Feminists Performing the Collective Trauma

Abstract

<p>A visiting group of Finnish feminists have just presented their activist project to an audience of about 60 in St Petersburg. After the presentation, a woman in her forties stands up to ask, in Russian, how the group could admit men to feminism, ‘since it is supposed to function as a shelter for women’. This question, posed in a tone of clear concern, haunted me long after my fieldwork in Russia. I had never before heard someone associate feminism with a shelter in such a direct manner. I gradually came to apprehend how vital this spatial metaphor is to understanding feminist activism in Russia, the setting for my ethnographic study. The shelter idea, I suggest, is pivotal for examining feminist activism in contemporary Russia and the root causes for the radical forms it takes, often stemming from experiences of gendered violence. The thematics scrutinised in this chapter thus resonate with the #MeToo movement and its aftermath, in which women around the world have become empowered to stand against gendered violence.<br /></p>