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From Balkan Anarchist Bookfair
May 13, 2025

From a discussion...

Good evening everyone, we will make a short introduction from the queer-feminist group Calvaluna before giving the floor to our guest speakers.

First of all, we want to thank the people who came to today’s event and the groups who responded to our call and will share their experiences from the local movements they are involved in. We would also like to add that we find it very important and a positive turn that in the last few BABs the topic of anarcho-queer-feminism is one of the main topics of the festival. This is because we perceive gender, body, sexuality not as one time events and as single, discrete categories discussed in the margins (of events, assemblies), but as processes and fields that permeate and are permeated by the multiple networks of historical, social, linguistic correlations and that construct a certain reality.

We consider meetings like the Balkan Anarchist Book Festival to be deeply meaningful as they offer opportunities to meet and get to know other groups both at a local and a pan-Balkan level. By exchanging experiences and thoughts with people who may be active in different countries but who face common problems and have common desires, we draw inspiration and support. Even more so with groups from other Balkan countries as we find much in common with each other despite the attempts of nationalisms on all sides to isolate us. Besides, we observe that the tension over gender discourse and the hate speech that has developed globally over the years feed into the already conservative, nationalist discourses which are encountered in the Balkans and are rooted in religious identity and the strong presence of the church in our lives.

We are at a point in time locally and internationally where anti-gender discourse is becoming more and more pronounced and distinct. Recently, we have observed that many states around the world, from the US to the UK and Hungary, are placing hate speech at the centre of their political agenda, accompanied by rapid changes in legislative frameworks that ensured basic freedoms regarding the expression of gender, sexuality and reproductive rights. Anti-LGBT discourse is being constructed and solidified alongside the rise of conservative, ethnocentric rhetoric that reproduces the narrative of a return to ‘a clean past’. At the same time, in everyday life, the ever-growing attacks on the bodies of queer people, femininities and migrant women have made the public sphere a suffocating and unlivable field. Whether it is targeted state policies or persistent, pervasive micropolitics aimed at suppressing the desire and freedom of our bodies, we believe that meetings and networking between queer feminist discourses, actions and desires “from below”, such as this one, is our response.

We as a group were formed in the fall of 2024 in Thessaloniki, at Fabrika Yfanet squat, after an open call. Our meeting came out of our common need to create a group and a stable meeting point in the city that would generate queer and feminist discourse and action – not only around the oppressions we experience, but even more so around our desires.

Our revolutions are part of our everyday lives – in schools, in the workplace, in the streets, even in our own homes – where we try to build different kinds of social relations and bonds with each other, constantly resisting gendered expectations and what they entail, looking for cracks through which we can breathe and imagine a different world.

We want to intensify our acts of refusal, which envision the unthinkable and potentially generate moments of overthrow of this rotten, oppressive system.

From our position, we speak and organize within the framework of queer feminisms from below. Why queer feminisms? For us, queer feminisms are not something fixed or rigid; they are the way we choose to live our lives on a daily basis. It is an integral part of our political position, a refusal to perform the gender roles assigned to or imposed upon us.

Finally, at this point we will introduce the groups in today’s panel, saying a few words about their action and summarising the contributions they have prepared.

The group Tsoupres is an anarcho-queer fem collective created in the spring of 2022 in Ioannina, Greece. Having experiences both within the movement and as people living in a provincial town, and especially having the combined experience of both, they focus on the issue of femicide, analyzing it through this perspective. Starting the analysis from the movement, moving from the pop feminism of previous years through the #metoo movement, they conclude with the dominant, conservative media rhetoric around femicide and its systemic implications.

The group vrrrane is an anarcho-queer collective from Zagreb, Croatia, created in the autumn of 2023. They will talk about the rise of Christian-fascism in Croatia and beyond, and the extreme repression of individuals who do not assimilate/integrate into the dominant religious narrative. Against this climate leading to isolation and repression, they are organizing themselves into networks of solidarity, self-organization and counter-organization with the aim of radicalizing more and more people inside and outside Croatia.

The group WISH* is a self-organized feminist collective in Lesvos since 2022. The aim of the collective is to provide horizontal care and mutual assistance to femininities who have been subjected to border violence. Integrating feminist struggles into a broader anti-state and anti-capitalist context, they create links between local and migrant women on the island and beyond, driven by radical care, and the recognition of the very specific forms of violence to which migrant women are subjected.

The group Feminista Akció is a queer-feminist and anti-capitalist collective from Budapest, Hungary, formed in 2024. Today they will talk to us about the situation in Hungary, giving us an insight into the cooperation of the opposition parties, the situation on the streets and the persecution by the police, the rhetoric against abortion and in favour of natalism and finally the muddying of the waters between martial law and the “emergency state”.

That’s all from us, we will now give the floor to the invited groups and after the presentations are over, there will be a discussion with statements/questions etc. Thank you!

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