Festivals As Reparative Gender Politics

What explains the popularity and widespread appeal of numerous post-Yugoslav feminist and LGBTQ+ festivals in the last decade? This book argues that the millennial generation expresses "reparative politics", as a distinct type of activism, through festivals. Reparative political acting, as identified here, characteristically relies on playfulness and creativity, interpretative (gender) dissent, acceptance of organizational and programmatic messiness and hybridity, belonging, and positive affect. The reparative politics is vital in a context that is marked by an individual and collective trauma of heteropatriarchy, violent breakdown of the common state, and post-transitional economic precarity. The book uses excerpts from programs, interviews and observations collected through the multi-sited ethnographic research. Siroi's focus on contemporary activism in Southeastern Europe challenges the narrow geopolitical understanding of the recent feminist politics and refutes the common assumptions of a passive millennial generation. Yet, the book's relevance surpasses its area of study, as it argues against the popular deriding of "artivist" expressions as the "merely cultural" or "merely aesthetic" engagement. In contrast, the book claims that such activities urge a redefined understanding of political agency. Festivals as Reparative Politics demonstrates that contemporary feminist festivals represent a distinct reformulation of contentious politics of gender whose constitutive principles can be exemplary for other types of political engagements.

What explains the popularity and widespread appeal of numerous post-Yugoslav feminist and LGBTQ+ festivals in the last decade? This book argues that the millennial generation expresses "reparative politics", as a distinct type of activism, through festivals. Reparative political acting, as identified here, characteristically relies on playfulness and creativity, interpretative (gender) dissent, acceptance of organizational and programmatic messiness and hybridity, belonging, and positive affect. The reparative politics is vital in a context that is marked by an individual and collective trauma of heteropatriarchy, violent breakdown of the common state, and post-transitional economic precarity. The book uses excerpts from programs, interviews and observations collected through the multi-sited ethnographic research. Siroi's focus on contemporary activism in Southeastern Europe challenges the narrow geopolitical understanding of the recent feminist politics and refutes the common assumptions of a passive millennial generation. Yet, the book's relevance surpasses its area of study, as it argues against the popular deriding of "artivist" expressions as the "merely cultural" or "merely aesthetic" engagement. In contrast, the book claims that such activities urge a redefined understanding of political agency. Festivals as Reparative Politics demonstrates that contemporary feminist festivals represent a distinct reformulation of contentious politics of gender whose constitutive principles can be exemplary for other types of political engagements.

What explains the popularity and widespread appeal of numerous post-Yugoslav feminist and LGBTQ+ festivals in the last decade? This book argues that the millennial generation expresses "reparative politics", as a distinct type of activism, through festivals. Reparative political acting, as identified here, characteristically relies on playfulness and creativity, interpretative (gender) dissent, acceptance of organizational and programmatic messiness and hybridity, belonging, and positive affect. The reparative politics is vital in a context that is marked by an individual and collective trauma of heteropatriarchy, violent breakdown of the common state, and post-transitional economic precarity. The book uses excerpts from programs, interviews and observations collected through the multi-sited ethnographic research. Siročić’s focus on contemporary activism in Southeastern Europe challenges the narrow geopolitical understanding of the recent feminist politics and refutes the common assumptions of a passive millennial generation. Yet, the book’s relevance surpasses its area of study, as it argues against the popular deriding of "artivist" expressions as the "merely cultural" or "merely aesthetic" engagement. In contrast, the book claims that such activities urge a redefined understanding of political agency. Festivals as Reparative Politics demonstrates that contemporary feminist festivals represent a distinct reformulation of contentious politics of gender whose constitutive principles can be exemplary for other types of political engagements.

Populist radical right (PRR) parties are questioning women’s rights and sexual democracy. Yet paradoxically they appropriate issues of gender+ equality to attack migrants and to mobilize a growing number of women as voters and members, based on a ‘racialization of sexism’ discourse. This book engages with these puzzling developments in order to investigate the evolving ideologies of PRR parties and their understudied membership from a gender perspective. Why do men and women join these parties? How do they negotiate the gendered propaganda of their organizations? Do these parties mobilize their members in gender-specific ways? How is the PRR achieving growing political legitimacy through such renewed gendered ideologies? And how does its mainstreaming strategy articulate with gendered social change and the advent of new generations of activists? Drawing on a two-year comparative and intersectional study of the Lega (Nord) in Italy and the Front national (now Rassemblement national) in France, and based on life histories of over 100 activists, The Racialization of Sexism tackles how gender, at the interplay with class, ethnicity, age and religion, shapes the parties’ strategies as well as their activists’ experiences; and how gender relations are transformed in unconventional ways within these parties. This book will be of interest to those studying gender, as well as nationalism, racism, social movements, radical politics and party politics.

Gendered Violence at International Festivals is a groundbreaking collection that focusses on this highly important social issue for the first time. Including a diverse range of interdisciplinary studies on the issue, the book contests the widely held notion that festivals are temporal spaces free from structural sexism, inequalities or gender power dynamics. Rather, they are spaces where these concerns are enhanced and enacted more freely and where the experiential environment is used as an excuse or as an opportunity to victim blame and shame. In this emerging and under-researched area, the chapters not only present original work in terms of topics but also in theoretical and methodological approaches. All of the chapters are cross- or interdisciplinary, drawing on gender, sexualities, cultural and ethnicity studies. Studies from a range of highly regarded academics based around the world examine the subject by looking at examples from a wide range of destinations, including Spain, Argentina, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Australia, Canada and the UK. This significant book progresses understanding and debates about gendered festival experiences and emphasises the symbolic and physical violence often associated with them. This will be of great interest to, undergraduate and postgraduate students and academics in the field of Events Studies. It will also be of use to practitioners or non-profit workers in the festival industries, including festival management organisations and planning committees.

Masaya, a provincial capital of Nicaragua, cultivates an aggressively traditional identity that contrasts with ManaguaÕs urban modernity. In 2001 the city was officially designated Capital of Nicaraguan Folklore, yet residents have engaged in a vibrant folk revival since at least the 1960s. This book documents the creative innovations of MasayaÕs performing artists. The first extended study in English of Nicaraguan festival arts, Unmasking Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Nicaraguan Festival is an ethnographically and historically grounded inquiry into three festival enactments during the Somoza, Sandinista, and Neoliberal periods: the carnivalesque torovenado masquerades, the transvestite Negras marimba dances, and the wagon pilgrimage to Popoyuapa. Through a series of interlinked essays, Katherine Borland shows that these enactments constitute a peopleÕs theater, articulating a range of perspectives on the homegrown and the global; on class, race, and ethnicity; on gender and sexuality; and on religious sensibilities. BorlandÕs book is a case study of how the oppositional power of popular culture resides in the process of cultural negotiation itself as communities deploy cherished traditions to assert their difference from the nation and the world. It addresses both the gendered dimensions of a particular festival masquerade and the ways in which sexuality is managed in traditional festival transvestism. It demonstrates how performativity and theatricality interact to negotiate certain crucial realities in a festival complex. By showing how one locale negotiates, incorporates, and resists globally circulating ideas, identities, and material objects, it makes a major contribution to studies of ritual and festival in Latin America.

To what extent is queer anti-identitarian? And how is it experienced by activists at the European level? At queer festivals, activists, artists and participants come together to build new forms of sociability and practice their ideals through anti-binary and inclusive idioms of gender and sexuality. These ideals are moreover channelled through a series of organisational and cultural practices that aim at the emergence of queer as a collective identity. Through the study of festivals in Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Copenhagen, and Oslo, Queer Festivals: Challenging Collective Identities in a Transnational Europe thoughtfully analyses the role of activist practices in the building of collective identities for social movement studies as well as the role of festivals as significant repertoires of collective action and sites of identitarian explorations in contemporary Europe.

This book aims to make sense of political developments towards more gender conservative populist movements from a feminist perspective, analyzing both ultraconservative campaigns against gender, which started around 2010, and the mass feminist mobilizations responding to them since 2016. The authors chart not just a continuation of the anti-feminist backlash dating back to the late 1970s, but the rise of a new movement, which benefits from the crisis of neoliberalism and threatens to destroy liberal democracy. This study offers a novel conceptualization of the relationship between the ultraconservative anti-gender movement and right-wing populist parties. It also examines the recent wave of feminist mass mobilizations, viewing the transnational revolt of women as a left populist movement. The authors map the Anti-Gender campaigns as a global movement, put Poland's Anti-Gender Campaigns in a comparative perspective, look at The Family as a refuge from Neoliberalism, and examine the move towards a 'Populist Feminism'. This is an important study for those researching in Politics, Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies and Sociology