The Globalization of Gender

Knowledge, Mobilizations, Frameworks of Action

Ioana Cîrstocea, Delphine Lacombe, Elisabeth Marteu, Ioana Cîrstocea, Delphine Lacombe, Elisabeth Marteu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367785789
• eBook ISBN: 9780429576065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides an insightful approach to understanding the contemporary circulations of feminist repertoires and shows how the international/transnational circulations of gender are interconnected, even coextensive, with the globalization process itself.

Fed by a shared reflexivity on relations among activist groups, state institutions, and international actors involved in the production and dissemination of contemporary norms dealing with gender, each chapter shares methodological premises and studies the circulation of gender-related norms and knowledge in situ and by varying standpoints. Specifically, the authors de-compartmentalize the academic disciplines and go beyond classical geographic divisions, in order to map social spaces and networks of actors involved in the production and circulation of gender-related repertoires. Last, the book grasps circulatory processes and entangled social phenomena, which are usually subject to disciplinary and thematic divisions separating collective action and public action, development aid and feminism, law and international relations. Focused on collective and individual experiences within women's organizations, activist careers, unstable mobilizations, public policies temporalities, the chapters reveal the mechanisms through which these arrangements are made and shed light on strategies deployed by actors rooted in specific social and political contexts.

This book will be of key interest to students and scholars of gender studies and more broadly to politics, International Relations, sociology, geography, history, and anthropology.

Part I

Expertise

1 Gender as a transnational
socialization platform
(Eastern Europe, 1990–2000s)

Ioana Cîrstocea

During the 1990s, the concept of gender was used as a new tool for thinking, doing and measuring social and political change after the collapse of socialist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. Involved in promoting democracy, United Nations (UN) and European agencies, philanthropic and political foundations as well as transnational activist networks supported women’s rights and gender mainstreaming programs under the encompassing theme of civil society promotion. Carrying innovative approaches in social sciences and therefore testifying to the modernization of higher education, new teaching and research labelled as “gender and women’s studies” were established in the academic spaces of the region.

Numerous works highlighted the international impetus for including gender issues in the thinking about post-socialism and, more generally, for developing a feminist reflexivity in Eastern Europe during the so-called democratic “transition” period (Zimmermann 2007; Cîrstocea 2008; Daskalova et al. 2010; Daskalova et al. 2011). Still, the very social agents of these processes remain a blind spot in scholarship.

The objective of this chapter is to grasp the social mechanisms at work in the production and circulation of academic and activist repertoires related to gender¹ in the 1990s. Previously absent from the intellectual repertories carried out in the East-European region, the very concept was translated and adopted after the ending of the socialist regimes and it was channelled into the local cultures through complex processes of international and trans-sectorial circulation. Therefore, it appears at the same time as a neologism in the East-European languages, as a new instrument for the politics of women’s and minorities’ rights in the democratizing post-socialist countries, and also as an internationally circulating knowledge-production tool.

According to scholarship, during the decade that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the region of Eastern Europe was a privileged laboratory of globalization (Lecler 2013: 28). In the present chapter I make the case for observing social change related to this process by focusing on the emergence of new discourses referring to gender and by using as empirical ground the trajectories of the post-socialist “entrepreneurs” of the concept. After outlining the general framework of my research based on a transnational approach and on prosopographic tools,² I will consider several profiles of “pioneers” of gender and I will eventually discuss the institutionalization path of gender studies in a national setting.

East-European “pioneers” of gender: a sample survey

With a few exceptions (cf. infra), the Eastern-European “pioneers” of gender took feminist positions after the collapse of socialist regimes only, and in doing so they did not claim the legacy of the previous official structures for the advancement of women’s rights. On the contrary, the “woman question” as articulated by the socialist states was rapidly abandoned in favour of internationalized, liberal references such as “women’s human rights,” “equal opportunities,” “gender mainstreaming.” I put forward here the hypothesis that the feminists of the 1990s were socialized to new political and academic discourses through a transnational communication platform (Saunier 2004, 2008, 2010; Topalov 1999) structured around institutions serving as network nodes. Among them, I closely studied the Network of East-West Women (NEWW, a transatlantic activist group founded in New York in 1990 and launched in Dubrovnik by an international conference held in 1991), as well as the Open Society Institute (OSI, George Soros’ philanthropic foundation, based in New York and Budapest).³ These institutions brought together young women intellectuals based in different East-European countries while tightly connecting them to both militant and bureaucratic milieus shaped by the international organisms and global events of the 1990s, especially the UN conferences.⁴ They enabled encounters (activist meetings, conferences, research programs) as well as a significant circulation of academic knowledge and political know-how (Cîrstocea 2010; Cîrstocea 2011; Cîrstocea 2015a, 2015b; Cîrstocea 2017). “Configurations of interactions” (interpersonal meetings) and “intertextual communities” (visible via co-publication and citation) appear in archival documents and secondary literature. I used such co-occurrences in order to define a sample of Eastern-European “pioneers” of gender: their trajectories connect institutional and activist arenas, social spaces and institutions, as well as levels of feminist action (national, regional and inter-supranational).

The group under study is made up of 86 women who participated in three or more of 20 events (meetings and collective publications) organized in the 1990s by or with the support of the 2 institutions mentioned above.⁵ Using data from their biographies available on the websites of their home institutions, published interviews, presentations of contributors to collective publications, the sociologic profiles of those individuals were compared, taking into account variables such as their national origin, age, academic and militant activities in national and international contexts.⁶

Coming from 15 different countries,⁷ the members of the sample were in their thirties at the beginning of the 1990s.⁸ They studied humanities and social sciences,⁹ were educated¹⁰ or had worked abroad,¹¹ most of them held positions in cultural institutions¹² and had an activist experience.¹³ Information about participation in events ordered chronologically shows that a significant number of new individuals entered the field under study in 1996,¹⁴ a year which also marks an evolution in their profiles. Women from ex-Yugoslavia¹⁵ and Poland¹⁶ are overrepresented among those who entered in the first period (1990–1995); after 1996, some women of nationalities not previously represented¹⁷ entered, while Hungarians and Romanians¹⁸ were the majority of the newcomers. The year 1996 also marked a rejuvenation,¹⁹ which reflects the appeal that gender and women’s rights issues could exercise over young professionals at a time when these themes enjoyed maximum popularity in the wake of the Women’s World Conference organized by the UN in Beijing in 1995. The sample under study is also divided along the lines of education, internationalization and academic professionalization. The members of the first group are less likely to have upper-level degrees than the second group, they are less likely to have studied abroad or obtained an international degree, they are slightly less established in the academic spaces, they are more often involved in political activism, and they are also less internationalized. In sum, the group’s composition underwent a significant quantitative shift in the middle of the 1990s, with the academic dimension becoming increasingly prominent and the activist dimension tending to become less important.

Considering the elements presented above makes it possible to identify the academic-activist cleavage as one of the principles structuring the transnational social space under study. However, since work in women’s rights organizations and political commitments cut across the academic trajectories, the opposition between academic and activist profiles should not be taken as rigid.

Academics, activists, and experts: interconnected and fluid positions

Degrees in the humanities and social sciences

Specialists in the field of “humanities” dominate the sample²⁰ and the number of English literary-degree holders is also large, supporting the idea that the mastery of the main international language, as well as international cultural skills or participation in activities abroad favoured access to literature in feminism and gender studies produced in Western settings since the 1970s. As far as the disciplines are concerned, literary studies and philosophy were the first to integrate feminist questions and to introduce new topics dealing with gender. In that respect, an option frequently used by the East-European “pioneers” was to denounce the bias of the classic disciplinary canons by proposing to their students to work on readings from women and feminist authors. In this way, gender entered the university programs from the margins, as specific names of degrees or academic specializations were not always used in order to signal the innovation at the institutional level.

The group I have studied also includes historians, political scientists and psychologists and they generally were specialists involved during the 1980s in doing research on topics such as family, youth, social policies, or ethnic groups. Inspired by international encounters with Western feminist scholars, they launched new research directions, they criticized the traditional sources and the national disciplinary bodies of knowledge, while some of them also created new spaces for professional socialization.²¹

The presence in the sample of a few economists and legal scholars must be also noted. Their feminist positions took the form of critiques targeting the new post-socialist legal bills and policy programs which tended to limit women’s rights during the “transitions.” Technical skills enabled them to intervene in the public space in order to denounce the “male-stream” bias of the democratization policies. Last, but not least, a relatively significant number of researchers and teachers who dealt with gender in the 1990s were initially trained in sociology or converted to it,²² and they were invited particularly to contribute data on the differential impact of economic liberalization programs or the various aspects of gender gap.

Later on, they all would be acknowledged as experts in gender issues by diverse national and international organizations, which could invite them for consulting work. Participation in international circles allowed all those scholars to acquire resources that were essential to consolidating their feminist efforts at the national level. Meetings and exchanges, participation in collective research programs and international publications provided further visibility to the East-European “pioneers” of gender, offering them the opportunity to discover and share feminist knowledge and know-how, and also equipping them with an international capital, both symbolic and material. It is also important to mention that, while gender research and teaching found a de facto place in the academic spaces in the Eastern-European countries, successful attempts to institutionalize new degree programs in gender studies within higher-education institutions were rare (Daskalova et al. 2010; Daskalova et al. 2011) and do generally not go beyond the Masters level. In Romania, the first degree-awarding program dates from 1998; others were created after 2000 in Bulgaria and Serbia, while the only doctorate remained the one granted by an international private higher-education institution, namely the Central European University of Budapest.²³

Internationalized and critical intellectuals

The population under study includes several profiles already internationalized in 1989. These Eastern-European gender “pioneers” spoke English or had published in foreign languages; some had been involved in political opposition and were in contact with Western peace and human rights activist groups. The (ex-)Yugoslavian members of the sample were collectively organized as feminists by the end of the 1970s and they cultivated professional and militant contacts outside their country (Bonfiglioli 2008; Bonfiglioli 2018).

In total, one-third of the individuals had an experience of protesting against the socialist regimes, more or less extensive and more or less visible in the written recent history of their countries. The sample includes participants in the Prague Spring and Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 as well as people who had protested the conservative aspects of perestroika in the USSR or who had been active in Polish unions (Penn 2005). Their biographies bear the traces of these actions in the form of professional exclusions, persecutions and restrictions on civil rights, exile – experiences acknowledged and sometimes rewarded with distinctions when democratization occurred.

Therefore, being a feminist in the first post-socialist decade sometimes perpetuates previous oppositional political dispositions, constituted in the context of the authoritarian political regimes; indeed, some of the Eastern-European “pioneers” of gender became internationally visible due to their dissident positions during socialism.

Established scholars and newcomers to the academia

The profiles of the majority of scholars in the sample, which are ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Introduction. Gender: a globalized category of public policy and knowledge production
• Part I Expertise
• Part II Mobilization and politicization
• Part III Bureaucratic and economic diversion of gender
• Conclusion. Gender: a “useful category” for studying globalization
• Index