Borderlands in European Gender Studies

Beyond the East–West Frontier

Teresa Kulawik, Zhanna Kravchenko, Teresa Kulawik, Zhanna Kravchenko

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032087511
• eBook ISBN: 9781000707489
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Challenging persistent geopolitical asymmetries in feminist knowledge production, this collection depicts collisions between concepts and lived experiences, between academic feminism and political activism, between the West as generalizable and the East as the concrete Other.

Borderlands in European Gender Studies narrows the gap between cultural analysis and social theory, addressing feminist theory's epistemological foundations and its capacity to confront the legacies of colonialism and socialism. The contributions demonstrate the enduring worth of feminist concepts for critical analysis, conceptualize resistance to multiple forms of oppression, and identify the implications of the decoupling of cultural and social feminist critique for the analysis of gender relations in a postsocialist space.

This book will be of import to activists and researchers in women's and gender studies, comparative gender politics and policy, political science, sociology, contemporary history, and European studies. It is suitable for use as a supplemental text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in a range of fields.

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Part I

Bringing in the second Other

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Chapter 1
Necessary and impossible

How Western academic feminism has traveled east

Agnieszka Graff

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Academic feminism is a deeply troubled field: troubled from the outside, of course, but also troubled internally. This chapter argues that feminists in postsocialist countries experience both sorts of trouble in a distinctive way due to three interconnected factors: (1) a historical context that has led many women in the region to become both feminist activists and academics; (2) the fact that we joined transnational feminist debates and strove to set up feminist structures at a time when the field was engaged in intense self-interrogation sparked off by the impact of poststructuralism and postcolonialism on feminist theory; and (3) the fact that we developed our political identities and theoretical orientations in the context of a transition to democracy, with neoliberalism at its height but liberalism—understood in the classical sense, as a philosophy founded on ideas of liberty, equality, and protection of minority rights—hardly a given.

The East–West feminist dialogue often begins with the Easterner patiently explaining the precariousness of her position in the region’s conservative academic institutions. Feminism is constantly attacked for being ideological, a word which may be shrugged off as epistemologically naïve by West European or American scholars, but which carries deadly weight in our part of the world due to the implied association with the communist era (for variations on this theme, see Daskalova et al. 2010). Synonyms such as doctrinaire or propagandistic do not even begin to evoke the stigma attached to the word ideology in postsocialist contexts. Then there is the charge that feminists are not objective or scientific: feminist research, it is argued, willingly sacrifices intellectual integrity to political mission. Finally, we are accused of having theorized ourselves out of political relevance: it is said that we have become too abstract, too obscure in our thinking; that we are an arrogant elite detached from the life of the so-called ordinary woman. This specter is routinely conjured up even in the relatively progressive media in order to discipline feminists, while conservative media frame feminists as enemies of the family and the nation, representatives of what is referred to as a culture of death. In Poland, we have only recently begun to comprehend the scale of the danger implicit in the war on “gender ideology” initiated in 2013 by Catholic bishops, right-wing politicians, and journalists (Grabowska 2013, 2014; Graff 2014; Graff and Korolczuk 2017; Korolczuk 2014). This backlash needs to be placed in a broader political context, both local and transnational: the polarization of the public sphere in Poland and the global resurgence of religious fundamentalisms, nationalisms, and populisms, movements that feed on real anxieties and inequalities caused by neoliberal policies.

The aim of the present article is to examine some of feminism’s internal problems while keeping this context in mind. I argue that Western academic feminism, long unmoored from its activist origins, is haunted by several contradictions that resonate strongly in postsocialist contexts. There exists an irreducible tension between, on the one hand, the political origin and political mission of feminism as a mass movement for social change in liberal democracies and, on the other, academic feminism’s commitment to high theory, which is largely engaged in undermining the basic concepts of liberal philosophy. Although this tension has its roots in the West, I contend that it is acutely felt in postsocialist states, where democracy’s status is far more precarious. My basic point concerning the founding years of academic feminism in the region is that we felt the theory/practice split as a profound tension in our own lives, a problem that needed to be solved rather than theorized.

Let me begin by recalling the familiar narrative. During the last three decades, academic feminist theory has unraveled the very categories on which modern feminism’s identity and strategy as a movement had relied: the concept of women’s common identity as an oppressed group; the notion of experience as a source of knowledge and basis for action; and the idea of universal rights as a basis for mobilization across borders. These concepts were undermined not by feminism’s detractors but by developments within feminist thought. Thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan became key reference points for feminist theorizing in the 1990s, changing conceptualizations of power and selfhood almost beyond recognition. The enormous influence of Judith Butler’s work led to a wave of antifoundationalism and a new interface between feminism and queer theory. Profound revisions in feminist perception of its own history were necessitated by the rise of Black U.S. feminism and postcolonial feminist theory. All this resulted in an impasse in the institutional project of Western academic feminism, a discontent or discomfort that has been explored and debated but that, arguably, remains unresolved (Brown 2008; Hemmings 2011; Scott 2008; Stimpson 1996; Wiegman 2002).

The questions at stake relate not to logical mistakes to be corrected or paradoxes to be explored and marveled at but to genuine aporias, irreducible contradictions. In the 1990s, a number of scholars conceptualized this development skeptically, as loss, crisis, or even betrayal, in texts that often included heated polemics with the early work of Judith Butler (Gubar 2000; Modleski 1991; Nussbaum 1999), but eventually most academic feminists embraced the paradigm change with enthusiasm, as their field’s necessary coming of age. Feminist theory has recently entered a phase of self-reflection, with scholars examining feminism’s engagements with its own development. In Why Stories Matter, a fascinating analysis of the affective dimension of feminist storytelling, Clare Hemmings shows the enormous influence of feminist narratives of “progress,” which rely on successive displacements of “old” feminist epistemologies and subjects (such as “patriarchy” or “female subordination”) and enthusiastically position their subject “as energetic and analytically astute, as generative of and residing in a well-earned state of positive affect” (Hemmings 2011: 35). The tale of progress is an adventure story that features the feminist scholar as a heroine who has successfully overcome the hurdles of the philosophical misconceptions inherited from the Enlightenment tradition. There exist competing narratives of loss and return, nostalgic stories that bemoan a too-hastily abandoned feminist past, but it seems clear that progress remains the dominant frame. From this perspective, those unwilling to move on seem marginal, perhaps even irrelevant.

It is not my purpose here to provide an overview and bibliography of these developments, nor do I intend to take sides in these debates. My aim is to cast light on the complex consequences of a certain historical coincidence. For over a decade—the very decade during which scholars and activists from postsocialist countries entered the debate—women’s studies became a field engaged in perpetual self-interrogation. I argue that our time of entry had important consequences for the feminism that developed in postsocialist countries, which has been marked by ambivalence toward feminist theory. In order to grasp this, it is important to note at the outset that the story under scrutiny is about more than theory: feminism must be viewed more broadly, as a cultural and political formation, an emancipatory project that includes, but by far exceeds, the realm of academia. It crosses national and regional boundaries and unfolds in a particular economic and political context, namely the hegemony of global neoliberalism. In recent years, a number of feminist thinkers have noted with alarm that neoliberalism has reframed many developments in feminist theory in accordance with its own agenda of depoliticization and privatization (Eisenstein 2009; Fraser 2009; McRobbie 2009; Mohanty 2013). My contribution is to consider how this diagnosis resonates in a postsocialist context.

Women’s studies without women?

In an article provocatively titled “The Impossibility of Women’s Studies,” Wendy Brown (2008) contended that academic feminism in the form of women’s studies programs once constituted an important intervention in the academy (a challenge to ubiquitous misogyny, sexism, and masculinism), but that it has outlived its usefulness. After admitting its past accomplishments, she argued:

Women’s Studies as a contemporary institution, however, may be politically and theoretically incoherent, as well as tacitly conservative—incoherent because by definition it circumscribes uncircumscribable “women” as an object of study, and conservative because it must resist all objections to such circumscription if it is to sustain that object of study as its raison d’être.

(Brown 2008: 21)

Brown’s argument is grounded in theoretical insights about subject formation and the relation between the (in this case female) subject and power. It is not just that there are many kinds of women, a plurality that the women in women’s studies obscures and evades. Once we recognize that subject formation occurs along many axes simultaneously, and not “in discreet units as race, class, nation, and so forth,” the very category of women becomes untenable as an object of study (Brown 2008: 31). If, moreover, we accept Foucault’s insight that power circulates through the subject of regulation, that human subjects are vehicles and not merely objects of power, then a political investment in “identity” becomes self-defeating. In effect, Brown argues, like any field organized according to social identity, women’s studies had to reach its limits.

“The Impossibility of Women’s Studies” was originally published in the journal differences in 1997, the very year in which the gender studies program was being established at Warsaw University. I participated in this effort as a doctoral student, sharing in the intense anxiety and hope, partaking in the heady atmosphere that only beginnings can offer. We used the abstract-sounding word gender in the pro-gram’s name, a choice that was partly determined by the founders’ awareness of theoretical developments in the West, but partly dictated by the need to strategize: gender seemed appropriately vague, neutral, foreign, and sophisticated. The word served as a sort of camouflage in Poland’s conservative academia, where neither women nor feminism would have been accepted. We were not lagging behind in theory. Rather, to recall Hemmings’s playful metaphor, we were “energetic and analytically astute” (2011) but engaged in an adventure story altogether different from that of our Western sisters.

In my view, the contradiction captured by Brown is real: women’s studies is a field of enquiry whose central category is both necessary and impossible to uphold. An important early book that undermined women as the grounding category of the field was Denise Riley’s “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (1988), which made a powerful argument for the indeterminacy of the concept. By the mid-1990s, the problem figured within feminist intellectual debates in the West as one of intellectual integrity and led eventually to the renaming of many women’s studies programs as gender studies. Most scholarly accounts of this historical moment view it as exciting, fruitful, and necessary, rejecting the criticism that too much self-scrutiny may be problematic for activism. In a defense of feminist theory’s turn to internal critique written at the end of the decade, Sara Ahmed insisted that such theorizing is the basis of action but also conducive to community building:

The internal critiques that any movement makes of itself involve re-thinking how to act, as well as what we are acting on. Action that is not informed by a double theorizing can be dangerous…. [T]his task of thinking and disputing the very categories with which we seek to contest the categories that are dominant in the worlds we inhabit, is also about thinking the complexity of “where” “we” are, and what we might seek to become. In this way, paying attention to how feminist theorizing is produced is also about producing collectivity, not as that which is “behind” the work that we do, but as that which is formed by those very acts of theorizing.

(Ahmed 2000: 102)

This argument, a persuasive response to the now mostly forgotten antitheory turn in Anglo-American women’s studies, works only in a particular institutional and ideological context: one that assumes the legitimacy of feminist theory as a scholarly pursuit and accepts journals such as Feminist Theory as respectable scholarly journals. Ahmed defends theory against the charge of political irrelevance in a context in which political relevance is believed to be a value. The political dimension of academic life is, of course, contested by some, but the link between certain academic disciplines and political movements is a historical fact acknowledged by all. In postsocialist countries, gender studies programs were being founded in a context profoundly hostile not only to feminism, but to the general idea that politics has a place in academia. There was a general tendency in post-1989 Eastern Europe to purge academic life of ideology, a category automatically linked to state socialism. In the 2000s, as nationalist sentiments grew and as the right appropriated postcolonial theory, scholars whose work was politically engaged—especially historians who wrote critically of Polish–Jewish relations, but also gender and queer studies scholars—were increasingly attacked as dupes of the “colonial condition,” accused of denigrating their own culture in order to please the West (Snochowska-Gonzalez 2012). In this context, we were facing urgent questions of strategy and legitimacy, a situation exacerbated by the fact that many of us were involved in both academia and political activism and that some went on to political careers.¹ To put it mildly, Western postmodern theorizing about the supposed impossibility of women’s studies was intellectually stimulating but oddly irrelevant to our predicament.

In 1999, as a graduate student just discovering feminism (and already teaching it—such was the peculiar logic of the situation in Poland), I participated in an intensive gender studies summer school at the Central European University in Budapest. The program, led by a team of Western scholars, included a course on feminism and psychoanalysis taught by one of the legends of British second-wave feminism, Juliet Mitchell. With a room filled with women from the region (Hungarians, Ukrainians, Czechs, Poles, Lithuanians), the discussion often strayed from topics such as Lacan’s notion of sexual difference or Cixous’s and Kristeva’s takes on Lacan’s phallogocentrism. We enjoyed the readings but wanted to know how feminist theory related to feminist practice. Mitchell understood the urgency of this question: she insisted that the link was vital and that academic feminism needed to be defended against efforts to depoliticize it. At the end of the course, I approached her, asking for an interview. Both tape and transcript are regrettably lost, but one of Mitchell’s statements stayed firmly in my memo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: European borderlands and topographies of transnational feminism
• Part I Bringing in the second Other
• Part II Conceiving scattered bodies
• Part III Citizenship intersected
• Epilogue: borderlands as an invitation to theory
• Index