The Intellectual History of Romanian Feminism from Early Transition to Democratic Deconsolidation and Illiberalism

Abstract

My analytical study aims at mapping feminist ideas in their temporal and political context, following a series of fundamental landmarks focusing on the aftermath of the economic crisis of 2008–2010 when the anti-austerity mobilizations led to a general socio-economic critique. My assumption is that year 2015 and the refugee crisis marked a repositioning of feminism at the European level and, in the particular case of the Romanian one, an additional opening towards social inequalities, poverty/feminization of poverty, class, and ethnicity.

In this paper, in addition to clarifying the methodological perspective, I analyse what I call the second ‘foundational’ period of Romanian feminism – between 2018 and present. It is a redivivus – the second ‘foundational’ period of feminism in relation with the tendencies of democratic deconsolidation in Central and Eastern European as well as with the imperative of facing the political insurgency of illiberalism. In this new political context, which had as its decisive moment the constitutional referendum of 2018 regarding same-sex marriages, Romanian feminism preserved its diversity built in the previous period but was forced to consolidate itself, becoming, thus, one of the most assertive oppositional paradigms to illiberalism and democratic backsliding. My assumption is that, departing from the traditional Stein Rokkan’s taxonomy of political cleavages, we have entered a new phase: the cleavage between different democratization strategies (Buttorf and Dion, 2017: 102).