Hot topic of feminism: “Many opinions without knowledge are very dangerous”

Simone Meier

The current UN announcement that more women and girls will be murdered in 2022 than in twenty years is shocking. In 2022, 89,000 victims of femicide. Violence has increased. Also in Switzerland. The counter-reaction is strong and visible. Is feminism over? Or more important than ever?

We spoke with Austrian filmmaker Katharina Mückstein about her documentary “Feminism WTF”. It is a film in which experts from the academic field speak; it is a smart history lesson about gender, but also about colonialism, about how enemy images arise and where the West has made irreparable mistakes.

It is a pedagogically smart inventory and a film that shows that we cannot rest on our laurels with utopian ideas about the future. It delivers questions, answers, fear and hope all in one. But first we go to another construction site of Katharina Mückstein. The “crime scene”.

You just filmed a ‘crime scene’ in Vienna. When you hang out on ‘Tatort’ fan forums, one character is always chosen as the crowd favorite: Bibi Fellner from Vienna. Played by Adèle Neuhauser. A headstrong commissioner who is completely free from all conventions. What did working with her mean to you?
Katharina Mückstein: I’ve known this character for a long time, and for me she was a female character very early on in the Austrian or German-speaking context, and I thought, oh, that’s a very gritty, very moving character. Then there is also a woman who is not very young, who does not correspond to the usual beauty ideals – although I think Adele Neuhauser is incredibly beautiful. For me it was great to work with this character, especially because Adele knows everything about Bibi and protects her very well in her work: she reads the script and immediately starts fighting for Bibi. Bibi’s popularity and complexity are largely due to Adele. “Tatort” is not always written and filmed by the same people; new people are always joining us.

Does this mean the series’ DNA lies elsewhere?
Precisely. And that’s why it’s incredibly important to have dedicated actors who are committed to their characters. Adele assigns Bibi a vulnerability, but she always emphasizes that the character is strong, independent and capable of action.

Let’s go from Bibi to ‘Barbie’, the film phenomenon of 2023. How did you, as a feminist director, experience the hype and the film?
Personally, I resisted going to the cinema for a long time. And then I thought the movie was really boring. I wasn’t interested in the character or his consciousness. The story of Barbie and Mattel will never be a feminist story, no matter how you spin it. The story of this doll is that generations of women have had eating disorders and grew up with surreal images of beauty. On the one hand, it is a marketing stunt to label the whole thing as feminist. On the other hand, it is not impossible that something that is capitalist and problematic in its history does not also convey feminist content. You have to see “Barbie” in this ambivalence.

“Barbie” is just a side note because I thought of it when I saw the color choice of your film “Feminism WTF”. They have high-profile feminist academics perform in rooms that are pink, purple or light blue. And I thought: if you put these rooms together to make a house, you would get a pastel-colored dollhouse similar to Barbie’s. What was your intention with this?
The history of the origins of this aesthetic has several aspects. One of them is that I am a feature film director. It was clear to me that I was now making a documentary, but I also wanted to make a film that was carefully crafted and that refuted the cliché that feminists are hostile to pleasure, gray and brittle. To me, feminism is pleasure-enhancing, life-affirming, and community-oriented. This is where true cohesion happens, this is where we can protect each other, even though we are different. My variety of colors can also be attributed to an idea as banal as the rainbow: it is a color spectrum, there are more colors than we can imagine, it is not about distinguishing the colors, but seeing them in their beautiful celebrate completely.

Your film mentions the line “Feminism is the most successful social movement of our time.” Honestly? I only see harsh counter-reactions, up to and including the abolition of existing laws, for example in America. I’ve been trying to convince myself for so long that these are the famous last throes of patriarchy that I have virtually no faith in them anymore. Is patriarchy much stronger than we think?
I think the fear is justified. This is what Swiss sociologist Franziska Schutzbach says in the film: On the one hand, there is hope that this is the last gasp before the death of patriarchy. This is a moment where the audience always laughs with relief. At the same time, she also says that attempts to undo the gains of feminism should not be taken lightly. Our rights are constantly threatened.

From the right.
Yes, from the right. We are rightly afraid of what could happen if right-wing parties gain even more power. Next year is election year in Germany. I am in contact with many German activists and they are very afraid. Also due to racist violence, which is currently flaring up again. It is not just feminism that we are working against, it is the actual diversification of our society, gender equality, the recognition of gender diversity. And of course this is being contested precisely because such major developments have taken place.

Precisely. We will no longer be beheaded, like Olympe de Gouges, who proclaimed during the French Revolution that women are people too. In Switzerland, women have been allowed to vote for 52 years…
It is also enough to look back at just two generations in your own family: my grandmother was not allowed to marry, have an account, or work without the permission of her father or later of her husband. My mother wrote a dissertation, started her own business, and still fought sexism all her life. Everything seems much better to me.

With your protagonists you try to open the discourse beyond our white, Central European present. We are no longer beheaded, but elsewhere people are stoned for being feminist or queer.
The insidious thing is that discrimination measures such as homophobia were only introduced in some countries by the European colonialists. We know this from Uganda and India, for example. Interventions were made in cultures that were well aware of gender diversity. Before colonialism. We must always question our European position. We live in so much peace and prosperity here and we have to ask ourselves at whose expense this has been achieved. We also tend to adopt a Eurocentric-patriarchal perspective in feminist discourses.

Like that?
We see ourselves as the spearhead of progressivism, we can have abortions, have children, work. The downside, however, is that thirty years ago it was still possible to support a family on one income. Nowadays that is no longer possible. Both parents have to work, but the care work is still there. Or it is about whether women should also join the army. But a feminist position is of course fundamentally against militarism and says that women should not become cannon fodder like men.

The sentence is also discussed: Just because someone is male and white does not mean that he is privileged. A reconciliation? A differentiation?
Political science professor Nikita Dhawan, a teacher in Dresden, says in the film that she meets several discrimination criteria because of who she is: woman, queer, of color, not in possession of a European passport. But if she compares herself to a white man who has German nationality, but is homeless and HIV positive, that is of course not true. There are always different forms of vulnerability that need to be taken into account in our society.

You have made a decidedly educational film that provides an understandable introduction to difficult topics such as postcolonial theory and trans studies. Where did this pedagogical motivation come from?
I’m forty now, I’ve been studying feminist issues since I was a teenager, and there are still new ways to think or understand something. Nowadays we rarely have the luxury of simply being able to learn something. And I wanted to make this luxury possible with my film. We are constantly forced to take a stand and express an opinion, often on matters in which we have no expertise. For example, on the subject of transgender and trans rights. Many opinions without knowledge are very dangerous.

What was the most important insight for you while working on your film?
My own feminist practice has changed enormously as a result of this film. At any point before the film, I would have said of myself that I was an intersectional* feminist. And that probably wouldn’t have reflected in my daily life, because I ended up living in predominantly white circles. Even though I was in a queer feminist scene, I was also connected to people who looked like me.

Yes, our typical bladder behavior.
Working on the film taught me what it takes to ask questions, listen, and be prepared for conflict. I have to design a space in which I work in such a way that people who are different from me, for example black feminists, also like to come there. I received rejections from some black feminists because they didn’t want to participate in a film that involved so many white people. I first had to understand that these women have had terrible experiences with women like me and that they no longer feel like it. So I had to think about how I could make a project like this attractive, so that people affected by racism feel invited and see my shoot as a safe place.

And what is your solution now?
I have learned to be hospitable and show solidarity with others. Being hospitable and showing solidarity is the most important thing. It was a difficult learning process for me and my team, but an educational process, and my entire personal environment also changed. If I really want to have relationships with people who are different from me, then I have to enter into relationships where differences can always create conflict. You have to get rid of this fear of conflict. It’s amazing how well it works and how much you grow together.

* “An intersectional feminism focuses on the voices of those who experience overlapping, simultaneous forms of oppression, to understand the depths of inequality and the relationships between them in each context.” (Source: UN Women Germany)

‘Feminism WTF’ is now in cinemas.