Healing Feminism

Healing is gaining traction in feminist and queer feminist theories and practices, in scholarship and activism. Healing means to make sound or whole, to make free from injury or disease, to become well again. Healing feminism addresses that the majority of sentient beings sharing with each other the environments of the planet Earth have never been well to begin with. Patriarchal powers make us sick. Healing feminism is the antidote to patriarchal powers. Yet the notion of healing feminism not only speaks of feminist and queer feminist practices as essential for critical care under patriarchal systems, it also analyses and pushes back against capitalist, fascist, racist or trans-exclusionary feminism. Feminism therefore, is a space of confict and in need of healing. This said, feminism that deserves this name holds space for complex conversations and materializes rebellious joys and hopes as resistance despite it all.

The Healing Feminism symposium brings together speakers who address a wide range of feminist practices and theories including the Black feminist tradition in the UK and the necessity of contemporary antifascism addressed by Lola Olufemi; Moana-based protocols and epistemologies unfolding an embodied archive that refects the museum as a charged space shared by Rosanna Raymond; Sami, decolonial and eco-feminist approaches to extractivism and mining examined by Lis-Mari Gurák-Hortfors and Karin Reisinger; designing with care in zones of confict and peace missions practiced by Malkit Shoshan; feminist spatial practices for counter-memories in public space analyzed by Mechtild Widrich, and the hidden architectures of Jewish survival during the Holocaust researched by Natalia Romik.