{"id":9726,"date":"2021-03-13T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-12T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aspeninstitutece.softmedia.cz\/article\/2021\/is-feminism-dada\/"},"modified":"2024-09-30T18:52:18","modified_gmt":"2024-09-30T16:52:18","slug":"is-feminism-dada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/article\/2021\/is-feminism-dada\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Feminism Dada?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the 1980s, two nice young Italian women came to Prague. They brought with them a women\u2019s proclamation, which demanded many good things: respect for human rights, disarmament and so on. They collected signatures from women on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In Prague, however, they came up against unexpected resistance.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Almost all the dissidents in Prague refused to sign the proclamation even without having discussed it between themselves. This was not out of fear of repression, but of ridicule, as V\u00e1clav Havel recollected. The ridicule would have involved participating in an international women\u2019s campaign.<\/p>\n

What is ridiculous about women making joint proclamations? Well, according to the future Czech President, the dissidents were afraid that the women would end up looking ridiculous because of the seriousness with which they \u201cwould like to increase the importance of their civic opinion by invoking their vulnerability and femininity\u201d. But again, the question can be repeated: what is ridiculous about that? And who would actually mock the signatories of the female proclamation?<\/p>\n

Would it be the Communists, to\u00a0whom they\u00a0had already\u00a0proved their courage more than once by signing proclamations that did not require invoking \u201cvulnerability and femininity\u201d?\u00a0Would it be those citizens who did not know about the majority of the proclamations signed by the dissidents at all or were indifferent to them? Whose opinion really counted for the brave female dissidents – of the women harassed by the regime, thrown out of work, blackmailed with the future of their children, and often even beaten by unknown perpetrators? Whose opinion was important for the women living, as Havel once put it, in a dissident ghetto?<\/p>\n

The author does not answer this question. The subject of the essay \u201cThe Anatomy of a Reticence of One Side\u201d (1985), from which the event comes, is not feminism, nor is it the attitude of male dissidents to female dissidents. The question of gender appears in it quite marginally, as an illustration of the \u201ctradition of this Central European atmosphere\u201d characterized by a heightened sense of irony and self-irony, which makes Central Europe, or at any rate \u201cour community – although women are doing comparatively worse here than in the West \u2013 a place where feminism is simply considered to be >>Dada<<\u201d (Havel). \u2018Dada\u2019 is something which is funny the more it tries to be taken seriously\u201c.<\/p>\n

We learn nothing about feminism from the fact that Czech dissidents thought it \u2018Dada\u2019 thirty-five years ago. But we do learn quite a lot about the sources of the views on gender and gender equality represented by today\u2019s national-conservative politicians from Central Europe, who are often former dissidents and identify with the dissident tradition. If feminism seemed \u2018Dada\u2019 to Havel, then what about Kaczy\u0144ski and Orb\u00e1n? The sources of anti-feminist policy in the countries of Central Europe are also dissident and not only religious.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe should add for the record,\u201d wrote V\u00e1clav Havel in the same essay, that five Czech female dissidents finally signed the proclamation with which \u201ctwo nice young Italian women came to Prague\u201d. He did not explain whether they were nice and young, but they were certainly not \u2018Dada\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the 1980s, two nice young Italian women came to Prague. They brought with them a women\u2019s proclamation, which demanded many good things: respect for human rights, disarmament and so on. They collected signatures from women on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In Prague, however, they came up against unexpected resistance.\u00a0 Almost all the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[92,192],"class_list":["post-9726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nezarazene","tag-editorial","tag-feminism"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9726"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10701,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9726\/revisions\/10701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}