Lea Vajsova: ‘There is a new wave of feminism in Bulgaria’

Lea Vajsova is an assistant professor on the College of Sofia, specialising in sociology. She is eager about vital idea and social actions, and is a member of the leftist feminist collective LevFem.

Vladimir Mitev: How has the state of girls’s rights in Bulgaria developed over latest years? It appears to me that no matter occurs within the USA has a major influence on Bulgaria and who governs it.

Lea Vajsova: I are inclined to agree that American debates and political processes do have an effect on these in Europe and in Bulgaria particularly, however with some reservations. International discourse just isn’t solely American, neither is the affect so unidirectional. In the course of the tenure of former Republican president Donald Trump, varied spokespersons for conservative organisations and/or conservative political identities on this nation, which additionally look to the Republicans, actually gained extra self-confidence and for a short while have been extra current in our public area. Actually, it appears to me that that is one among their traits – assimilation of American Republican ideologies and people of the European far proper. They behave as if the realities there and in Bulgaria have been precisely the identical.

We’re witnessing a paradox: the nationalists declare that there’s a cosmopolitan elite that’s making an attempt to destroy the nation state, whereas in actuality it’s the conservative spokesmen who’re borrowing speaking factors, for instance from the US, and imposing them in an area context.

In a way, they’re behaving like globalists. That is analysed intimately by the sociologist Mila Mineva. However in fact Trump has not been the one issue.

Allow us to not overlook that the disaster in Syria swept Europe with anti-immigrant sentiment. Sadly, this legitimised the far proper, which gained a foothold in a lot of European governments. For instance, in 2016, the Bulgarian far proper launched the so-called “burqa legislation”, with which it hoped to create public discord just like that in France.

To elucidate how conservative voices turn out to be highly effective sufficient to power a debate at one second after which out of the blue turn out to be marginal on the subsequent, it’s not sufficient to have a look at who’s within the White Home. We have to suppose by way of which present international narratives are gaining momentum.

At completely different occasions, completely different points come to the fore. For instance, home violence appeared to be an even bigger difficulty a while in the past. Now it appears to be much less talked about. However are there any societal points which might be coming to the fore?

To elaborate in your commentary, I want to begin from the second when the feminist collective LevFem was born, specifically in 2018. This era was marked by debates on the ratification of the Council of Europe Conference on combating violence in opposition to ladies, the so-called Istanbul Conference. This doc was in the end rejected in Bulgaria as unconstitutional. The far proper – at the moment led by the United Patriots and the Bulgarian Socialist Social gathering within the particular person of occasion chief Kornelia Ninova – launched a marketing campaign in opposition to ladies and the LGBTQI+ neighborhood. It was this that provoked us to hitch the ladies’s social motion.

In nearly all of the manifestos of the main political events there are insurance policies aimed primarily at encouraging ladies to have youngsters. That is clearly about white, middle-class, heterosexual ladies, who’re anticipated to supply the disciplined workforce of the longer term. Fortuitously, a extra radical model of this conservatism, which could have included a ban on abortion, has not discovered its strategy to Bulgaria.

On the identical time, nonetheless, the feminist motion of our latest post-socialist historical past had prioritised the issue of home violence. The activism of girls’s NGOs in Bulgaria, analysed by Maria Ivancheva, started with the Fourth World Convention on Ladies in Beijing in 1995. They initiated the Safety from Home Violence Act (PDVA). The Nineteen Nineties noticed the emergence of the idea of “ladies’s rights” in addition to “youngsters’s rights”, conceptualised by way of home violence and human trafficking. The overall framework for work on these points is offered by the idea of human rights. Within the early 2000s, because of lobbying by ladies’s NGOs, additional legal guidelines have been handed: the Youngster Safety Act (2000), the Anti-Human Trafficking Act (2003), and the Safety from Discrimination Act (2004). However in the long run, it’s the difficulty of home violence that has been probably the most important for the feminist area in Bulgaria since 1989.

However we at LevFem have been confronted with one other downside within the ladies’s motion: there have been few clear voices talking about socio-economic inequalities from a feminist perspective, or in regards to the issues of being a lady and a caregiver.

It’s a downside as a result of, through the debate on the Istanbul Conference, we noticed the conservative insistence on the “conventional Christian household” as a metaphor which obscured a means of re-traditionalisation ensuing from the dismantling of the welfare state. The welfare state has performed (and performed earlier than 1989 in socialist Bulgaria) an essential position in reaching ladies’s emancipation and equality.

For instance, we’ve got entire feminised industries which might be completely essential – well being, schooling, social companies, and the garment trade – and the place labour is the bottom paid and dealing circumstances are poor. It’s no coincidence that the nurses’ strikes have come out of those sectors. They don’t seem to be solely combating for a rise of their wages, but in addition to criticise the subordination of healthcare to the logic of the market and to commodification.

There have been protests by moms with disabled youngsters and by social employees. Such vocations grew to become much more essential through the Covid-19 pandemic, however the recognition of their significance appears to not have gone a lot additional than applause from balconies.

Many ladies have chosen to to migrate, changing into nurses and home employees in Western European nations. We all know that Bulgaria has historically equipped Western Europe with migrant care employees. However, it’s not solely the employees in these sectors who are suffering from poor working circumstances, devaluation of their jobs and low wages. They’re additionally the residents whose entry to fundamental public items is more and more restricted. In Bulgaria, for instance, we’ve got an issue with a scarcity of locations in municipal nurseries and kindergartens in massive cities, which take up the inner migration circulate. This impacts ladies, who’ve to remain at residence to take care of their youngsters.

‘There’s a new wave of feminism in Bulgaria. Maybe this can be a constructive factor, as a result of there may be clearly a rising sense that the general public debate is regressing’

Our analysis reveals that some ladies lose their jobs, others transfer to hourly work and extra versatile work preparations the place their insurance coverage protection suffers, and others prolong their maternity depart for the second yr or go on unpaid depart for the third yr. Which means that their earnings falls and so they turn out to be depending on their companions and family. Once more, ladies come out yearly to protest about this difficulty, however principally in useless, it appears.

Given all these traits, it’s maybe not shocking that many new organisations have emerged since 2018, together with us. From a survey I carried out amongst them, it’s clear that there’s a new wave of feminism in Bulgaria. Maybe this can be a constructive factor, as a result of there may be clearly a rising sense that the general public debate is regressing and we have to suppose extra purposefully about how one can counter it.

What are the struggles of the ladies’s motion? 

There are already severe efforts afoot to higher perceive the actual scenario of Bulgarian ladies. Certainly, this is without doubt one of the strands of girls’s activism in Bulgaria that’s positive to go on creating. The nurses proceed to protest and have obtained invaluable help in Dobrich from the leftist Varna collective Battle. Stanimira Hadzhimitova’s Centre for Sustainable Communities, in partnership with Italian colleagues, and Valentina Vasilonova of KNSB (Confederation of Unbiased Commerce Unions of Bulgaria), are collectively engaged on the problem of exploitation of feminine Bulgarian migrants within the Italian farm sector.

LevFem can be making systematic efforts to ascertain cooperation with commerce unions. After the rejection of the Istanbul Conference, ladies’s activism turned to lobbying for an modification to the legislation in opposition to home violence. Nevertheless, after years of effort, the brand new legislation was in the end rejected within the Nationwide Meeting. In a way, the legislation was held hostage to electoral politics, and now the organisations are again to sq. one. However probably the most disturbing assertion was made in early 2023 by the coalition BSP for Bulgaria (BSP) at a congress: it dedicated itself to holding a referendum in opposition to “gender ideology in colleges”.

Since we’re speaking about political events, it needs to be talked about that ladies in political events have additionally been marginalised following the Istanbul Conference. We’re witnessing a severe decline within the illustration of girls in politics. There are additionally a lot of new grassroots initiatives. For instance, the feminist autonomous area Kopriva, which goals to create a spot of security and neighborhood, and the Feminist Library. The casual collective round Feminist Mobilisations, then again, has devoted itself to the 8 March and 25 November protests. These dates are important within the battle for girls’s rights in Bulgaria.

Two years in the past, there was a tragedy with a schoolgirl who was burned with acid. It was an especially brutal crime. There adopted a sequence of protests below the slogan “Ni una menos” – “Not one [woman] much less”. All around the world, organisations adopted this slogan throughout protests. In Bulgaria, one other slogan was “You aren’t alone”. The place are these actions going?

There may be a casual activist group on Fb referred to as “You aren’t alone”, the place ladies who’ve skilled home violence can help one another. On the finish of 2018, one other girl was brutally murdered in Ruse. When information of her homicide broke, there have been protests in Sofia and elsewhere.

Discussions began about whether or not we must always declare a Bulgarian #metoo motion, and thus add to the demonstrations deliberate for 25 November – the Worldwide Day for the Elimination of Violence in opposition to Ladies. However we didn’t need this motion to be a carbon copy of the American one. On the very least, if we referred to as it that, there was a threat that journalists would impose a linguistic framework on us that had no relevance to what was occurring in Bulgaria on the time. We determined to name it “You aren’t alone”, and launched hashtags #НеСиСама and #NeSiSama (“You are not alone”), which rapidly grew to become in style and helped the protest on 25 November. Particularly, LevFem collected statements from ladies speaking in regards to the inequality they skilled, and printed them. Curiosity was substantial. Hundreds of individuals learn them and shared them. In the long run, we collected all of them in a ebook.

However at the moment I would not say that we considered this motion as worldwide, despite the fact that we drew energy from the worldwide context. We did not have the energy to coordinate with different organisations from different locations in a purely sensible method. Nevertheless, for the reason that starting of the pandemic, LevFem has been constructing a community referred to as Important Autonomous Struggles Transnational (EAST), which brings collectively commerce unions, ladies’s and LGBTQI+ casual activist collectives and organisations. Nice efforts have been made on this course by Kalina Drenska, Maria Ivancheva, Stoyo Tetevenski, Neli Konstantinova and Stoyanka Eneva.

For us, internationalism, particularly in Jap Europe and in post-socialist nations, is an important line of labor. On the one hand, there isn’t a doubt that completely different nations have related tendencies and it is very important work along with neighbours. However, as I discussed earlier, a big a part of the care labour market is equipped by ladies migrating from the East to the West, and it’s important that we’re a part of the worldwide ladies’s social motion wherein migrant home employees and carers have a significant position.

The impetus for this motion inside the European Union undoubtedly got here from the previous MEP and commerce unionist Kostadinka Kuneva, and Conference 189 on home work is a very essential doc. Kuneva was additionally our particular visitor on the transnational assembly organised by LevFem in Sofia in September 2022, which was attended by over 150 activists from many nations.

Are you able to inform me a bit extra about LGBTQI+ activism in Bulgaria?

The historical past of the LGBTQI+ motion earlier than and after 1989 is simply starting to be written. However we will say {that a} pivotal second was when the primary Sofia Pleasure marched via the streets of Sofia in 2008 below the slogan “Me and my household”. It was surrounded by police cordons and attacked with projectiles and Molotov cocktails.

The work of attorneys additionally stands out. So far, LGBTQI+ organisations proceed to battle for an addition to Article 162 of the Penal Code on hate crimes dedicated on the premise of sexual orientation, gender identification and gender expression. They’re calling for complaints and grievances to be filed when an incident happens. The problem has turn out to be extraordinarily topical because of the day by day violence in opposition to the LGBTI+ neighborhood following the talk on the Istanbul Conference. These organisations additionally focus their efforts on the rights of same-sex {couples}, pushing for the authorized recognition of same-sex cohabiting relationships. Attorneys are additionally taking over the instances of transgender individuals who need to have the ability to change the intercourse on their identification paperwork to match their gender identification. They’re pushing for the alignment of Bulgarian laws with that of the EU.

However what is particular to LGBTQI+ activism, versus ladies’s activism, is the sustained effort that goes into neighborhood constructing. A key position in that is performed by the Rainbow Hub neighborhood centre, from which grassroots youth teams emerge. Such communities have additionally fashioned across the anarchist social centre Autonomy Manufacturing facility/Fabrika Avtonomia. One other particular function of younger activists is that almost all of them outline themselves as being on the “left” and suppose in an intersectional perspective, versus these from the Nineteen Nineties who had extra liberal attitudes and an anti-communist identification. This distinction has been analysed by sociologist Shaban Darakchi. The tendency for LGBTQI+ activism to be extra grassroots-based than ladies’s activism can be seen as a consequence of the dearth of a celebration dedicated to defending LGBTQI+ rights.

Lastly, let’s discuss in regards to the hyperlinks between LGBTQI+ teams and feminist ones. What impresses you on this respect in Bulgaria?

Ladies’s activism and LGBTQI+ activism have, for probably the most half, been parallel. A turning level on this respect was the debates across the Istanbul Conference, when ladies discovered themselves on the identical terrain as LGBTQI+ activists. Nevertheless, this example just isn’t typical of the Bulgarian scene, as a number of the older feminists of the Nineteen Nineties clearly distinguished themselves from LGBTQI+ activists and didn’t recognise the trigger as their very own. Actually, they claimed that it was dangerous!

It isn’t clear whether or not and to what extent LGBTQI+ neighborhood representatives additionally see ladies’s points as their very own. However it is just for the reason that Istanbul Conference that there was a larger want to have a look at intersectionality. Though there’s a will to unite, we undoubtedly want to contemplate the factors of divergence and equivalence between what have traditionally been completely different types of activism.

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