CA 23149 Democratization at stake? Comparing Anti-Gender Politics in CEE and NME countries (Antigender-Politics): Isabel Heinemann, Univ. of Bayreuth and Heidi Hein-Kircher, Martin Opitz-Library/Ruhr-Univ. Bochum (Web)
Time: 23.-24.09.2025
Venue: University of Bayreuth – and virtual space
Proposals by: 15.05.2025
When women across Europe and the United States started to question male dominated health care and patriarchal power – both in the family and in the realm of politics – their feminist activism soon developed into a transnational movement. The health books written ‘by women for women’, the practice of self-examination and the concept of women’s health centers stimulated demands for better and women-centered health care also in other parts of the world, namely the socialist countries and the Near and Far East. However, what started as a powerful critique of antifeminist and patriarchal conditions in healthcare in Western democracies soon fueled further antifeminist reasoning and blaming of activist women as either “communist agents” or “reckless man-hating” feminists in these same countries. Whereas we have first accounts of how antifeminist campaigns sought to undermine women’s health feminism and of how activists themselves worked to counter such attacks in Western democracies, we need more information on how women in Eastern Europe and the NFE dealt with patriarchal health care systems and health knowledge on the one hand side and antifeminist attacks on women’s (health) movements on the other. This is where our international conference sets in.
We ask:
– How did women in Western Europe and the US, but also Eastern Europe and the Near and Far East react to patriarchal structures and predominantly male-centered healthcare and health knowledge? What alternative knowledge techniques, body practices and organizational structures did they built? How important were international networks and which persons created them? Continue reading