As part of the Elisabeth-List-Fellowship project "In/Visible Endometriosis", a symposium will be held at the Forum Stadtpark from May 23-24, 2024. More information will follow soon.

More information in regard to this symposium will follow shortly.

Take a look at the fellowship project "Reproductive Justice".

Exploratory Workshop on Everyday Creativity in (Post)socialism

The Gender Sociology team organized a workshop on "Everyday Creativity in (Post)socialism" on June 2 and 3, 2022. An international community of researchers met in Graz in order to present individual research projects, to network and to discuss the future of the research field of everyday creativity in (post)socialism in the context of gender. Gender researchers have contributed significantly to the reconceptualization of creativity and its everyday and social dimensions. However, relatively little of this work has been conducted in the context of state socialism and post-socialism. The workshop aimed to bring together scholars who have already conducted research in this area and provide a platform to establish contacts, exchange ideas and plan future collaborations.

Gender Politics and War Welfare during World War One and beyond

December 9/10, 2021

The conference explored the local and global dimensions of welfare policies and humanitarian aid during and after WW1 from a gender historical perspective. Topics included gender discourses that reinforce, re-establish and challenge gender conventions, gendered discourses around violence, pain, trauma, and healing and how these played out in the field of humanitarian and welfare work during the war, and during post-war reconstruction. Groups of interest included those claiming an identity as (non-)combatants and veterans, feminist and socialist anti-war activists, transnational, and international organizations as well as right wing and nationalist groups committed to reinforcing traditional gender norms and gendered citizenship models as part of their nation-building agenda.

The conference identified and explored emerging questions and directions within First World War Gender Studies as well as reflections on continuities and change within contemporary theories of how gender is bound up with militarism, warfare, and conflict resolution.

More about the program here.

The conference will took place as a hybrid format in HS 11.01 and online.
 

Gender in Transformation Processes: Central and Southeast European Perspectives

September 30 - October 1, 2021

University of Graz

Interdisciplinary symposium organized by the Institute of Sociology and Center for Inter-American Studies (University of Graz) and Institute of Sociology (University of Zadar) and the Institute of Social Sciences "Ivo Pilar", Split, Croatia

The program can be found here.

More information can be found here.

Platform Urbanism - Towards a technocapitalist transformation of European cities?

Online Symposium - March 4-6, 2021

PROGRAMME

Recently, the increasing platformization of everyday life has become a subject of research across the social sciences. This symposium aimed at strengthening critical research on platform urbanism. Critical urban scholars have advanced this concept to examine the significance of changing everyday practices and power shifts brought about by the expansion of platform operators into all areas of urban life (Barns 2019), such as household services, food delivery and mobility. Thus, platform urbanism can be understood as a mode of producing urban spaces. The inherent mechanisms take on an increasingly central role in refashioning relational dynamics between code, commerce and corporealities (Sadowski 2020; Lee et al. 2020).

The task of a critical platform research lies in engaging with the socio-spatial and normative implications of platform-mediated urban life. Platformization reconfigures existing digital-social-spatial orders and threatens to increase inequalities of circulation and care in cities (Elwood 2020; Bauriedl/Strüver 2020). Moreover, platforms are not only challenging existing regulatory frameworks (Graham 2020), they also increasingly shape ways of imagining urban futures and experiencing urban space in what may be called platform-mediated practices of place-making. Hence, the inclusion into or exclusion from the newly created webs of code, commerce and bodies create new forms of precarity, (in)visibility and (in)security. However, beyond a mere 'techno-dystopian' stance, critical platform research needs to emphasize the call to understand platforms as well as contested sites of social creativity and everyday appropriations (Leszczynski 2020; Elwood 2020; Richardson 2020). Rather than a critique of 'uberisation' or 'airbnbisation' in megacities, this symposium invites for a critical debate of the actual consequences of digitalisation for socio-technical relationships between citizens, cities and urban infrastructures with reference to platform urbanism.

We seek to bring platform researchers and activists from the fields of feminist geography, critical urban studies and labor geographies into dialogue, by focusing on but not limiting the discussion to questions such as the following:

• How does the rise of platforms affect urban socio-spatial practices and services?
• What implications do datafication, platformization and algorithms have for everyday urban life?
• How are embodiments, subjectivities and gender relations stabilized, normalized or transformed by service platforms?
• How do platform economies and platform practices increasingly impact the demand for urban services, (de)privilege urban spaces and (de)normalize the gendered division of labour?
• Which new spatial patterns of centrality and peripherality are (re)produced in platform urbanism?
• What can we learn from alternative platforms and social movements for technological sovereignty with regard to alternate platform futures?

Organizers: Prof. Dr. Anke Strüver, Marcella Rowek, Yannick Ecker (all Institute of Geography and Regional Science, University of Graz), Prof. Dr. Sybille Bauriedl, Henk Wiechers (all Department of Geography, European University of Flensburg).

References:

• Barns, Sarah (2020): Platform urbanism: negotiating platform ecosystems in connected cities. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Bauriedl, Sybille & Strüver, Anke (2020): Platform Urbanism and the Production of Private and Public Spaces: Gender Relations in Caring and Sharing. In: Urban Planning, 5(4): in print.
• Elwood, Sarah (2020): Digital geographies, feminist relationality, Black and queer code studies: Thriving otherwise. In: Progress in Human Geography, January 2020: 1-20.
• Elwood, Sarah & Leszczynski, Agnieszka (2018): Feminist digital geographies. In: Gender, Place & Culture, 25(5): 629-644.
• Graham, Mark (2020): Regulate, replicate, and resist - The conjunctural geographies of platform urbanism. In: Urban Geography, 41(3): 453-457.
• Lee, Ashlin, Mackenzie, Adrian, Smith, Gavin J. D. & Box, Paul (2020): Mapping Platform Urbanism: Charting the Nuance of the Platform Pivot. In: Urban Planning, 5(1): 116-128.
• Leszczynski, Agnieszka (2020): Glitchy vignettes of platform urbanism. In: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(2): 189-208.
• Lynch, Casey R. (2020): Unruly Digital Subjects: Social Entanglements, Identity, and the Politics of Technological Expertise. In: Digital Geography and Society, 1: 100001.
• Richardson, Lizzie (2020): Coordinating office space: Digital technologies and the platformization of work. In: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, September 2020: 1-19.
• Sadowski, Jathan (2020): Cyberspace and cityscapes: on the emergence of platform urbanism. In: Urban Geography, 41(3): 448-452.

MASCAGE Online Seminar "Analyzing Social Constructions of Ageing Masculinities and Their Cultural Representations in Contemporary European Literatures and Cinemas"

This online seminar series presented ongoing research within the European research consortium MASCAGE, a project which analyses social constructions of ageing masculinities and/through their cultural representations in contemporary European literatures and cinemas. During three events in the spring of 2021, researchers from the six national teams of MASCAGE, Austria, Ireland, Estonia, Israel, Spain and Sweden, presented studies on ageing and masculinity in different regional contexts of Europe.

The seminars were free of charge and open to all. All seminars are held in Zoom. 

Program(PDF):

February ^24th 13-15 pm (GMT+1)

• Male directors in the second half of life: Israel and beyond
  Shlomit Lir & Liat Ayalon, Louis and Gabi Weisfeld School of Social Work, Bar Ilan University
• Aging Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Spanish Literature
  Raquel Medina, Aston University, Josep M Armengol, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha
• Dementia and Masculinity in Recent Irish Literature
  Michaela Schrage-Frueh, NUI Galway

April^15th 13-15 pm(GMT+1)

• The road taken: Aging man's final journey representations in contemporary Israeli literature
  Danielle Gurevitch, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
• Reading/Being Ove: cultural representations of ageing masculinity and older men's readings of A Man Called Ove (Backman, 2012)
  Karin Lövgren, University of Gävle, Linn Sandberg, Södertörn University, Jeff Hearn, Örebro University
• The (Hopeful) Potential of Old Age and Caring Masculinity in Estonian Films 'A Friend of Mine' (2011) and 'Tangerines' (2013)
  Teet Teinemaa, Tallinn University

June^7th,13-15(GMT+1)

• Older Men's Resistance to Stereotypes of Ageing in Ireland
  Maggie O'Neill, Aine Ni Leime, NUI Galway
• Fear and loathing in pandemic. Researching masculinity and old age during a health crisis
  Marcos Bote, Universidad de Murcia, Agustina Varela, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Josep M Armengol, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha
• Men 65+ in Austria: Lived Experiences and Media Representations
  Florian Pirker, Barbara Ratzenböck & Roberta Maierhofer, University of Graz

Gender, Affect, and Politics - a 3-Part Series by the Intimate Readings Research Group

In this series, the Intimate Readings Research Group discussed how narratives in different media establish a sense of identity and community through shared emotional experiences, how they mobilize publics and counterpublics, and how they create potential affective worlds that allow readers and audiences to question dominant ideas of gender and sexuality.

The 3-part series "Gender, Affect, and Politics" was a feature for the monthly queerfeminist magazine "genderfrequenz" (Gender Frequency) at the Graz-based free radio station Radio Helsinki (92,6 MHz). You can stream the episodes on Sundays at 5 p.m. or listen to them later on the website of the Cultural Broadcasting Archive (CBA).

Episode 1 | Feb.^21st, 2021 | Public Feelings and How to Study Them
Episode 2 | March^21st, 2021 | Literature, Social Media, and Affective Worldmaking
Episode 3 | April^18th, 2021 | "Feeling Bad? It Might Be Political!" - Interview with Ann Cvetkovich

Streaming: https://helsinki.at/program/shows/gender-frequenz-sozialpolitisch-feministisch-unbeugsam

Episode 1 - Public Feelings and How to Study Them
In the first episode, Silvia Schultermandl and Dijana Simić gave an introduction to the academic field of affect studies in order to illustrate the potentials of studying emotions as political phenomena. By introducing different creative writing tools, affect studies scholar Ann Cvetkovich invited us to reflect on how certain historical and political events feel. Furthermore, May Friedman and Ahmet Atay explored particular public feelings of loneliness and fear by discussing the heightened struggles already marginalized communities face in times of a pandemic.

Hosts: Silvia Schultermandl, Dijana Simić
Music: Planningtorock - "Let's Talk About Gender Baby", K. Flay - "Sister"
Literature: Rita Felski - "Beyond Feminist Aesthetics", Nancy Fraser - "Rethinking the Public Sphere", Michael Warner - "Publics and Counterpublics", Brian Massumi - "Parables for the Virtual", Deborah Gould - "On Affect and Protest", Ann Cvetkovich & Karin Michalski - "The Alphabet of Feeling Bad"

Getting in good trouble, necessary trouble: A Discussion on Black Lives Matter

Panel discussion

Friday, 29.1.2021, 17:00 (CET)

For this panel discussion on the Black Lives Matter movement, 3 very interesting guests were invited who first addressed the topic from their professional perspective and were then open to questions from the audience.

The panelists:

• Dr. Sabine Bröck: Professor of American Studies at the University of Bremen, teaches English-speaking cultures and transnational/transcultural studies.
• Dr. Elka Stevens: Professor at Howard University (USA), focuses on the fashion industry, African-American clothing, visual and material culture, who approaches questions of gender, identity and global culture with an artistic approach.
• Nicole Wyche Huffman: A US-based brand specialist and queer black activist who advises brands and corporations on issues of inequality and leads the Black Lives Matter Working Group.

Lecture and Symposium

Program

January 14, 2021
4-6 pm Lecture: Public Feelings in a Time of Pandemic - Ann Cvetkovich (Carleton University, Ottawa)
This presentation was about writing which Ann Cvetkovich has been doing over the course of the pandemic in monthly meetings with my Austin (Texas)-based Public Feelings group, whose participants were also in Chicago, Vancouver, and Ottawa, Canada. These short pieces constituted efforts to make sense of what was going on - or just documented how it felt - with attention to topics such as covid silver linings (and other pandemic keywords); Zoom-based art and performance; protest under conditions of social distancing; dialectics of hope and despair; black feminist resources for survival and other forms of collective care and mutual aid; and the relation between the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the covid-19 pandemic. Through an exploration of the current state of theories of affect and sensation, Cvetkovich prompted a discussion of the differences and connections between how the pandemic felt in Canada/US and how it felt in Austria/Europe.

Symposium on book project "Affective Worldmaking"

January 15, 2021 3-8.30 pm

The book project combined fundamental theoretical observations on the role of affect and emotion in narrative texts (literature, film, art, performance, mass media) with analyses of specific genres, time periods, and different geopolitical contexts (from North America, to Southeastern Europe to East Asia) and brought them into dialogue with literary and artistic engagements (poetry, personal essays, comics). During the symposium, the editors and some of the contributors discussed the overarching questions addressed in the book, such as the power of narrative, the construction of subjectivities of gender and sexuality, and the role of affect in times of crisis. Finally, a roundtable discussion investigated what makes up a public, what governs dominant discourses, and in how far and in what ways counterpublics can be created through narrative.

3-6.15 pm Perspectives on Affective Worldmaking

3-3.15 pm Introduction (Silvia Schultermandl)

3.15-3.45 pm Panel I
Chair: Dijana Simić
Heike Paul (FAU): #FamiliesBelongTogether: Civil Sentimentalism and the Holy Family

3.45-4pm Coffee Break

4-5pm Panel II
Chair: Si Whybrew
Silvia Schultermandl (KFU): Quick Media Feminisms and the Affective Economies of Hashtag Activism
Jana Aresin (FAU): Compassion, Solidarity, and Recognition: Narrating Shared Identity in Postwar Women's Magazines in Japan, 1945-1955

5-5.15 pm: Coffee Break

5.15-6.15 pm Panel III
Chair: Jana Aresin
Dijana Simić (KFU): Intimacy, Recognition, and Counterpublics in Contemporary Bosnian-Herzegovinian Prose
Si Whybrew (KFU): Textual Encounters of Hope and Be/Longing: Science Fiction and Trans Worldmaking

7-8.30 pm Roundtable Discussion: Finding a Way Out? Affective Possibilities in Times of Crisis
Chair: Silvia Schultermandl
Panelists: Ahmet Atay (College of Wooster), Claudia Breger (Columbia University), May Friedman (Ryerson University), Renate Hansen-Kokoruš (KFU) and Jelena Petrović (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)


The event was co-hosted by Karl-Franzens-University Graz (KFU) and Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and was held online via FAU-Zoom. 

Gender Revisited. Negotiating Gender in the Age of Posthumanism

International conference at the Karl-Franzens-University Graz, December 10-12, 2020

What is 'the human'? What do the terms 'human' or 'being human' mean in the age of rapid bio- and communication-technological, scientific, cultural and social developments that are increasingly influencing our everyday lives? Is the category of the 'human' still tenable in view of the blurring of traditional oppositions, such as human/animal, organism/machine, nature/culture? What role do these developments play for feminist theory formation in the 21st century, not least with regard to the ethical, philosophical, cultural and artistic questions that go hand in hand with them?

In addition to questioning humanistic-epistemological categories that continue to shape Western societies and their knowledge production to this day, critical posthumanism questions modern models of knowledge and progress such as human enhancement (mental, genetic/prenatal interventions) or visions of an 'artificial superintelligence'. The development and application of new technical strategies is often due to pure euphoria about progress, which ignores the political and social consequences. Conversely, technology and its applications make it possible to imagine breaking out of conventional gendered dichotomies.

Points of overlap between modern humanism and current transhumanist currents include both a pronounced anthropocentrism (humans as the 'measure of all things') and a tendency towards hostility towards the body. For representatives of critical posthumanism, this conceals patriarchal strategies of subjugation, especially since chaotic matter or corporeality is considered 'feminine' in traditional binary discourse. Critical posthumanism shares this power-critical perspective on knowledge with the theoretical approaches of gender and queer studies, as well as postcolonial studies, which emerged at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The latter note the interconnectedness and mutual influence of diverse structures of difference and inequality or privilege with the aim of developing emancipatory strategies.

In posthumanism, on the other hand, the active agency of (human and non-human) matter is placed alongside the power of discourse. Donna Haraway, for example, outlines the idea of a reinvention of nature in her groundbreaking text A Manifesto for Cyborgs: in view of new communication and biotechnologies, the entire social network, such as the household, workplace, market, public sphere and the body, could be dissolved in an almost unlimited, multifaceted way. The comprehensive merging of the world into coding practices makes a monstrous world without gender conceivable.

The symposium posed the question of how 'gender' is (re)negotiated under 'posthumanist' conditions.

Men are not the same anymore: Recent changes in gender relations in South East European societies

Inga Tomić-Koludrović and Mirko Petrić

November 18, 2020, 18.45 p.m.

Following the breakup of Yugoslavia and the subsequent collapse of the "socialist gender regime", concerns were voiced about the imminent retraditionalization of gender roles in the successor countries. However, if one is to judge by the data on the division of household labor, in this respect the position of women seems to have improved in the postsocialist period. Namely, unlike in the "paternalistic socialist states where women were defined primarily as workers yet were also expected to serve men" (Frader, 2006), and where almost the only help employed women could count on in the household chores was that of another woman (Sekulić, 1995), recent empirical research carried out in the post-Yugoslav states indicates that men are now performing some housework.

This lecture attempted to trace the reasons for this change, relying on the relevant primary quantitative and qualitative data from two recent research campaigns carried out in four South East European countries (Swiss National Science Foundation funded SCOPES and Croatian Science Foundation funded GENMOD). The approach to the subject was relational and data was presented on relative amounts of housework performed by men and women in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. However, a special focus was laid on gendered perceptions of fairness in housework and the varieties of strategies by which men negotiated it and accepted to do it. A typology of households with respect to gender balance in housework was also presented, and possibilities of further change in the direction of more equity discussed.

Cultures of Birthing - Birth Cultures in Transition

International online symposium as part of the Elisabeth-List-Fellowship Program for Gender Studies, jointly organized with the Institute of Sociology and the Society for Sociology at the University of Graz (GSU)

10. & 11.11.2020

While in recent years, discussions about birth and childbirth have been dominated by the fact that birth is increasingly becoming a 'project', which is also accompanied by increasing institutionalization and specific medicalization, the birth process is currently changing. More and more birthing mothers themselves are (again) articulating criticism of the processes surrounding their birth experiences. Against the backdrop of these criticisms of current birth cultures, the contributions to the international online symposium examine the current changes in childbirth and the 'event of birth' from various perspectives. They approach the changes in the experience, concrete conditions and practices of birth from a historical-cultural-comparative, gender and sociological perspective using qualitative and theoretical approaches and examine the resulting social, cultural and subject-related areas of tension.

For information: The online symposium was held via the online conference system 'Zoom'.

The program
(subject to changes)

Tuesday, 10.11.2020

14:00 | Welcome and introduction

14:30 to 16:00 |
The feelings of women giving birth. A history of somatic emotionality
Prof. Dr.phil Lisa Malich (University of Lübeck, Germany)

16:30 to 18:00 |
Dream birth or birth trauma? On the new discomfort of birth
Dr. habil. Sabine Flick (University of Graz, Austria)

Wednesday, 11.11.2010

10:00 | Welcome and introduction

10:15 to 11:45 |
Birth and the politics of un/happiness
Dr. Rachelle Chadwick (University of Pretoria, South Africa)

11:45 to 12:00 | Closing

Organizing team

Resistance necessary? - Identity and gender struggles on the horizon of right-wing populism and Christian fundamentalism in Europe today

Report on the symposium

The current occasion for the symposium

The current proliferation of right-wing populist attitudes and policies aimed at transforming human rights-based democracies into illiberal or ethnic-identitarian closed societies has been accompanied for some years by what has been termed "anti-genderism" (Hark/Villa), an activism against gender justice and anti-discrimination. In some countries in Eastern Central Europe in particular, we have observed aggressive attacks on sexual minorities, emancipatory human rights movements and academic gender studies. Our project "Is resistance necessary? - Identity and Gender Struggles in the Horizon of Right-Wing Populism and Christian Fundamentalism in Europe Today" saw itself as a reaction to these tendencies by aiming to shed light on the background to these phenomena by organizing an interdisciplinary and international symposium, to promote international and interdisciplinary networking between academics from Eastern and Central Europe and between academics and activists, and thus ultimately to identify and develop spaces of openness and starting points for transformation processes within the problem area.

The symposium took place from October 14-16, 2020

The symposium was part of an international and interdisciplinary research project led by an Incoming Senior Fellow, PD Dr. Sonja Strube, Institute for Catholic Theology, University of Osnabrück, and a Graz cooperation partner, MMag. Dr. Rita Perintfalvi, Institute for Old Testament Biblical Studies. Our research team included as Junior Fellows: Raphaela Hemet, MA (University of Graz), Cicek Sahbaz Wemmer, MA (University of Vienna) and Miriam Metze, MA (University of Vienna).

The project officially ran from October 2019 to September 2020, during which time the research group had to reschedule and reorganize the symposium three times due to the ever-changing Covid situation: The first date for March 2020 was canceled a week before the event due to the government's Covid measures. Everything was then rescheduled for October, but the team still assumed in June that they would be allowed to hold the symposium in person. However, this idea could no longer be realized later, so in the end everything had to be presented online, which of course required a new rescheduling. In the end, we were very pleased that we were able to successfully organize the symposium online on 14-16 October 2020. In addition to the 25 speakers, we had more than 100 registered participants.

In panel discussions, lectures, short presentations, five different panels and seven different video chat rooms, researchers in the field of gender studies from various disciplines such as political science, sociology, social psychology, political philosophy and feminist theology as well as activists and politicians came together to discuss the central topics of the symposium: Dr. Rebeka Anic (Croatia); Prof. Dr. Elżbieta Adamiak (Poland); Prof. Dr. Andras Bozókí, Prof. Dr. Erzsébet Barát, Prof. Dr. Andrea Pető, Dr. Larissza Hrotkó, Dr. Rita Perintfalvi (Hungary); Prof. Dr. Gerhard Marschütz, Prof. DDr. Hans Schelkshorn, Prof. Dr. Gunda Werner, Prof.in DDr. Irmtraud Fischer, Prof. Dr. Kristina Stoeckl, Dr. Stefanie Mayer, Ao. Univ-Prof. Dr. Katharina Scherke. Dr. Irene Klissenbauer, Miriam Metze, MA, Raphaela Hemet, BA, MA, Nicole Navratil BA, MA (Austria); Prof. Dr. Oliver Hidalgo, Prof. Dr. Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky, Dr. Michael Brinkschröder, PD, Dr. Sonja Strube (Germany); Mag. Tanja Grabovac (Bosnia-Herzegovina); Dr. Monica Cano Abadia (Spain); Cicek Sahbaz (Turkey); as well as Judith Fürst (ORF) and Sandra Kocuvan (Province of Styria).

A publication is also planned, which is due to appear in spring 2021. The publication of the symposium contributions will be printed on the one hand, but also made easily accessible through open access. Link to the publication: Anti-Genderism in Europe at transcript Verlag (transcript-verlag.de)

Results of the symposium:

Conflict between the neo-right parties and gender research

For the neo-right ideology, "the people" is an identitarian ethnic community; accordingly, the people must be regarded as a homogeneous unit and any deviation must be eliminated. An identitarian democracy offers no room for the foreign, but instead aggressively rejects the so-called "others" such as migrants, Muslims, Roma, homeless people, etc. and is characterized by sexism, hostility towards sexual minorities and, in some cases, anti-Semitism. Against this ideological background, it is easy to understand why gender research, which uses scientific methods to advocate the protection of human rights, the equality of the sexes and sexual minorities and an open society in general, can be attacked as an enemy of the nation.

The term 'gender' has become a symbolic glue. It is used to call together many actors. Right-wing populists, right-wing extremists and religious fundamentalists use 'gender' as a fighting term. It is seen as a symbol for all the insecurities and fears that currently exist. Many fears associated with anti-European, anti-liberal and homophobic attitudes are condensed in the term 'gender'.

The role of faith and religion in anti-gender discourses

It is no coincidence that certain parts of the churches and theologies also support the anti-gender movement. In ultra-conservative church circles, just like the New Right, people want to preserve an image of society that has been overtaken by modernization processes. The common trait of populism and fundamentalism is that both are backward-looking by nature. They dream of the lost golden age. Both perceive all change as a threat: changing gender roles threaten masculinity, the gender discourse threatens gender relations, etc.

Division of gender and anti-gender representatives: Can there be reconciliation?

I don't think this division needs reconciliation. It's simply an either-or decision. I am quite sure that the fight for gender equality in the context of right-wing populism and religious fundamentalism is also a fight for democracy and human freedom. Since the universalist principle, i.e. the recognition of the equal rights and dignity of all people, is indispensable for Christian ethics, Christian churches and theologies must absolutely condemn inhuman, violent gender hostility and militant sexual nationalism.