FEMEN is a Ukrainian feminist protest group that has become infamous for its topless protests against patriarchy. The group, founded in 2008, has since grown to be a worldwide phenomenon, and not simply because its protests are often seen as “sextreme.” Marian Rubchak, editor of Mapping Difference: The Many Faces of Women in Contemporary Ukraine, takes a look into the history and meaning of the movement, and asks: Where is it going?
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The year was 2008; 17 years had passed since Ukraine declared its independence and early advocates of change began to espouse high-minded ideals designed to promote women’s rights. These incipient feminists laid the groundwork for raising an awareness of discrimination against women, and were instrumental in advancing the passage of some of the most progressive pro-women legislation Ukraine had yet seen. Fast forward to 2008 — the promising beginnings were moving very slowly, too slowly. Clearly the work of reform would need to proceed to a higher level.
As anthropologists who have worked in the Pacific Islands since the 1990s, we both felt that most political analyses of the region have been flawed for one simple reason: they overlook the enormous but complex political influence of Christian churches. This influence does not always take the form that observers of American politics might expect, where particular churches take explicit stances on political issues or support particular candidates or parties. The political influence of churches in Oceania is both more subtle and more pervasive than that. Time and again during our fieldwork in Fiji and Solomon Islands, we saw how the words of preachers and pastors, activities of Christian organisations, and interpretations of the Bible shaped how people understood their place in political communities. In Oceania, like everywhere else, there is no single Christianity, making it frustratingly difficult to generalize about ‘Christian politics’. Although anthropologists have increasingly turned attention to Christianity, little attention has yet been given to the ways that rival churches position themselves against each other. Our ethnographic research led us to see denominationalism as key source of social friction and creative energy, essential to any understanding of politics in the region.
the 1990s under the stewardship of the city’s first directly elected mayor, former communist Antonio Bassolino. Through the study of two major piazzas and a squatted centro sociale (social centre), the book explores the pivotal role of public space in the administration’s efforts to reorder and redefine a city that had hitherto been commonly regarded as an urban outcast. It thus sets out to investigate how changes to the built environment were, on the one hand, produced and publicly endorsed and, on the other, experienced and contested by different groups of people. Understanding public space means grappling with the messy and perhaps ugly pluralism that constitutes urban life, rather than unwittingly confirming normative and institutional ideals about a ‘good’ (and, especially in the case of Naples, ‘well-behaved’) city.
