FEMINISM, ANARCHISM AND HETEROTOPIC SPACES OF WOMEN

Abstract

This paper examines the anarhist concept of democracy and perspectives of applying Foucault ‘s notion of heterotopia to radical anarcho – feminist practices and tactics of subversive change in society. The text deals with the issuses of invisibilty of women’s voices in the political arena, puts forward the importance of hidden political processes (competition, persuasion, networking, protection of interests) in political life, at the moment when they happen, but also later, when collective memories are stored in society and official history is written. Anarcho-feminist movements, which is the subject of the paper, emphasises the connections between feminism the workers ‘movement and class struggle, and expresses the difference between bourgeois and workers’ feminism. The anarcho – feminist workers’ movement in New York and Peterson from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century is taken as an example. These histories, which are explained in the papaer as heterotopic political tactics of changing the immediate living environment, clearly indicate the importance of material living conditions and situational identities for understanding the social position of women and shed new light on some of the key problems of modern feminism associated with huge class, racial, material and cultural differences among women that make it impossible to establish a general “women’s sisterhood” today, as well as over a hundred years ago.