Evgenia Ivanova's questions

One of the wise women of this year’s conference is Evgenia Ivanova from Belarus. She is coordinator of the Center for Gender Studies in Minsk, and has an educational background in law and gender studies.


By Sander van Haperen


'The WIDE conference gives my a great opportunity to meet people from different parts of the world.' Evgenia Ivanova says. 'People who consider themselves feminists and spend their professional or free time fighting for social justice for themselves, their families, communities and states.' Ivanova thinks conferences like WIDE play an important role for activists and experts. 'It is about exchange of different perspectives we have on feminisms and current problems, locally as well as globally. It is about all the frustrations and doubts I have as a feminist and that I hope to discuss openly in the circle of people with similar values without any fear to be misunderstood or ignored due to the feminist identity.' Here in the group of people where it is not necessary to prove simple things over and over again - that gender is there, that sex matters, and so on – the participants can meet the common need for practitioners and theorists to make their work more interrelated.

Future of feminisms
'When I think about the future of feminisms and challenges we face, I put my imaginary feminist self in the quite extreme situation when she has to make the concrete choice. Answers are not always clear to me. That’s why I put my concerns in the shape of questions rather than answers. I would like to share them with you and would be very happy to here your own questions you ask yourselves as feminists. A couple of my questions are: to what extent does feminism remain the ideology for gender studies as a discipline and gender mainstreaming as a strategy? Shall we have some theoretical borders which separate feminism from other ideologies? If yes – what shall it be? If not – to what extent we can include different opinions and still be different from non-feminist movements and ideologies? Advocating for women political representation, will we support, for instance women from conservative party or any group practicing fundamentalism? Being a religious women and a feminist, will we bring up our daughters as emancipated women or loyal to religious norms when there is a conflict between these two identities?'

Post your own feminist questions at http://feministvisionsforeurope.blogspot.com


This article has been published in Daily Visions 11-10-2008