Genderová inspirátorka soudobých dějin
Gender inspirer of contemporary history

Hana Havelková (18. 9. 1949 – 31. 10. 2020)

Summary/Abstract: The obituary is a reminder of Hana Havelková, a sociologist and one of the leading personalities of the Czech feminist thinking after the fall of the Communist regime. She was initially focusing on Critical Theory; since the 1990s, she was active in the community of the non-profit Gender Studies organization in Prague and the Slovak feministic magazine "Aspekt". In the beginning of the new century, she was the prime mover of the establishment and accreditation of the discipline of gender studies at the Faculty of Humanities of the Charles University in Prague, where she subsequently lectured until 2018. Hana Havelková was not an activist, but a scientifically oriented researcher interested in a mental definition and exact analysis of the gender as an organizational principle of the society at both institutional and symbolical levels. She studied the gender on topics such as the fate of the Czech women’s movement during the socialist era and after, dilemmas of feminism in Eastern Europe, the role of expert thinking in the formation of gender relations, or political participation issues. Initially, she was the only person in the Czech feminist environment to step out from the sole source of inspiration represented by Anglo-American authorities and the first introduce Italian, German and Austrian sources into this community. The authoress stresses the significance of Hana Havelková as a source of inspiration for Czech contemporary history, whose mainstream did not show any interest in a discussion with gender studies for quite some time, and her ability to cross interdisciplinary boundaries in this area.

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