Women in black against war meet

Off Our Backs, Oct 1995 by Carola, Elizabeth

(Seeing the importance of digital communications in this movement really made me rethink my view, previously skeptical. The war has largely destroyed the postal system in both Bosnia and Serbia (where mail is heavily censored), and opposition groups are really reliant on electronic communications. Strangely, though, e-mail had completely stopped in the two weeks before the conference, for the Belgrade groups.)

loving women, fighting war

Workshops included, "State Fear, Structural Violence and the Hope of the Activist," "Loving Women, Fighting War: Lesbians in the peace movement," "Women's Reality of War," "Women and Militarism," "Women Testify: Ethnic cleansing, racism and xenophobia." Workshop titles like, "I am Disobedient: Disloyal to Civilization" and "Women will remember; They want that we forget" showed a U.S. feminist influence.

I first went to "Loving women, Fighting war." Lepa Mladenovich, Belgrade lesbian feminist activist (and frequent contributor to off our backs!) facilitated, posing various questions -- How do lesbians function in the peace movement? How are we visible as lesbians? Should/do we prioritize lesbian or peace issues, and why? -- before facilitating a consciousness-raising-type roundtable. With Italian, Serbian, Croatian, Albanian, Macedonian, Hungarian, U.S., British, German, and Belgian women there, translations flew thick and fast (mainly Serb-English-German-Hungarian and back again) as women recounted their experiences.

A Belgian woman said that she had always been a feminist and felt committed to women's issues, before beginning to experience oppression from straight women. She now organizes mainly as a lesbian "because of rising homophobia, because of the rise of the right wing in Belgium, which is declaring lesbians and gays as sick, and gaining power. The louder they become, the more solid I will be in my lesbian visibility."

A British peace activist, Rebecca, said it felt crucial for her to be out in her work because "Homophobia does just what war and weapons do -- divides people into good and bad; sexuality into good and bad."

A Serbian woman agreed: "To fight for peace is to fight against patriarchy." But, she said, there is a lot of unacknowledged lesbian energy and hard work going into the women's projects like the SOS Hotline and refugee projects in Belgrade.

A few women from different regions in former Yugoslavia talked about this (universal?) problem.

Another woman talked about the ongoing process of coming out -- that homophobic abuse could force you back "in" even after years of being out and OK about it.

A woman from Budapest talked about how the fledgling Hungarian feminist community were experiencing the political backlash before even having organized a movement -- "Hungarian intellectuals come back from meeting with American academics who tell them that 'political correctness' is on the rampage in America, that Black working class lesbians have taken over college campuses....So they start preaching in Budapest about the dangers of 'feminist fascism' and 'political correctness' -- where we haven't even had a movement to begin with!"