womenspacework - workspace
Background
womenspacework
concept by Yvonne P. Doderer
From 15th of July until 15th of October 2000 the ifu was established during three months at German universities in Hanover (Project Area Body, Project Area Migration and Project Area Work - in cooperation with TU Clausthal), Kassel (Project Area City), Hamburg (Project Area Information) and Suderburg (Project Area Water), (the Project Area Intelligence could not be realized). Within the ifu about 900 female students from various countries all over the world came together to study, to discuss, to exchange ideas and information.
The virtual platform womenspacework was a concept for the art programme within the project area city by Yvonne P. Doderer in cooperation with Fender (M. Schrade). Part of womenspacework was a workshop, conceptualized and realized by Yvonne P. Doderer in cooperation with Martina Schrade, which took place from 11th of September until 14th of September 2000 at the university in Kassel.
In the year 2001, First Story - Women Building / New Narratives for the 21st Century curated by Ute Meta Bauer for Porto 2001, Cultural Capital of Europe, invited womenspacework to participate within the First Story ... project. The invitation allowed us to update and to continue this virtual platform. For further informations about First Story ... please go to www.firststory.net
Starting Point
Although the first International Women's University (ifu) in Germany was founded in and was operating within a purely academic context, the ifu would not exist without the so called "New Women's and Lesbians' Movement". The ifu's context has been created by forms of protest and resistance, actions, initiatives, strategies, practices, temporary or permanent projects of feminist theory and practice developed over the last 30 years by active women/lesbians not only in Germany but as well in a lot of European and non-European countries. A lot of women who initiated and organised the ifu or have been participating at the ifu, still consider themselves as coming from the Women's and/or Lesbians' Movement or as being a part of it although it can be argued whether and in which way this movement still exists.
It is a fact that women/lesbians all over the world are still fighting for women's and lesbians’ politics, for women's and lesbians’ rights and interests.
Although there is a lot of criticism about the different 'isms', as racism, centrism(?) and ethnizism of the New, especially Western white and bourgeois Women's Movement, women/lesbians are still engaged in feminist politics all over the world - no matter how they define themselves and their political point of view. They fight against their oppression, humiliation, discrimination and against all the forms of violence directed at women especially.
Since the specific mechanisms of oppression and differences have been getting more and more apparent and clear, it is necessary to develop further and ongoing networking structures within the different spaces of political action and thinking.
Although the virtual space of the internet/www is not free from exclusion and using it includes participating in already elitist conditions, this space offers - due to its inner open structure and global dimension - the possibility of articulation and organisation of a politically feminist resistance of individual women and groups of women at least for now. A lot of initiatives and projects are already in the net but it is still difficult to find them. In the face of national as well of international political and economical tendencies of globalization, it might be the right time to offer structures of networking and information to critical feminist initiatives, projects, groups and individuals in order to make the forces operating here more effective or to mobilize new ones. The example of Seattle has shown us the possibilities of virtual forms of communication getting more influential locally as well as nationally and internationally.womenspacework can be conceived as a virtual platform for an international networking structure within academic and non-academic spaces and activities for women. It should be able to offer a transversal space connecting feminist theory and practice.
womenspacework can be seen as an organized virtual structure on an international level in which feminist theories, actions and information can be combined and put to work within a network..
womenspacework is an ongoing project - bookmark now!
Ideas, critic, suggestions and own contributions please send to:
contact@wspacework.net
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last modified : 08.03.2004
© 2001 Yvonne P. Doderer, Stuttgart and authors
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