This year, for the fourth time, Women's Space organized Feminist Summer School which was held from July 17th through 22nd in Kladovo, East Serbia. The goal of this event was to support young women empowerment and provide education through different topics of the feminist movement. Special attention was paid to patriarchate deconstruction and its mechanisms used to preserve domination and status quo. Moreover, we discussed violence against women as the most explicit and dominant form of this power demonstration.
With about fifty participants, volunteers, facilitators and organizers, this was the largest school until now where we jointly discussed topics of: patriarchate in our lives and possible resistance, feminist approach to violence, personal feminist issues regarding discrimination against women, short history of feminist movement, practical feminism through workshops of body and voice empowerment and self-defense for women, and emotional literacy. We offered presentation of feminist alternatives through giving space to newly founded grass root group "Amazons" represented by Ana Panday and Zorica Spasojević; discussing neo-liberal capitalism and its influence to global female population; created discussion groups on women position in using and creating new technologies, but also talked about and criticized the treatment of women within different traditions and cultures.
Two very important topics within our country feminist movement: existence of women of different sexual orientation than heterosexual and the position of Roma women provoked participants' interest.
This year's workshops facilitators were long term women movement activists in Serbia: Lepa Mlađenović, Sunčica Vučaj, Tatjana Nikolić, Katarina Lončarević, Tijana Popivoda, Vera Kurtić, Zoe Gudović, Biljana Stanković Lori, Milica Gudović, as well as Enisa Eminovska from Macedonia, activist and leader of many years within the European Roma women movement.
The last day of this school was dedicated to possibilities of networking and self-organizing of young women and it was done through the presentation "Conquering Liberty: Young women and feminism" organized and implemented by volunteers, participants from previous feminist summer schools: Aleksandra Demirović, Tamara Mitić, Jelena Vučić i Vesna Savić.
Volunteers also organized a field trip for us - cruising the Danube river where most of the women took part whereas at the same time there was the possibility to practice yoga for two hours for the reminder of the group.
Feminist Summer School, the same as previous years, provoked great interest and once again confirms that such activities are very needed and invaluable to empower both individual women but also the Serbian feminist movement.
Energy, smiles, positive commentaries and strong embraces we have received from the participants, empower us additionally and reassure us in our efforts to continue working on organizing similar events.
