SHAPING THE AGENDA: FEMINIST STRATEGIES OF CIVIC AND POLITICAL ACTION IN POST-COMMUNISM

• Main Authors: Diana Elena NEAGA, Valentin Quintus NICOLESCU
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: National University of Political Science and Public Administration, Bucharest 2013-12-01
• Series: Romanian Journal of Society and Politics
• Online Access: http://rjsp.politice.ro/files/December2013/neaga.pdf

More than 20 years after the 1989 Revolution, the Romanian society continues to be patriarchal – and implicitly less democratic for women. This fact becomes more obvious if one looks towards the political sphere and at the way in which women’s interests are represented at the political decision level. In this social environment, civil society and especially the feminist movement have a particularly important role in terms of promoting women’s specific civic and political agendas. Our paper is an exploratory investigation of the strategies of political and civic actions used by the feminist movement in Romania during the postcommunist period. We will try to identify and categorize these strategies. Our aim is to explore a way of formulating a sort of typology (a methodological exploration) of the civil and political models of action used by five Romanian feminist NGOs, while trying to assess their activity. This study is one of a prospective nature, in other words, it is not an exhaustive attempt to analyze the entire specter of feminist organizations, but rather an attempt to test the methodological apparatus and to adapt the theoretical framework to the realities found in the field.