Roundtable 1: Feminist movement in Slovenia and state feminism in the 80s

At the first roundtable, we will discuss the role of the so-called "new social movements," particularly the feminist and LGBT movements in the 1980s, and how they shaped the position of women in late socialism. We will also look at the impact they had on the shaping of gender equality policies in the 1990s. After the change of the political system in 1991, these movements encountered a new obstacle: the intense efforts of conservative political actors to retraditionalize Slovenian society. In this sense, the progressive new social movements of the 1980s seem to have been one of the first victims of the new political order: it soon became clear that the democratic standards of an open, inclusive and progressive society they aspired to would not be the obvious and self-evident foundations of a new state. At the roundtable discussion moderated by Roman Kuhar, visible actors of the feminist movement in Slovenia - Vlasta Jalušič, Suzana Tratnik, Metka Mencin and Mojca Dobnikar - will reconsider the legacy of the new social movements in the context of current populist and anti-gender struggles and the position of gender and sexual minorities thirty years after Slovenia's independence.