the number of information channels. The main thing is to make a program correctly, without distorting the basic ideas of feminism. A person who supports feminism and, at the same time, allows sexist, homophobic, trans-phobic, mysandric, or misogynic expressions in his speeches, cannot be allowed into public space, where the key meanings and agenda of the movement are constructed.
The topic of misandria (hatred towards men) had long been resolved in Western discourse, when feminism reached the third wave and the focus of the struggle shifted from a purely “female issue” towards universal equality regardless of gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation and gender identity. In Russia, the majority of “feminists” are still convinced of the need to block access to their activities and projects for men, considering them to be the main sources of oppression and the ancestors of the patriarchate. The same applies to the topic of homophobia and transpophobia. In the meantime, the intersectional approach perfectly demonstrates that gender, race, sexual orientation and other identities are interrelated and intersect with each other at different levels. As a sociologist and sexologist, as a feminist and queer, I am convinced that queer theory carries enormous potential, and it is precisely through this change of optics that it will be possible to achieve our common goal - gender equality.
The project "I - Art. F - Feminism. Actual Dictionary" is an exhibition that took place in the fall of 2015 in Moscow with the support of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation branch in Moscow. After we had several presentations of the exhibition catalog in Kazan, Kiev and Yekaterinburg.
We took the work of artists and artists from any political point of view, provided that this artist or artist did not make depreciatory statements about another discriminated group. Our position is intersectional, but it was important for us to present the widest range of opinions and strategies on how artists and artists speak about feminism in the language of modern art, even if we personally did not agree with this position.
We were surprised that almost the whole crowd of the opening days came to the opening of the exhibition, that is, all those people who usually go to the opening. We even heard young people say that they came here just to have a drink for free (although we had very little wine at the opening, and here we disappointed them). Usually such an audience is not interested in feminism.
We do not believe that feminism and LGBT are two fundamentally different agendas. However, in modern political conditions, it is difficult for all organizers to make public events related to LGBT people. Nevertheless, we believe that we need to look for ways to talk about this too. For example, in the framework of the “Dictionary” there was only one job related to LGBT people - a performance, and it was shown only to a closed audience. Yes, it was a compromise, but we believe that it is better than completely ignoring the topic of sexual identity and the threatening level of homophobia, fueled by the state media.
Our mini-festival in the library was held for the first time. At the same time, part of our team (Daria Serenko, Sasha Talaver and Ella Rossman) participated in last year’s Open Opportunity Festival, not Flowers, which involved library sites.
The fact that the format of the celebration was called the “festival” seems to me to be a tribute to the latest trends in Moscow’s cultural life as well as world cultural policy in general. In the gluttonous Moscow, in my opinion, it is becoming more and more difficult to draw attention to a separate lecture or discussion. According to the scale of the cultural scene, the scale of cultural events is increasing; the festival of an exceptional event, tearing everyday life, turns into a part of the routine that forms the urban lifestyle. In Moscow, the week is like a festival: music, then food, in March, in a logical way, feminism.
Our event is more like a space representing different feminist perspectives, for example, if you look at talk show participants and speakers, then they represent very different "feminisms". During the festival, we tried to collect different formats: a lecture about the anti-heroes of the creator of the portal no-kidding.ru Sasha Shadrina, the reading of the legendary story Natalia Baranskaya “Week as a week” with expert commentary by historian Ira Roldugin about the Soviet gender order and the subsequent discussion, at the end of the program - talk show "What do we celebrate March 8?".
Our festival is designed for a wide audience. As a library, we are open and democratic. In this sense, we are lucky, because in addition to the audience that we collect on social networks or sending press releases on the urban media, our regular readers, who find information on the website or in the library's poster, always come to us. And our readers are very different people: after all, we are the central city library. Therefore, we also tried to make the program so that it would be interesting to people of different ages and different degrees of familiarity with the agenda. For example, they read a story about the routine of a young Soviet woman, who turned out to be something close to older people and at the same time opened up a space for talking about the Soviet gender order, and behind it the modern one.
We are trying to popularize a critical view on the modern gender order - what could be wrong with that? Another thing is that the popularization of the feminist agenda does not necessarily lead to the abolition of a serious conversation about social exclusion and violence. There are many different ways to make a conversation not boring, and the event is inclusive - for this, in my opinion, it is not necessary to throw out criticism.
March 19 in our library will be a wiki-marathon of women's history, organized in conjunction with the "Wikipedia". The idea of the event is that first the Wikipedia employee will hold a master class on how to write articles so that they pass the test, are tied to the correct sections, have all the necessary hyperlinks and reliable sources, and then all participants write their own articles about women in history.
We-fest поддерживает интерсекциональный феминизм, но проект изначально вообще не задумывался как феминистский, и степень погружённости представительниц оргкомитета разная. Не все из нас говорят о себе, используя феминитивы, не все публично позиционируют себя феминистками. Девчонки из команды Центра городской культуры, которые также участвовали в организации и многое сделали для фестиваля, и вовсе всё время подшучивали над "нашим феминизмом".
We talked about the transformation of the institution of marriage and feminist art, arguing about women's "tuning" and women in politics, watched "How to become a bitch" and "Flower of the Desert". The women came out with their manifestos, in the mornings there were practical classes for parents. An important format was communication with a pilot, a female physicist, the wife of a prisoner, a man sharing feminist values. There were also lectures and even an exhibition entitled “The Door to the Space of Freedom. The Imperfect Heroines of Rudolf Tyurin”. From ten to eighty people gathered at various events. 80% women, 20% - men. As far as we can judge (including reading the results of the survey), many of them were advanced in terms of femdvizhenie, but there were also a lot of those for whom the festival was the first stage.
Even with such a soft positioning by the very fact of its existence, we provoked an unprecedented scale holivar in the Permian segment of Facebook. As befits a holivaru, there was no constructive discussion. There were problems with the speakers - people refused. No one, however, cited the specifics of the festival as a reason, citing employment. But I think our ideology has played its role. For example, none of the deputies came to the discussion about women in politics.
Another problem was the age requirement. The exhibition, which took place during the festival at the Center for Urban Culture, was marked by 18+, that is, minors could not even attend quite innocuous festival events. Meanwhile, there were teenagers who really wanted to get in and begged to let them go with tears in their eyes.
The experience of our festival has shown that, say, the discussion on feminism turned out to be almost 100% ineffective, because it turned into shouts and did not lead either to compromises or to progress in the political positions of the opponents. And the public lectures with the subsequent discussion gave, it seems, a significant effect, and within the framework of enlightenment they help the festival to achieve its objectives.
Cover: artjazz - stock.adobe.com