labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
julho/ 2016- junho 2017 /juillet 2016-juin 2017

Editorial

Labrys, estudos feministas/études féministes is an international, multidisciplinary and multilingual magazine which is free online since 2002. Today our objective is still the same as it has always been: opening debates, spread out women´s production of knowledge, showing the conditions reserved to women in a patriarchal world and helping in the transformation of these realities, thanks to feminist mouvements dynamism.

It has been fifteen years since the first issue of Labrys came online. That is hundreds of articles that spread out feminist research and its social intervention.

Fifteen years which have witnessed the propagation of the word “feminism”, without, however, a real suffocation of the patriarchal system. On the contrary.

Patriarchy, this million tentacle monster, renews itself after each feminist strike against its outrageous power. Its strategy is to use feminism and the feminists to back up its hold over society: prostitution is a good example, for today, many feminists are defending the prostitutional system –this abomination- under the pretext of female prostitutes “agentivity”, while they are nothing but objects being sold and exchanged for a boundless consumption.

If feminism is, today, more talked about than before, its power is very often melted among those “reasonable compromises” which keep alive patriarchal order. In this way, sex and sexuality are taking a turn for what appears a “liberation” under the shield of hypersexualization, compelling young girls to take dangerous risks and make themselves available to be accepted in teenagers groups.

If feminism had once desired to break down patriarchal structures based on biological background, it is now being transformed into a “soft feminism”, “post-feminism” or any other term teasing out the deep meaning of feminism: that is researching and destroying patriarchal parameters which establish themselves as a system and control the whole society.

Therefore, violence against women is increasing under all its forms and in all fields, whether material, symbolic or in the representation domain. Brutal strength, strokes, murders match up with a constant position of inferiority at work and diminishing women capacities. In people imaginary they are still fragile, incapable, incompetent and subordinate.

 "Post-feminism" that announces the end of feminine struggles and claims, “because everything has already been achieved”, is the one kind that appeals to many men for it means that radical feminism has lost the battle of extricating all patriarchal constraints and domination.

In daily social discourses, many patriarchal voices can be heard: those of political and religious men, teachers and professors, all wishing the coming back of submission and control over feminine bodies, such as the inevitable prohibition of abortion. Some of them are even trying to teach us what feminism is all about and how to be a feminist.

The masculine condescendence expressed through rape, making the victims feel guilty, murders every single minute, is a patent proof that we need badly a more aggressive and vindictive feminism that will not be deceived by a supposed masculine support. A feminism that advocates ever and again the liberty in relation to stereotypes, citizenship, the construction of a political subject able to lead, invent and create, and above all to break the ties and limits imposed by a “biological” disguised in “natural”.

Enjoy your reading

labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
julho/ 2016- junho 2017 /juillet 2016-juin 2017