'You keep belittling us and we are sick of it!': Four lessons learned from feminist interventions in Czech art schools

Joining the many past and present students who are sick of the belittling in Czech art schools such as the feminist collective Čtvrtá vlna, the article identifies four areas that are key to the upholding of heteropatriarchy in Czech tertiary education. Presented in a form of ‘lessons learned’, the aim of the respective analyses is to help make successful the contestations of androcentrism and sexism in Czech art schools and art world more broadly. Deploying autoethnography, the analyses draw from a self-reflexive account of the author’s experience of studying art and art education on the university level in the Czech Republic. Drawing from this self-reflexive narrative and feminist scholarship on art education and postsocialism, the article examines the paradoxical and intricate ways through which heteropatriarchy operates in Czech tertiary art education, with particular focus on how heteropatriarchy entangles with other regimes of colonial (post)modernity, namely Eurocentrism, capitalism and its correlate, the overcome state-socialism.