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June Poetry Readings
IN TRIBUTE TO HRISTO BOTEV

This event is part of the 'HIGH VELOCITY: All about Him' Project

Head of Project: Ventsislav Zankov
Partnering organizations: GEMINI Bulgarian Gay Organization,
MURGASH Art Gallery
Event coordinator: Ivanna Murdzheva
powered by [E80] association - Exit Strategies&Projects

Reading Botev Today

" … а на небето слънцето спряно сърдито пече…"
Христо Ботев

Today's militant feminism can boast with an important achievement: it elaborated and enforced a brazen concept about gender roles and their social sanction. In addition, feminism introduced a register of its own and managed to sell it as the universal, and in fact, the only reliable guide to the controversial debate over gender-identity-society. This promotion campaign was so successful that every now and again it manages to boycott the debate itself. Similar feminist efforts are meant to obuse the dramatic human tendency to division: they neatly 'hunt down' any discourse, which fails to recognize the difference between him and her, Shakespeare and She'kspeare, and elegantly shoot it off as 'politically incorrect'.

There is an ultimatum-like streak to these effort: they strive to deflate the universal implications of 'man' and to strip men of their 'solar' quality.It hardly comes as a surprise that the symbol of the sun, in its turn, should be sanitized from meanings related to masculinity, because 'when-you-come-to-think-of-it' this is a symbol wriddled with universal values. The political correctness, which feminist readily introduced in our lives, leaves us with alarming prospects. If we are to follow it consistently we will end up describing men as 'male' men, fearing the time in the coming future when the discussion about 'female' men will inevitably grab us.

Until then we will be stigmatized as 'macho' types any time we attempt to interpret the 'solar' aspects to masculinity.* And we will join the prisoners of Her Majesty The Political Correctness. Chances are that Botev's credo and writings will keep us company.

Unless we try keep these feminist practices off Botev's readings and reconsider their usefulness elsewhere.

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* Not to mention the glamor of the elusive, transient lunar aspect to femininity which will be ardently outlawed by feminists,anyhow. The apocalyptic vision of the Moon falling from the skies and the Sun never rising is an excellent metaphor, that is if we need one, about this symbolic stagnation.