The production of emancipatory feminist spaces in a post-socialist context: organization of Ladyfest in Romania

Abstract

Ladyfest – a Riot Grrrl feminist do-it-yourself festival – has been organized independently in cities around the world since the year 2000. The emancipatory spaces that activists at Ladyfest seek to cultivate through workshops, music, and art provide seeds of inspiration for transformative social change. The main strength of the festival is the capacity to strengthen networks. This article discusses how the idea for this festival arose in Olympia, Washington, expanded to other locations, and was later organized by young feminists in Romania. In 2005, young women in Timisoara organized the first such festival in their city with a community of women from both inside and outside of Romania, and held another festival in Bucharest in 2007. Retrospective interviews are used to unpack the meaning of such organizing in a post-socialist context with reflections on how feminism has changed in Romania over the past decade. Specifically, the analysis of this event offers insight on how the production of space can be used to catalyze interconnections between emancipatory feminist spaces, the mode of production, and flows of feminist knowledge and concepts.

Keywords:

• Romania
• feminism
• spatial theory
• Riot Grrrl’ activism
• social change

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all the women involved in organizing the festivals and especially to Sandra Vilcu, Bori Kovacs, and Ruxandra Costescu. As the first author had volunteered to procure film donations for Ladyfest, Romania, it sparked a series of linked events that led to the first Davis Feminist Film Festival that she co-founded with Danielle Fodor in 2005 as a fundraiser for international feminist internships through the Gender and Global Issues Program at the University of California, Davis (UCD). This film festival is now an on-going annual event organized through the UCD Women’s Resources and Research Center. This further shows how grassroots activism can spread between diverse spaces.

The writing of this paper was set in motion at UCD with the support and enthusiasm of Margaret Byrne Swain, Janet Henshall Momsen, Debbie Elliott-Fisk, and Carol Smith. Thanks to Michelle Yates, Renata Blumburg, Margaret Cronin, and Sonny Nordmarken for input on earlier drafts to help steer it towards maturation. Thanks to Mark Bilbrey for language editing. From the No Borders Conference where this was presented at Pennsylvania State University, thanks to Lorraine Dowler for feedback as discussant. And finally, thanks to the three anonymous reviewers as well as GPC editor Pamela Moss for their insights to further strengthen this article.