Author(s): Alenka Spacal / Language(s): Croatian
Issue: 31/2006
In the text, the author analyses the relation of the category "feminist", which she understands as a political category, opposed to the category of "female", which she understands as essentialist. Using the examples of numerous festivals with various attributes (feminist, women's, queer), and based particularly on the discussions which have been taking place around this aporia, she demonstrates the dangers of insisting on an essentialistic approach. She shows that it leads into further social ghettoisation with all the further implications, both when the issue is about the narrowly political, as well as about cultural-artistic creation. Simultaneously, following Lucy Lippard's intervention into the rift that has arisen between the essentialist and the anti-essentialist, she doesn't side completely with one (in her case, the anti-essentialist) position, realizing herself that this would lead to a re-disappearance of women from the field of visibility. In relation to this, she tries to find and suggest in the text the real yardstick for the use of the signifier "female" in order to, on the one hand, to a degree indeed emphasise this specific female (for reasons of overcoming the dominant discourse given to equate the universal with the male, and the pure historical injustice), and, on the other, to avoid an inordinate and unneeded stressing of the concept of female, which leads into a biologically (sexually) determined reserve.
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