Ewa Majewska: ‘Feminism is about challenging a society in which there are privileged and underprivileged people’

Ewa Majewska is a Polish feminist, activist and thinker. She works on the SWPS College in Warsaw and is the writer of Feminist Anti-Fascism, Counterpublics of the Widespread (Verso Books writer, 2021). She was interviewed on the sidelines of the Worldwide Marxist Feminist Convention which occurred in Warsaw final November.

Cross-border Talks: What do you suppose feminism is at this time and what are its most vital duties?

Ewa Majewska: I believe the most well-liked notion of feminism truly has rather a lot to do with equality between women and men. It’s a liberal notion that means that the feminist mission can be achieved when girls have the standing of males. That could be a misunderstanding of feminists. It is the one I am actually not proud of as a result of I believe it’s extremely reductionist. Actual feminism, or the feminism that I am proud of and that I need to promote, is a idea and in addition a apply of political company that begins from the expertise of being socialised and educated and rising up as a girl. We want this idea, apply and political company to grasp completely different variations of inequalities, completely different variations of discrimination, completely different alternate options to neoliberal capitalist patriarchy.

So for me feminism is rooted in a model of socially constructed expertise, embodied expertise through which folks be taught to be second-class human beings and through which they construct their emancipatory claims. So for me, feminism isn’t just decreased to problems with men-women or masculinity-femininity. It’s extra about difficult a model of society through which there are privileged and underprivileged folks, through which “the pure order” is seen as one thing hierarchical, through which some model of chief or God is on the high, after which there are women and men and slaves, or people who find themselves underprivileged, or people who find themselves discriminated towards for different causes, similar to sexual orientation, class, faith or ethnicity.

For me, feminism is a reasonably broad doctrine. I am not afraid of claiming it is a large ideology. It is a large idea that begins with the embodied and socially constructed expertise of femininity. However then it goes a lot additional and consists of the expertise of different discriminated types of life. It builds utopias or alternate options that problem the established order. An enormous a part of feminism can also be criticism of the prevailing society. And self-criticism. I believe that is one thing that Bell Hooks, one among my favorite feminist writers, has mentioned many instances: that feminism generally has this wonderful capacity, which at instances turns into an impediment, to be overly important of itself.

Feminism is the social motion and the idea that’s most likely essentially the most self-critical of all political positions, theories and types of activism. And that’s good, as a result of it signifies that we are attempting to vary our theoretical place, our political calls for, our types of activism, our types of being. And we are likely to attempt to see the issue on our facet as nicely, not simply of whoever is being criticised or contested.

For me, feminism is an effort to construct an egalitarian society pushed by solidarity and altruism slightly than competitors and battle. I do not suppose we now have to get rid of battle from our worldview. I believe feminists can very nicely be dialectical or Marxist. However I believe a sure idealistic model of society can be one through which these conflicts are resolved respectfully and with care for everybody.

“Feminisms are feminisms. They develop out of a rejection of inequality, the oppression and discrimination of ladies, the therapy of ladies as a useful resource”

That will be the distinction between my imaginative and prescient of feminism and the liberal imaginative and prescient of feminism, through which we deal with people and their rights slightly than on folks’s social make-up. The model of feminism that I help additionally has sturdy financial claims and may be very a lot at odds with neoliberal economics. So I believe that competition-based economics, which is predicated on the concept of speedy revenue and which upholds the unequal division of labour and income, is completely at odds with feminism.

I’ve to stress that a variety of what for me is the feminist battle teaches us to embrace different struggles, together with the struggles of trans and non-binary folks. I do not perceive how people who find themselves in any method towards trans and non-binary folks can name themselves feminists. I believe that goes towards the core assumption, which is that being discriminated towards and oppressed due to one’s identification is unsuitable.

What do you count on to occur in Poland after the elections, when it comes to girls’s rights? 

Within the subsequent three or 4 months we will see a variety of preventing, a variety of negotiations and a variety of efforts to bribe completely different folks, to persuade them to vary their political positions. However I even have one other expectation. What I simply described was a really concrete imaginative and prescient of the political manoeuvres that may be to return. However there’s one other factor that is essential in relation to the election outcomes. I and lots of feminist mates right here in Poland share the expertise of waking up in a distinct nation. And that is extraordinarily vital, as a result of for the final eight years we have been residing in a rustic ruled by two variations of what I’d name a state of exception.

On the one hand, we had a variety of fascist insurance policies and political choices that have been taken mainly every single day. We had the Polish-Belarusian border points and the atrocities on that border towards racialised refugees. We had not solely anti-feminist, however mainly anti-women laws, aiming for a higher ban on abortion than the one which already existed. We had anti-LGBTQI+ declarations, statements and efforts to vary the regulation. We had very tragic moments round work.

We had folks dying within the office due to exhaustion. So, for instance, we had docs and nurses dying in the middle of their work. We had a minimum of one employee at Amazon who died of exhaustion in the course of the Covid interval. The federal government didn’t intervene very a lot in these conditions. Principally we had this state of exception, this example of treating sure classes of individuals as enemies, as lower than human. However we additionally suffered from what I name this state of exception, which consists of being consistently provoked by political choices and statements that trigger very intense and really tough feelings, similar to concern, anger and anxiousness.

We have been residing like this for eight years. Anybody with a progressive place and mindset awoke every single day to new atrocities and new hate speech unleashed by the federal government. The most important distinction now, after the election, is that we do not get up with this nagging feeling of hysteria, of concern, of some new unacceptable political choice or state of affairs that we now have to face and act towards. So we’re exhausted after eight years of protesting towards the whole lot: for girls, for homosexual rights, for refugees, for staff. All these struggles have been each day, very intense. So I’d say we’re on the opposition facet, and right here I do not make a lot of a distinction between the left and the liberals, as a result of many liberals have been genuinely busy criticising the conservative authorities as nicely. We’re exhausted.

Proper now, on the one hand, we will see a variety of amusing happenings on the political scene. However however, a minimum of we do not have that exhaustion, that anger, that concern each day in our emotional life. That could be a implausible change.  

In September 2022, we noticed the outbreak of main protests in Iran which have been about feminist struggles and towards strict controls. Is there an Islamic feminism? Is it the identical form of feminism that we see within the West, or are another nations making their feminist battle completely different when it comes to company?

I want to make two feedback about the best way you ask this query. One is that you’re very delicate in describing the state of affairs in Iran. I imagine that what girls and their allies have been combating in Iran since final yr, since September final yr, was truly a genocide towards girls.

It was not about working situations or hairdressing or something like that. It was truly the energetic efforts of the Iranian state to erase girls, mainly to kill girls. So the state of affairs was far more dramatic than it was described. I make this remark in order that we are able to transfer on with a barely altered notion, as a result of I’d not scale back the protest in Iran to hairstyles or training or girls’s rights in that gentle method. I might say it was the proper to stay as a girl that was at stake there.

And one other factor is that I discover it very problematic to speak about Islamic feminism, as a result of if we need to discuss Islamic feminism, we even have to speak about Catholic feminism or atheist feminism. We might be dividing feminism into non secular, regional or cultural contexts, one thing to be averted. We do not discuss a lot about European feminism, for instance, primarily as a result of it is perceived to be so various. There may be feminist literature, together with a complete postmodern selection.

So I am fairly towards being open to the concept of Islamic feminism, as a result of within the nations which might be thought-about Islamic, we now have Marxists, we now have postmodernists, we now have traditionalists. You realize, feminisms are feminisms. They don’t seem to be influenced by the cultural context alone. They develop out of a rejection of inequality, the oppression and discrimination of ladies, the therapy of ladies as a useful resource, as a supply of unpaid and invisible labour, as a supply of reproductive energy. And this battle may be very comparable in Poland, in Iran, within the USA, in Brazil, in all places. So for me, the very idea of Islamic feminism is an concept that comes from Europe, an concept that’s primarily based on our try to grasp the world regionally. And I do not suppose that is the easiest way of wanting on the world.

So I’d discuss girls in Iran, or feminists in Iran, however I would not name them Islamic feminists, as a result of they may be towards Islam, or they may need to protect a sure model of Islam, however on the similar time they may need to promote Marxist economics, for instance.

On this area that’s perceived as Islamic, we now have Rojava girls, we now have Palestinian girls, we now have Iranian girls. We now have girls in Iraq and Afghanistan who’re constructing barely completely different variations of feminism. However what unites them isn’t Islam. That isn’t the principle challenge for feminists. Nowhere, not even in nations the place Islam is the largest faith, is it the largest challenge. Their fundamental concern is all the time the state of affairs and the place of ladies but in addition of all these areas of tradition, of society, of the financial system which might be perceived as female: social replica, invisible work, the care sector and different areas the place what’s perceived as culturally female is concurrently abused and discriminated towards.

And I believe that in Islamic areas of the world, as in all places else on the planet, girls have very completely different solutions to those issues. What I love concerning the girls in Islamic nations who’re preventing for rights and equality and for feminism is that they’re amazingly courageous. The braveness to be a feminist in these elements of the world, it truly is wonderful. So maybe that may be the one distinction that I see.

The total model of this interview on Crossbordertalks