09 January 2019
Madrid
On 9 April 2019, the University Platform on Feminist and Gender Studies (EUFEM) presented the Manifiesto of Academic Support to Policies against Gender Violence. DEUSTO Interdisciplinary Research Platform on Gender is associated to EUFEM and supports the Manifiesto.
The Feminist and Gender University Institutes have been created throughout the last 30 years in different Universities, with the objective of palliating and correcting the androcentric biases of a university that had ignored the experience of women and their role as knowledge, science and culture producers for centuries and that have only accepted them in their classes in 1910.
For decades, the Spanish Universities’ Feminist and Gender Institutes have been emerging spaces where people belonging to the academia have been offering their knowledge and experience - in philosophy, history, science, culture or health - to give visibility to and analyse inequalities, correct content, expand knowledge and provide to the new citizens spaces of freedom and intellectual development. Thanks to them, the current equality units were created, identifying the inequalities present at the university, formulating policies to correct them and ensuring and implementing protocols aiming to put an end to harassment and discrimination in the classroom. Feminist and Gender University Institutes are a clear example of academic interdisciplinarity at the service of democracy and freedom, continuously connected with society and its needs.
For all these reasons, representatives of the Feminist and Gender University Institutes presented a manifesto stating that they will not tolerate the current attack on equality policies by sectors that want to undermine the progress done in the fight against violence and social discrimination from state policies, social movements and academia. They condemn and deplore the defamatory use that is being made by Vox on policies against gender violence, since it misrepresents goals and basic objectives of democracy.
The manifesto’s signatories remembered past experiences when marginalised groups started to have rights, when it was normal to emerge marginal and small groups denying change and progress. This had occurred when of the fight for universal suffrage, divorce or even the Spanish constitution.
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