Just in time for Davos

[Doug Henwood]

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

>Were Japanese feminists & leftists alive & kicking (rather than 
>stagnant & bereft of imagination as they are)

The Zizek Lenin conference had, I think, 16 presenters. Of them, two 
were women - Charity Scribner read her own paper, and a woman whose 
name I forget read Alain Badiou's paper because he wasn't able to 
come. In my own presentation, I mentioned the thin female presence. 
When several of us went to lunch after the final session, a woman 
who'd been in the audience thanked me for pointing that out, adding 
that it's the rule at all European academic conferences, and nobody 
ever mentions it. This sparked a little conversation about gender 
relations in general. One German woman rued the passivity of her 
sisters - but a Swiss woman studying in Paris said they're far more 
assertive than French women, whose only strategy for asserting 
themselves is the erotic/seductive.

As odd as it is for someone who likes to bash the U.S. to admit, it 
seems gender relations here are a bit more advanced than in the Old 
World.

Doug