CITY OF WOMEN 2014

the international festival of contemporary arts in lubljana

or how to do things with feminism

I. INTRODUCTION
this year city of women was celebrating 20 th anniversary. for a week lubljana became a real city of women. quoting mara
vujic, the artistic director of this edition, the festival: has significantly contributed that the equality of women in art and
society in general, as well as different feminist theories and practices have become and still remain, relevant premises
for social discourse. what brought me to lubljana an urgency! i deal with the f word since more than two years, having
many contradictory relations to it. from the beginning i knew i will not be interested in analysis of particular performances.
i put myself a task to look not only via close ups but first and foremost at the whole event as a feminist proposition, what
does this feminism can do.
i ended up thinking and rethinking my own own practice-based research inviting all my materials, associations,
narratives, methodologies to dance.

i came to lubljana with all my critical apparatus. what I mean here with criticality are the irit rogoff's words that criticality
is a recognition that we may be fully armed with theoretical knowledge, we may be capable of the most sophisticated
modes of analysis but we nevertheless are also living out the very conditions we are trying to analyse and come to terms
with. therefore, criticality, is a state of duality in which one is at one and the same time, both empowered and
disempowered, knowing and unknowing. () so it would seem that criticality is in itself a mode of embodiment, a state
from which one cannot exit or gain a critical distance but which rather marries our knowledge and our experience in ways
that are not complimentary. unlike wisdom in which we supposedly learn from our experience, criticality is a state of
profound frustration in which the knowledge and insights we have amassed do very little to alleviate the conditions we
live through. so, you might well ask, what is the point then? well, I would answer, the point of any form of critical,
theoretical activity was never resolution but rather heightened awareness and the point of criticality is not to find an
answer but rather to access a different mode of inhabitation. with this profound frustarion i arrived at the airport of
lubljana.
festival city of women was a definitely feminist festival, where all the works there presented we can name feminist
without any objections. performances that especially brought my attention were the once by bryony kimmings, alexis
o'hara, leja jurisic & teja reba, ursula martinez. all these performances were dealing with so called women's subject or
larger: gender subject as well as women's problematics. none of these projects was dramatic, pathetic, heavy, full of
tears, sad, serious, tragic, full of blood, full of menstrual blood, loud, hysteric, tremulous, repressed, romantic, anegdotic,
long, too long, obviously too long - which all those mentioned as many other components are generally inscribed into a
domain of women's work, building inevitable part of a definition of what is assumed as a women's art. because how can
woman have a sense of humour if she needs to survive within this men's world.
that week in lubljana brought me once again to the questions about gender/s ( these wanted and unwanted ), feminism

and feminist work, especially feminism in dance and choreography since this is my modus operandi. why these words
are still so problematic. why there is still a need to underline the binary women's art - men's art. i find i can't even have
this conversation about equality in the art world because so many people think it's already been achieved...has it?
i would like here to make a space to think through these few issues, as well as ask following questions: is there a
difference between woman artist and man artist? do we need ( and if yes, then why ) festival for women's art?
lets start this story from the beginning. once upon a time...

II. GENDER TROUBLE

once upon a time...gender appeared. gender. the magic word that brought many discourses to the ground. gender. a
space that regulates identity, desire and, especially power. to possess gender is to enter into heterosexual
relationships subordination. to be possessed by gender is to be assigned to heterosexual relationships subordination.
first and foremost, gender represents itself as a binary. a binary is a space that contains only two elements ( ! ). these
elements are equal ( ! ) and opposite to each other in every aspect. and they are the only two choices in that universe
( ! ). in gender, the binary is male or female, in other words: man-and-woman, boy-and-girl, crone-and-curmudgeon,
lady-and-gentelman, cinderella-and-prince of charming, the pill-and-viagra, romance-and-horror movies, cooking-andgastronomy, breast cancer-and-prostate cancer, small hands-and-dirty hands, love before sex-and-sex for the sexs
sake, not knowing much or knowing a lot but not being able to say it-and-encyclopedic knowledge, not making any
noise-and-knowing how to raise your voice, being left by your partner for a younger woman-and-leaving your partner for
a younger woman, letting yourself be fucked in the ass when its needed-and-the desire and fear to get fucked in the
ass, gossips-and-the big narratives....the binary is clean like a rain water in the spring pond with a whole family of
ducklings swimming and quacking in yellow quack quack quack. the binary elements are equal. really? is there
anywhere the world where men and women are equal and opposite in all three spaces of identity, desire and power?
really, can you name me a town where thats the way life is.... where is the town where the small particular problems are
equal to the universal ones and where the manicure is equal to callused hands.

everything what is masculine is not masculine, but universal. everything what is feminine is feminine or is nowhere.

not only that gender is a binary, it is a cultural construct, defining the boundaries of imaginary meanings and creating
phantasmatic body. this phantasmatic body is compared to something that is real - a different set of fantasy. the
boundaries of what is real, are produced in the framework of the natural heterosexuality, where the physical facts
serve for the cause ( no none! one here does not appreciate a huge variability of human anatomies ), and desires are a
reflection of the inexorable effects of that physicality.
the two heterosexual laws: gender is real and gender is an equal binary, had regulated, still regulates social power
relations. feminism was one of the movements fighting against gender inequality ( even though in 60-ties the category
was still not in use, one could speak about social roles ). when during 90-ties the queer discourse manifests itself,

homosexuality started to fight for their identities, trying to reject the omnipresent perfect gender. a perfect gender, this
powerful oppressive force: women call it MAN, homosexual and bisexual call it STRAIGHT, transgender call it
CISGENDER. and in this perfect gender there are white men and black men, and because of the racial component,
these are seen and treated by the dominant culture as two different and unequal genders. a rich woman who owns
everything, a poor woman who works three job these are different unequal and natural genders in our society.

i am going to rethink my thinking how can i deal with the gender problems. i will try not to put myself in the victim position
that i used to do in uncomfortable situations and only because in western society i am perceived as a woman category
and as this category i can and i cannot take some positions ( explicitly speaking ). am i a woman? totally, definitely,
endlessly? being completely honest - i am not. i am not a woman. that is my secret that you know now. i am not a
woman and i am not a man, and i am a part of gender binarism. that is why i am a woman ( sometimes i want that so
much and who does not want to... ) but i am not a woman and i am a woman. and surely i am a woman also because it
is nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it is only a matter of speaking. what i can
say about myself i am transgressing gender. i think anyone who wants to question or study gender is transgressing
gender. i think anyone who has either the desire or the courage to own their transgressions against gender is
transgender. i am transgressing gender and i am transgendering myself but only some days in a week. my eagerness is
not to put a blame on anybody and definitely not to blame men it is not their fault to be socialized in a different way
( different towards who? ), it is not their fault they were taught to laugh at good-natured jokes ( little smile with a mischief
on the lips and how can i claim not to be a woman. but that is just me...lets talk about you, baby...! ).
following judith butler and assuming gender as being performative, in this sense of understanding - a gender is not a

noun as well as not a series of free-floating attributes, because substantial effect of gender is produced performatively.
therefore - using the legacy handed down to us in the discourse of metaphysics substances one can say this: gender
turns out performative - that is, constituting the identity in the sense that "gender is always activity but not activity of the
subject, which would precedes her/his act. if you take the attempt of framing gender, exiting beyond the metaphysics of
substance, you have to take into account nietzsche's thesis the wording in "the genealogy of morality": "there is no
existence outside-doing, action, becoming; do-er is just a fabrication added to deal doing is everything". nietzsche
could not predict of course such use of his thoughts, and he would never forgive us. we can tell the following: behind the
expressions of gender lies not gender identity, identity is performativity by only "expressions", which are supposedly its
result.
by constructing gender as -ING action and speaking forth of myself not as an "i" but "i am doing" with the accent on
doing, certainly it changes the perception of gender ( and hopefully a gender binarism ) as well as the idea of subject.

judith butler, already in the 90s doubted whether feminism has still the need to construct the subject of feminism
appearance. from the viewpoint of feminist political practice it seems necessary to consider a new approach to
ontological constructs of identity - to find such formulas of politics of representation, which would reinvigorate feminism,
built on other grounds to which extend women's category owes its stability and cohesion within the heterosexual matrix.
if a stable notion of gender ceases to be a fundamental premise of feminist politics, it can to undermine the cultural
reification of gender and identity, the need for a new kind of feminist politics: its methodological and normative starting
point - if not political goal - would then be variable construction of identity.
this is a departure from the humanist concept of entity based primarily on the assumption that there is a substantial
person, which has a number of relevant and irrelevant attributes. foucault, writing diaries of herkulina barbin, considering
that gender links together the functions and meaning of the body that doesnt need to or even shouldnt be linked, comes
to the conclusion that the disappearance of "sex/gender" would entail positive effects of dispersion of these different
functions, meanings, tools, somatic and physiological processes, and also multiply the pleasures, which will come out
beyond the framework set by gender intelligibility considered unambiguous and remaining in a binary relation. the
physical pleasures will not be automatically relate to "gender" as their first cause and ultimate meaning. this would be a
world, in which "smiles wander without a cat".

III. FEMALE TROUBLE

but thinking about all these theories, here cats wander without a smile. i can claim many different strategies about
gender but that doesn't change the fact that the gender that i am performing and the one that is put upon me by the
society i live in, touches me large amount of time. when i walk on the streets and i hear all the exciting whistles and
sophisticated invectives directed towards me that makes me feel extremely attractive and sexy. but if i do not want to be
sexy, can i really escape any classification. staying only at the level of binary woman man, we can simply see how in
arts it is still a present issue. looking at the situation in dance and choreography, the field that i am operating within, i
would like to share some guerrilla's observations. however before that, an assurance: when i use here a word man, i

am talking especially about white heterosexual man and his position in the society, though as i mentioned before, this
binary woman man opens huge problematic. i don't want here to be an ignorant towards homophobia as well as racism
and other discriminations in society. i am aware that the situation of singular is much more complex that what am i
proposing here. since the society and thus our thinking are mostly executed by the binarism, i would like to approximate
several points at issue:
1. there are always only few men in the artistic study programmes ( there are more or less 85% to 95% of women ). all
these future choreographers graduate with very good marks and promises on their faces. here comes the paradox.
when we look at the percentage of choreographers being a part of festivals, residencies, grants, this imbalance shifts to
the other side. as an example lets look at the big berliner festival tanz im august: 2014 18 men, 13 female
choreographers, in 2013 19 men, 6 women, in 2012 29 men, 14 female, festival impuls tanz vienna 2014: 23 men,
17 women. why there is less women with so called big names in the scene since there were more women during the
study program? do the women make worse work? why there is this flip?
without a very sophisticated mathematic knowledge, one can easily notice that if there are only two places in the
residency space and one goes to the man, one goes to the woman, keeping in mind the gender percentage of
graduated, this situation still doesn't give us a result of 50/50. just to mention: the latest news regarding a berliner grant
for early birds, einstiegsfrderung has been given to three people from choreography: two men and only one woman.
what kind of mathematic law should i apply here? are we talking again about the phenomenon: men got more help
structurally, economically, women are more educated with the sit in the kitchen and be quiet? i hope not.

2. how is it actually happening that there are more women studying in the department of dance and choreography.
maybe it is good to look also at the early education when the girls receiving from their parents carnival costumes plus a
desire to be a ballerina or a princess. is dance a woman? it seems like. women are still developing an idea to be
ephemeral and so their dance is classified this way. thus it does not need financial support its destiny is to vanish.
ephemeral, fragile, full of grace lady vanishes...and whose parent does not want to see their little girl in the role of a
swan!
3. if at the end there is happening a boy during the audition to the department of dance and choreography, that has to be
the one! have you ever seen the whole year without at least one boy? obviously schools want diversity and what kind of
diversity proposes a group made out of women? one of the major residency in germany - k3 every year chooses three
amazing choreographers who are at the beginning of their so called professional careers. remembering the percentage
from the choreography departments it should be more than obvious that many time k3 chooses three women. looking at
the last six years, that only happened in 2011 but immediately this imbalance was aligned in 2012 when 2 boys were
chosen instead. just recently i heard another juicy example a new, fancy educational programme in berlin called smash
was so desperately searching for boys that it was even awarding them with scholarships! and the oscar goes to penis
ownership!
i wouldn't choose only girls. they are all the same! having the same tits, the same pussies, the same ideas, the same
aesthetics. i think that educational programmes should allow boys study for free or at least for half price. for the diversity
has its price.

4. since there are not so many male performers, they have bigger easiness to get the job in the artistic projects ( how
many call have i seen: we are looking for male dancers/performers, haven't you? ) because who wants to make another

dance performance only with female performers screaming hysterical vaginas. as a man, you just get it! again choreography demands variety. what kind of variety can we achieve only with women on the stage.
i am not saying that men are responsible for all evil that happens in this field. i am not pointing out all these things only to
spread the feeling of frustration. i am not demanding to flip the status quo making women living happy forever and after. i
believe we need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny
meaning and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have chance for the future. instead of confirming
status quo we should claim new practices and new way of doing things.

IV. FEMINIST TROUBLE

feminism.
feminism is obviously difficult to define on account of the many different kinds of perspectives that were developed till
today. it is admittedly a vibrant tradition that has contributed to intellectual, cultural enrichment,
and social transformation in all regions of the world for at least centuries. now and again feminism is defined as a
network of actions designed to eliminate women's economic, political, social subordination to men and claims its domain
within the dichotomy of two identity categories: category of a woman and category of a man. that perspective led
feminism to become an identity category in itself. it is very important for me to underline this is not my standpoint. i find
inescapable danger in formulating feminism that way. a fixed point, a label does not allow feminism to be an action, a
movement. thus i would like to bring two modes that i am going to proceed in this text proposition:
first i do not want to concentrate on feminism but on feminisms instead. i do not claim one definition of feminism. i
stand for multiplicity of feminisms that can problematise and put in a state of crisis, well-established discourses, pointing
out limitations, significant omissions.
second - i insist on understanding feminisms as actions, feminisms as verbs, verbing to the thing. i am not feminist, i
make feminist practices, i am feminisizing ( the word that does not exist in english, as well as in polish, my native
language ) the artistic practices. i am feminisizing what can be and cannot be feminisized.
i like to see feminisms as procedures. they operate differently in different contexts ( where they become different
operations ) and remain substantial even when abstracted from the operations. as operations where they define how a
procedure is implemented ( with what technique, what purpose, effects ) in a particular ( concrete, historical ) situation.
feminisms are everything but identity categories.

what are feminisms then if they seem to be everything and for whom i already impaired almost all philosophical
apparatuses? are they only another critical discourse? what are the differences between feminisms and other -isms?
feminisms can follow the same problematics that other -isms address, with this significant difference that feminisms are
putting attention to the gender subject. feminisms say that we just cannot be simply naive to forget the gender issues
and even if we want to detach from them, first we have to question these issues, to be aware of them. feminisms

emancipate from gender through awareness of gender issues. feminisms are asking for us how can we operate within
gender, what is exactly status quo and how can we change it. feminisms are not about flipping power relations ( now we
- women in power ) but make the hole in the status quo, breaking the limitations of binarisms, putting into trouble every
position, using gender to critically analyse power. feminisms are revealing the absurdity of the law of the father the
universal, well known truth. some of the western cultural narratives are based on the objectivity the only possible
subject, the finally only one equation. that is a deadly fantasy that feminists and others have identified in some versions
of objectivity doctrines in the service of hierarchical and orderings of what can count as truth. the only position from
which objectivity could not possibly be practiced is the standpoint of the master, the man, the one god, whose eyes
produce, appropriates and order all differences. following the idea of donna haraway feminist objectivity is about limited
location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. in this way we might
become answerable for what we learn how to see and how to act upon.

feminist choreographies.
the status of the feminism within the western art discourses has largely been defined in the domain of visual arts and
performance arts yet has predominantly been one of absent in choreographic discourse. the past ten years have seen a
re-emergence of the need to think about and conceptualise the arts in general and dance in particular in terms of the
political but barely using the feminist tools, as well as practicing and discussing the contemporary feminism within
contemporary choreography. to pose a question on feminism in choreography - in my opinion a missing point in
contemporary discourse around dance and choreography is to propose some possible ways of thinking through this
question.
both the feminist and the choreography parts of this phrase are complex and may have different meanings.
nevertheless, the phrase itself is one which best sums up my concern first and foremost with an analysis which identifies
itself as feminist and which uses choreographic strategies to examine work. feminist choreography aims to draw
attention and concerns. relating choreography to feminisms can take various forms. to make a simple distinction
between "feminist choreography" and "the feminisms of choreography" - whereas the term "feminist choreography" came
to denote dance that speak about political issues on the level of content, "the feminisms of choreography", on the other
hand, deals with issues of form, methodologies, operations, procedures. "the feminisms of choreography" displays
dance's self-reflexive potential to expose and talks about its own mechanisms and means of production and reception,
thereby subverting traditional ways of how dance is produced and received. through this distinction, we can say that
"feminist choreography" ( understood as feminist choreography, as well as the feminisms of choreography ) questions its
relations to the institutions inside which it takes place with the gender awareness. it reflects upon the roles of
choreographers, dancers, bodies, audiences, and producers and their traditionally hierarchical relationship towards each
other. In short, "feminist choreography" is engaged in the practice of criticality starting from the speaking subject with
gender awareness. it is important to remember that the terms feminist and woman are not synonymous. it this sense
feminist choreography doesn't need to talk about women in the sense of content. feminist choreography is not a woman
with a broken heart dancing towards lyrical music.
if feminisms are not knowledges, but practical methodologies, to make them happen, they must be practiced. thus from

the question of what are feminist choreographies i need to ask what feminist choreographies can do while practicing
their procedures. instead of limiting the project about who we are as women, who we are as men i would rather put the
accent on what we want to do, what we can do and how we can deal with this binarisms within the artistic process, in the
production system and later in the artistic product.

feminist practices.
i connect practices to voices, and hence to the bodies that move and act. these are the ways of engaging in strict
analysis and offer many models of strategically operating within the world. through practices i constantly gain the
position that i can constantly redefine and problematise. practices exist collectively and singularly and are constantly with
instances and ideas that i encounter. they are the moments of articulation that are still in process that without a
conclusion can give the space to heterogenous approaches, opinions, positions. to share them is to talk within them than
talk about them. their function is to keep the clear analysis with a conscious incompleteness, to work far from pretending
to be comprehensive and to admit own partialities, in the same time refusing any claims of omnipotence or universal
position. of course the inevitable exclusions in the particular feminist practices are too many to name. the choices are
marked by own particular positions. but they allow for constant redefinition of this particular position that can be
constantly problematise. these are the moments of articulation and these moments are still in process. i bring my
practices here in the text, i bring them here as a text, keeping in mind - there is never a final text.

bodies.
the artistic choreographic practices are still facing the major division between the physical practice of the body and the
discursive practice of working with concepts. that is the way how the particular choreographies are defined and how the
body functions within them. body for me is both the subject area and the research method, which allows to combine
these areas. if we allow the body activity to prove its meaning if we give it something more than organized tank of props,
then it will be able to embody a new dimension of body action. perceive the body as capable of begetting ideas, perceive
it as physical writing means perceive it as does the choreographer.
dance, perhaps more wide than other actions focused on the body, develops bodies, which both initiate and respond.
dance in this sense becomes a form of theorizing, which informs and is informed by the examples of the relevance of the
body. may the theory to terminate the definitions of the body in isolation from the medium through which it expresses
itself?

V. THE END
how to finish the text if the problematics are not solved...goddess forbid! there must be continuation. i am sure that i
missed so many important points, how many positions did i exclude, how much did i stay on the level of binarism and
how i didn't allow my thinking to find new spaces. of course there is a good reason to believe that position from below of

the powerful ( which i could claim here for myself ) is better to see the power structures more clearer but we should not
forget that the positioning of the subjegated are not exempt from critical re-examination, decoding, interpretation. that is
my learning process how to practice criticality for recognizing my own semiotic technologies for making meanings,
reflective relation to my own as well as others' practices of domination and the unequal parts of privilege and oppression
that make up all positions. that is why, through practicing my feminisms I should rewrite this text again and again,
reconstructing and rethinking the technology of gender by pluralising and opening up the term man and woman, by
opening other terms, not necessary the once mentioned above. there is no way to be simultaneously in all privileged
and subjegated positions ( and i still didn't use essentialized third world woman ). thus self-identity standing alone is a
bad critical system. one cannot be either a cell or molecule, or a woman, colonized person, labourer, and so on if one
intends to see and see from these positions critically. being is much more problematic and contingent.
coming back to the question: do we need women's art festivals ( for i believe that i did answer the question about male
and female artist )? my answer is : yes, we do need them but the festivals that propose certain clear politics, certain
awareness that are not addressing only women but also men. in my view, the position that men cannot be feminists is
based on the same male-female dichotomy that underlies patriarchy. if we want to detach from that, we need to first
understand how these both sides functions in everyday power relations and thus practice within them what can we do
about them, how can we try to go beyond them. i believe that city of women is a great example for women's festival and
feminist practice. i am waiting for more.
by agata agata agata*
*agata agata agata would like to thank mara and a festival city of women for invitation, joanna and georg as well as leja
jurisic and teja reba from identity!move a platform for practical research - for make the travel to lubljana easily happen.