From actions to words: FEMEN’s fourth-wave manifestos

Abstract

Since its creation in 2008 in Ukraine, FEMEN has fascinated mainstream audiences and scholars alike. Yet few studies have dealt with FEMEN’s writings in French. While the lack of translations may partially explain this critical gap, the overall dismissal of FEMEN and its impact on contemporary feminisms participates in the historic marginalisation of women’s contributions to the arts, the sciences, or society at large. Recognising the organisation’s problematic standpoints, this article demonstrates how, going from action to words, FEMEN’s collective book publications, Manifeste FEMEN and Rébellion, contribute to, and complicate, contemporary feminist thought and debates. Inscribing themselves in the feminist manifesto tradition, both books articulate a fourth-wave feminist standpoint, and through FEMEN’s assessment of their actions, the organisation unveils Western democracies’ tartufferies regarding secularism and equal rights. FEMEN’s manifestos also generate a reflection on the (im)possibility of a universal, global approach to feminism, namely, due to their Islamophobic stances.

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“…These pages make up a cultural artifact, an interstitial genre (Benozzo & Gherardi, 2020) that hybridizes different expressive and rhetorical ways of communicating in the name of performativity. For inspiration, we looked to both the manifestos that characterized the four different waves of feminism (Schaal, 2020) and to the manifestos of the twentieth‐century avant‐garde movements: Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism (Catalano et al., 2014). The manifesto genre holds a special charm, deriving from its ability to reduce the barriers between art and reality, literature and politics.…”