Is feminism doomed? Feminist praxis in the times of ‘gender ideology’ in Slovakia

Elaboration and sedimentation of feminist ideas in a broader context

After the political change in 1989, the new feminist discourses in Slovakia were strongly connected to self-education of women within their fields of personal, political, and academic interests (Okrúhly stôl začiatočníčok, 2009). Therefore, they mostly centered around knowledge production and popular education, and partially on movement building. ¹ The advocacy activities and service provision were initially connected to specific topics such as violence against women or sexual and reproductive rights with focus on abortion. Similarly to other post-socialist countries, the mid-1990s were a period of growth of the Slovak civil society (Sloat, 2005) and feminism gained space mostly within non-governmental organizations.

In the 2000s, the process of accession to the European Union (EU) structures contributed significantly to the institutionalization of feminism, although through the narrow focus on gender equality topics within the Slovak state policies and bureaucracy (Cviková, 2007, 2009; Cviková and Juráňová, 2009; Očenášová, 2011; Valkovičová, 2019). At the same time, accession initiated numerous processes that have shaped the current state of feminist activism: the financial support for feminist non-governmental organizations has been thinning; a number of activists have relocated to the state bureaucratic structures, making the boundaries between state and civil society permeable; gender equality and feminist topics have been adopted and appropriated by state which led to the ‘hollowing out’ of the content of gender equality; and the gender equality agenda has been intertwined with neoliberal policies which are responsible for the increase in social inequality and insecurity in Slovakia (Cviková, 2009; Cviková and Juráňová, 2009; Kobová, 2016; Valkovičová, 2019).

Since 2011, these phenomena provided fertile ground for the so-called gender ideology rhetoric—that is, conservative attacks on feminist engagement in the governmental and non-governmental sector—(Valkovičová and Maďarová, 2019), and for the subtle democratic backsliding on gender equality policies, understood as a gradual process of ‘going back on previous commitments to gender equality’ (Krizsan and Roggeband, 2018: 92). Over the last several years, we witnessed the adoption of ‘family mainstreaming’ or building of the state-wide infrastructure for ‘family counselling’ by the EU-funded conservative and church-based organizations. After the national election in 2020, the new Minister of Labor, Social Affairs, and Family restructured the gender equality department, which is now called the Department of Equality between Men and Women and Equal Opportunities and is led by a former employee of the Slovak Bishops’ Conference (TASR, 2020b). The term gender has been gradually erased from the public administration and policies; the financial support for gender equality has in fact stopped. The new director of the governmental analytical centre Institute for Labor and Family Research dealing with gender equality and gender-based violence has claimed to ‘balance’ the currently prevailing ‘feminist and leftist’ approaches with more conservative perspectives to ensure the ‘ideational diversity’ (Roman Joch: Nie som proti . . ., 2020).

The ‘conservative turn’ is usually seen as a consequence of the anti-gender sentiments. However, a few actors in the civil society and academia also acknowledge that the spread of the ‘gender ideology’ rhetoric is fueled by the previous connection between gender and neoliberal policies, and inability of human rights discourses to grasp intersectional power relations embedded within social structures (Kováts, 2018a, 2018b, 2019).

Feminist activism in the gender ideology era

The types, forms, and actors of feminist activism in Slovakia vary, and the account of its complexity goes far beyond the possibilities of this article. Therefore, we focus on a selected number of practices that illustrate the changing field of feminist praxis in the times of ‘gender ideology’ (Kováts, 2019; Kuhar and Paternotte, 2017; Valkovičová and Maďarová, 2019).

The advocacy practices are mostly realized by the established feminist organizations which continuously need to reflect on the new context of the discursive delegitimation of gender equality policies and feminist agendas (Krizsan and Roggeband, 2018; Roggeband and Krizsán, 2020). The development around the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (i.e. Istanbul Convention) is one such example. Slovakia was among the first countries to sign the document in 2011; however, there was no political will to ratify it. Among the Slovak conservative public and politicians, the Convention has become an embodiment of foreign powers trying to impose ‘evil liberal values’ on the traditional Slovak nation. It became clear to feminist actors that the approach used in previous campaigns—arguments about human rights, international obligations, democracy—would not work. The aim thus was to connect the actual problems experienced by women with the measures described in the Convention, and to move beyond the framework of human rights, often very distant from everyday language. A wide spectrum of media was approached with suggestion to write about targeted topics or publish articles already written by the activists. The street paper Nota Bene was offered a topic about violence against homeless women; a monthly magazine dealing with health was primed on health implications of gender-based violence; and ‘women’s journals’ published brief advice-like information regarding violent relationships and contact information on available services. ² Information about the Istanbul Convention was part of every article. While in general this kind of activity might be a common marketing practice, for many feminist organizations in Slovakia, it is quite novel (Mesochoritisová, 2019, personal communication). Unfortunately, despite the feminist efforts and following the decision of the Parliament, Slovak President Zuzana Čaputová informed the Council of Europe that Slovakia will not ratify the Convention (TASR, 2020a).

Simultaneously with the pressure against the Convention, the efforts to restrict sexual and reproductive rights of women have increased in Slovakia. Between February 2018 and July 2020, 11 legislative proposals aimed at restricting the access to safe and legal abortion were submitted to the Slovakian Parliament (Povstanie pokračuje, 2020). While this brought along a lot of work for different feminist actors, unexpected anger and solidarity emerged as well. The leftist and anti-fascist groups initiated cooperation with feminist organizations and proposed to organize a protest We won’t be silent! Around a hundred people gathered in Bratislava in November 2018 and marched around the city centre to protest restrictions of sexual and reproductive rights. As we described in the beginning of this article, different competences and experiences were key to organizing the event: while the initiative Povstanie pokračuje (transl. Uprising continues) focused on building a community of people willing to claim the streets, feminist organizations ASPEKT and Možnosť voľby gathered and produced information about the topic, provided different types of materials, supported the knowledge base needed to update the social media, and eventually did the advocacy work.

What was meant to be a one-off street event transformed to a continuous cooperation under the umbrella of the We won’t be silent! initiative. While still continuing with protests against the efforts to restrict sexual and reproductive rights, the civic initiative also aims to engage in other social issues and connect with groups, organizations, and individuals supporting social struggles in a variety of areas. Therefore, when the last anti-abortion bills were submitted to the Parliament in July 2020, the street protest was framed in terms of invisible women’s work. So the invitations to the event and speeches included statements such as the following:

We have provided for everyday life and functioning of society during the pandemic. ( . . . ) Only recently, the whole society has been applauding us for doing our poorly paid work because we stood ‘in the front lines’ of the corona crisis response. And now, we get the message from the Parliament that we are incapable and incompetent to make decisions about our bodies and lives. (Nebudeme ticho, 2020)

Women and allies were asked to bring wooden spoons, pans, pots, and brooms and to declare their civil disobedience. ‘We are here to rethink what is often considered to be taken-for-granted such as the presence, bodies, and work of women’, a public speech went. The aim was to move beyond the individual framework, to address a variety of structural social inequalities and link them to the protest. Altogether five cities (Bratislava, Košice, Liptovský Mikuláš in Slovakia, Prague in the Czech Republic, and Manchester in the United Kingdom) joined in what was the biggest protest in support of sexual and reproductive rights in Slovakia so far. Around a thousand people gathered in Bratislava with tens of others elsewhere. The We won’t be silent! initiative continued with protests, civic disobedience, advocacy, and analytical activities in the autumn as one legal proposal to restrict access to abortion passed to the second reading in the Parliament. Two more Slovakian cities (Banská Bystrica and Poprad) joined the protests, and a thousand of wooden spoons with comments for MPs were sent to the Parliament. The anti-abortion bill did not pass yet; however, it is going to be presented to the Parliament again.

Small initiatives and cultural centres around the country play a key role not only in the protest but also in supporting popular education and building of local communities based on feminist principles. Over the last years, several cultural centres were established that organize or provide space for feminist discussions, festivals, and other events. For example, in spring 2021, there is going to be the third edition of the feminist cultural festival Artwife organized by the cultural centre Diera do Sveta (transl. Dent in the world) in Liptovský Mikuláš, a town with around 30,000 inhabitants in northern Slovakia. The festival has become a meeting place for feminist activists, artists, and academics mostly from Slovakia and the Czech Republic, but from other countries as well. It serves as a place where new projects are planned, relationships are built and strengthened, and international networks are initiated. It is important to say that the festival and the centre in general take into consideration the local atmosphere and the context. In 2021, the main theme of the festival is going to be Work and the organizers plan to introduce topics such as working conditions or paid and unpaid reproductive work, from a feminist as well as a leftist perspective (Festival ArtWife2020_Práca, 2020).

The differentiation of feminist actors within the left movement is supported by the cultural monthly Kapitál with its regular feminist section and the leftist blog Karmína that publishes texts mostly about working-class persons’ struggles. In general, the digital space seems to support the emerging feminist voices, and media platforms or social media accounts deal with feminist and gender equality issues (Černohorská, 2019) or adopt a feminist perspective when commenting on the current issues. The digital space is also used to organize quickly across the country. In 2019, when the Slovak Parliament voted on one of the anti-abortion proposals, women were invited to write emails to their MPs and inform them about how their uterus was doing. The initiative—inspired by a similar activity that took place in 2016 in Poland—was spread mostly via social networks and in a couple of hours hundreds of emails flooded Parliamentary email accounts.

Concluding remarks

In this article, we inevitably omit lots of actors and practices that form a stable ground for feminist praxis or present emerging initiatives in numerous areas of life (gender-based violence, obstetric care, political participation, and so on). However, what we hope to illustrate is that the current neoconservative and far-right political pressure has triggered different foci of resistance and helped discover allies beyond the common realm of feminist activism in Slovakia. Besides the feminist civil society organizations, the actors of feminist practice can be found in cultural centres around the country, leftist media and initiatives, anti-fascist groups, public administration, arts, and social services. While continuity can be traced in practices such as knowledge production, popular education, advocacy, and service provision, street protests are becoming more common as a result of internal cooperation and transnational trends. Movement building can be still considered a weaker aspect of the feminist practice in Slovakia. Different actors often stand on their own with limited information sharing and joint activities. Ad hoc cooperation is more common than long-term strategic plans. Cooperation between Roma activists, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) people (including trans-rights activists), working-class women as well as other groups could be improved. To some extent, cooperation is a matter of political will and practice. However, more often, its lack is primarily a result of the limits posed by exhausted feminist bodies, but this is a topic for another occasion.