Lefteast
Note from LeftEast editors: This article originally appeared in Romanian in The Political Art Gazette and we publish it as part of the collaboration in the ELMO – Eastern European Left Media Outlet network. On March 8th, 2022, responding to the invitation of Meduza Kolektiv and Rhythms of Resistance Cluj, the radical housing justice movement […]
“In the Women’s Conference we are trying to get something which is new in the history of the world; we are trying to formulate a body of doctrine with regard to women’s problems seen through the eyes of the women themselves.”
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Significantly, the emphasis on deep differences within Europe as well as the greater visibility of participants from countries not belonging to the Western and Central European (social democratic) core visibly shaped the final stances adopted at the 1931 Conference.
Ida Sabo (Szabó Ida) was born in Pécs in 1915 from a Vojvodina Hungarian mother. She grew up in Subotica where in 1939 she became a member of the Yugoslavian Communist Party. During World War II she moved to Ljubljana and joined the Slovene Partisans. After the war she held several high-ranking offices, i.e., she was a […]
Note from LeftEast editors: the bilingual volume “Essential struggles: pandemic fronts” was published in 2021 as a result of the E.A.S.T. network collaboration during the pandemic, whose webinars and texts on social reproduction, housing and care work we featured on our website. The volume was edited by the LevFem collective members Stoyo Teteventski, Mariya Ivancheva, […]
Note from LeftEast Editors: This article was originally published in Russian by the DOXA Journal. It was translated from the Russian by Michael Baker and edited by Arina Gundyreva. Today, queer people in Russia are forced to oppose systematic discrimination, occasionally even forcing them into emigration. In the USSR however, with closed borders and absolutely […]
To offer our readers an inside look at contemporary Afghanistan, we have conducted an interview with Ali Abdi, a researcher who has been living there since 2015 and working with a queer community in Kabul. The Taliban’s speedy takeover of Kabul last week surprised many political observers. Yet, this is exactly what many in Afghanistan […]
The EU recovery plan is reinforcing an idea of welfare and economic reconstruction which reproduces patriarchal and racist hierarchies and exploitation, while some EU member states like Italy and Greece are already promoting measures – like divorce regulations and child allowances laws – that materially make Istanbul Convention void of any meaning. But women have not been silent in these months and are organizing their counterattack. During the last E.A.S.T. public assembly we started to discuss the multifaceted dimensions of these patriarchal attacks and the struggles we can build together towards a big transnational mobilization. This interview with Kalina Drenska, member of E.A.S.T. and LevFem (Bulgaria) is the first of a series of texts that wants to start from Istanbul Convention to explore ongoing fights against violence against women and lgbtqi+ people, in their connections with the struggles against racist and exploitative policies. Kalina talks about the stratified political meanings attributed in Bulgaria to Istanbul Convention and shows the links between attacks on women and lgbtqi+ people and the policies of cutbacks that lead many women to find better living and working conditions abroad. Furthermore, she unveils the hard pathways that feminist struggles must take – in Bulgaria and beyond – to overturn isolation and accumulate power on the transnational level.
Note from LeftEast editors: We share this podcast with the permission of its producers from Contrasens. “Contrasens” is a podcast which explores current themes in the field of the social sciences. The project aims to bring to the forefront and make as accessible as possible research conducted by sociologists, anthropologists and other specialists from related fields. […]
This text was originally published on the Transnational Social Strike Platform website. There is also a Turkish, a Polish and an Italian translation available. Authors’ note: On April 11th, EAST members, women and LGBTQIA+ people from Turkey, Poland, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, […], drawing from Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, gathered together in a […]
Note from LeftEast editors. The article is a reprint: it originally appeared at JewishCurrent on April 1 2021. Translated from Polish by Sean Gasper Bye. ON MARCH 8TH, 2021, International Women’s Day, I drew a lightning bolt on my mask in red lipstick, put a thermos in my backpack, and went out […]