DARJA ZAVIRŠEK IRENA ŠUMI MARTA VERGINELLA xx FOCUS MARWA ARSANIOS

The Reading Room, Activation No. 2* Round table at the launch of Care as Violence, a book by Darja Zaviršek (/*cf., Ljubljana, 2018)

Global inequalities, environmental disasters, as well as current and future mass migrations influence the relationships between men and women. Instead of a fairer redistribution, the fundamentalist neoliberalism continues to create new inequalities which promote the ideology of a scape goat that is becoming the symbolic culprit for the present situation. Influential politicians and opinion leaders promise to take care of women if they submit to retraditionalisation- and repatriarchalisation tendencies: if they do not wish to take the blame for the problems of today’s society, they should dedicate themselves to childbearing, quietly accepting their second-rate position and leaving the paid posts. While some warn against the over-emancipation, education and independence of women, these are promised affection and social care in exchange for their unpaid care work and the subordination to the general traditionalism designed to maintain the status quo in economically and socially uncertain neoliberal conditions. Although we are talking about global processes of care which are, in reality, turning into violence, we need to analyse how they manifest in Slovenia, who are the local promoters of neo-patriarchy, and what is the potential of the feminist and women’s movement in Slovenia to stop the neo-patriarchy, bearing in mind Agamben’s words that “one ends up identifying with an enemy whose structure one does not understand.”

Participants: dr. Darja Zaviršek, dr. Irena Šumi, dr. Marta Verginella * The event is part of the Reading Room project at the Who is afraid of Ideology? exhibition by Marwa Arsanios.