Women in Culture. Introduction to the Issue

The late 1960s and early 1970s development of liberation discourses (postcolonial, racial, ethnic, gender, environmental, etc.) resulted in them turning not only and not so much into an intellectual strategy, but instead, in their entering culture as social practices, and becoming the main patterns of behavior and models of thinking. 1 In this context, the feminist discourse, 2 which initially developed as a political and legal narrative of the struggle for women’s rights, unfortunately became a world view and even an ideological discourse of opposition and competition between the sexes as it spread. In view of the above, the current cultural situation pursued by feminist activists in terms of gender can be described as a struggle for alpha leadership between an antagonist and a protagonist in the course of a liberation discourse (Gaag, 2014; Carrigan, Connell & Lee, 1985, pp. 551–604; Wood, 2011). Such a struggle is also often described in the terminology of Darwinian natural selection and, therefore, it is realized in social practices as an all-out war between the “oppressors” and the “oppressed,” justified by the criteria of biological (non)utility in nature or society.