Publication date: 12.12.2020

When it comes to authoritarianism, what happens in the household helps us understand what happens in the nation, what happens in the nation helps us understand what happens in the household. This is a talk about feminism as an analysis of power and powerlessness from the dinner table to the bedroom to the boulevard to the parliament. It’s also an exploration of the tools feminism has given us to understand abuses of power at all levels, emerging from an analysis of feminism as a branch of human rights concerned with gender. 

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and urban history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and catastrophe. Her books include Recollections of My Nonexistence; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; and A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she writes regularly for the Guardian and Lithub and serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International.

After the lecture, there will be a conversation with the author, led by Dr. Agata Sikora - cultural studies scientist, essayist, author of „Wolność, równość, przemoc. Czego nie chcemy sobie powiedzieć” (Freedom, equality, violence. What we don't want to know) and Magdalena Komornicka, art historian, curator of Joanna Piotrowska's exhibition.

This event is accompanying exhibition Joanna Piotrowska. Frowst – touching issues of women’s voice and resistance. Photographs presenting teenage girls in poses taken from self-defence refer to the ubiquitous, structural and physical violence against women, but they are also a story of a rebellion of women and girls against a culturally sanctioned narrative that disciplines women.