Living Gender after Communism

Cover

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Contents

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Foreword

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pp. vii-ix

More than a dozen years have passed since the collapse of communism and its attendant dislocations, crises, and opportunities. A whole generation of young people has come of political age without ever having experienced communism for themselves. For them, it is only a set of stories told by their parents and grandparents...

Acknowledgments

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pp. xi-xii

Living Gender

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pp. 1-21

The chapters presented in this volume—most by young scholars from postcommunist states—suggest that moving away from communism in Europe and Eurasia has provided an opportunity for gender to multiply.¹ As the communist party-state has retired, other institutions and processes—such as the market, political parties, ethnic identities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the...

I. NEGOTIATING GENDER

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pp. 23-

1. Housewife Fantasies, Family Realities in the New Russia

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pp. 25-39

Since the early 1990s, the Western press has published a regular flow of articles about the changing gender climate in the former Soviet Union. These articles describe Russian women finding a high-earning husband and becoming the bored, beauty salon–hopping housewives of the new rich, or signing up in droves for international...

2. Contesting Violence, Contesting Gender: Crisis Centers Encountering Local Governments in Barnaul, Russia

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pp. 40-59

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there was a momentous opportunity for the transformation in the Russian response to domestic violence. For the first time, most Russians—87 percent of men and 93 percent of women in a 2001–2002 survey—agreed that violence against women in the family is a problem.¹ From a Moscow suburb and the northern city of Arkhangelsk to the ethnic Republic of Tatarstan and...

II. DENYING GENDER

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pp. 61-

3. The Abortion Debate in Poland: Opinion Polls, Ideological Politics, Citizenship,and the Erasure of Gender as a Category of Analysis

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pp. 63-79

Reproductive policy and politics have surfaced as topics of debate across Central and Eastern Europe since 1989. In Romania, the liberalization of abortion was one of the first initiatives proposed by the provisional government, ¹ while in East Germany questions around access to abortion threatened the future of unification...

4. The Gendered Body as Raw Material for Women Artists of Central Eastern Europe after Communism

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pp. 80-101

The suppression and limitation of creative expression during the rule of communist regimes catalyzed a rebellious voice among some Polish, Czech, and Slovakian women artists. The dramatic appearance of explicitly genderrelated art since then is a sign that new opportunities for women artists have emerged. I argue that these...

III. TRADITIONALIZING GENDER

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pp. 103-

5. Birthday Girls, Russian Dolls, and Others: Internet Bride as the Emerging Global Identity of Post-Soviet Women

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pp. 105-127

Twenty-one-year-old Olga from Ukraine writes in her online ad: ‘‘I am a calm, even-tempered lady. I love children, home comfort, and stability. I also like music, movies, and sports. I adore children. I’m looking for a kind, honest man, who dreams to create a strong family.’’ This personal ad written in awkward English is rather unremarkable...

6. Does the Gender of MPs Matter in Postcommunist Politics? The Case of theRussian Duma, 1995–2001

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pp. 128-146

In postcommunist Russia, the problems that women face as women have for the most part been ignored.¹ In this new situation, the problem of representation of women’s interests in top government institutions becomes of utmost importance. Can the Russian political elite be responsive to women’s interests? If so, which segments of the...

IV. NEGOTIATING GENDER WITHIN NATIONALISMS

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pp. 147-

7. Romanian Women’s Discourses of Sexual Violence: Othered Ethnicities,Gendering Spaces

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pp. 149-168

In December 1989, Romanian citizens of all ethnicities revolted against the socialist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceau¸sescu and demanded radical change. Among the first legislative revisions was the reversal of the oppressive pronatalist policies that had denied Romanian women the right to abortion and contraception in the interests of ‘‘the nation.’’ Socialist rhetoric of gender and ethnic equality was replaced by...

8. Challenging the Discourse of Bosnian War Rapes

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pp. 169-184

This chapter challenges the existing discourses on the Bosnian war rapes by capturing nuances that have been omitted in many, especially earlier, analyses.¹ When I use the word ‘‘discourse,’’ I use it in Foucault’s sense, designating ‘‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.’’² These discourses have...

9. Deficient Belarus? Insidious Gender Binaries and Hyper-feminized Nationality

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pp. 185-202

Belarus did not yield to the wave of nationalism that swept across the former Soviet bloc states in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The country regained its independence in 1991 and, in contrast to the neighboring states overwhelmed by ethnic and nationalistic tensions, remained peaceful. At first open to the national resurgence...

Fifteen Years of the East-West Women’s Dialogue

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pp. 203-226

Since the 1989 breakup of the Soviet bloc, women from the region of the former Soviet Union, eastern, southeastern, and central European states (hereafter referred to as ‘‘the region’’) engaged in dialogue with each other and with women and feminists who came to the region, especially from Western Europe and the United States. The latter initially...

Works Cited

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pp. 227-249

List of Contributors

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pp. 251-253

Index

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pp. 255-263