Making the Socially Unspeakable Sayable – On the Potential of Uncertainty between Utopian Anticipations and Real Interventions

Social movements, especially feminism, question the ‘natural order’ of society and its gender relations. From a feminist perspective, the historical relationship between the systems of capitalism and patriarchy raise the question of a transformation strategy between reform and revolution, between social change within the existing order and a transition to new constellations: As an ongoing "struggle against sexist oppression" (hooks 2000: 28), feminist movements are not only concerned with establishing equality, but also with overcoming the gap between what is socially sayable and what has so far been unsayable, the utopian. By putting the question of gender relations on the social agenda, women's movements aim to change and reinterpret society (Maurer 2012:78). In contrast to hegemonic narratives, they develop resistant, oppositional activities that transgress boundaries. They politicize "what it means when the cultural norms behind the silent social agreements are uncovered and therefore no longer simply taken for granted" (Studer 2011:51). This has consequences for feminism and its dialectic link between theory and practice: the practical and theoretical dimensions of this movement, with which it remains inextricably linked, must be analysed in all their hybrid and heterogeneous combinations (Majewska 2023: 50) to develop theory from within social movements (Gago 2021) as well as their archives and memories (Hartman 2022). On this basis the paper offers a survey of specific reformations of feminist protests in the present. As an analytical frame, feminist theories of radical social change between utopian anticipations and real interventions are introduced. Alongside utopian anticipations, real interventions can currently be observed globally in feminist strikes and uprisings. In order to make them useful for analysing feminist blueprints of radical social change, the following questions are discussed: What is the relationship between strategies, means, and forms of feminist protest? How are dynamics of structural social crisis and conceptions of radical social change linked? Which utopias and feminist perspectives on the good life and emancipation are expressed in them and articulated by the participants?