Introduction
Conceptual debates and methodological differences
Janet Elise Johnson, Katalin Fábián, and Mara Lazda
The Routledge Handbook of Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia examines the contemporary historical and political approaches to gender in Central-Eastern Europe and parts of Eurasia (CEE&E) from the 20th through the first two decades of the 21st century. With the collapse of communism starting in the late 1980s, the past three decades brought this large and previously relatively isolated region quickly into extensive contact with the rest of the world. The Handbook asks how political forces have organized gender before, during, and after communism and how individuals and women’s/feminists groups respond. This collection is structured to present the developments in the study of women and gender in CEE&E through the defining debates, highlighting specificity but also the many inviting and challenging connections globally.
Gender is always one of the main axes around which politics, economics, and societies are organized, but Communist Party regimes in CEE&E explicitly politicized gender by raising and ostensibly solving the “woman question.” As Soviet power collapsed, state-defined gender ideologies transformed, making it even more obvious that not only social norms and economic conditions construct gender, but that gender is a structure of power shaped by distinct historical contexts. As developed in the chapters that follow, we hold that gender represents systems of difference, privilege, and oppression that affect us all—women, men, and those who do not fit within these binary categories—and is created, not primarily through individual acts of sexism but through political, economic, and social processes, lived and inscribed into laws, informal norms, and practices. The Handbook demonstrates how gender has become politicized and central to the various regimes over the last century and a half in CEE&E.
From the late 1980s, the study of gender within CEE&E grew rapidly inside and outside the region. The analysis has mostly been of women’s positions and later gender, eventually embracing intersectionality—the dynamic matrix through which various structures of power operate, not just separately but in combination with each other. Some scholars focusing on gender have taken up the lens of postcoloniality—the examination of the racialized and ethnicized legacy of imperialism and colonialism including the Soviet project—and the interrogation of the unmarked categories of masculinity as well as hetero- and cis-normativity. Prominent scholarly disagreements have manifested, most notably about western intervention, feminism, and the assessment of state socialist policies for promoting gender equality but also about the usefulness of traditional gender analytics.
Driven by feminist commitments to integrating women’s stories, the Handbook’s chapters mostly rely on qualitative data, such as memoirs, oral history, archival research, ethnography, and interviews. Most of the chapters’ authors are trained as scholars of history, political science, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, or the study of the region, but there are also chapters from the perspectives of disability studies, social work, legal studies, peace studies, and public health. We did not overcome the legacy of scholarship’s focus on Russia or the tendency toward Cold War lenses, yet the inclusion of perspectives from across the region and alternative frameworks suggests paths to diversifying knowledge production.
By focusing on countries that have a shared—albeit, quite varied—experience of communism in the 20th century, the Handbook makes an argument that this history continues to shape how gender is constructed. But, we argue that this communist history is neither the only shared experience, nor the only useful spatial or temporal framework for understanding the parameters of the region. When discussing pre-World War I periods, the Handbook includes the lands of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, German, and Russian Empires as they exerted significant influence regarding gender arrangements on these territories and peoples. When discussing the communist period, the Handbook interprets the Eastern Bloc, meaning the territories under Soviet influence in Central-Eastern Europe as well as the entire Soviet Union, and periods when Yugoslavia, Albania, and Romania endorsed a form of communism while distancing themselves from the Soviet Union. After the early 1990s, major political shifts took place: some states divided, Germany reunited, some states entered into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union. At the same time, the Handbook recognizes that postcolonial and intersectional perspectives especially complicate and challenge the idea that ideological and regime changes are critical junctures and raise questions as to whether a region as such exists. The COVID-related crises of 2020, with their gendered and racialized impact, may further challenge our assertion.
This first Part of the Handbook examines the development of the feminist study of CEE&E over time, including epistemological and methodological approaches and the most important continuing debates that inform and enrich the global intellectual engagement with gender in CEE&E. The second Part focuses on the emergence of women’s movements in their cooperation and collision with feminist movements and different regimes. The third Part analyzes how the dominant ideologies intended to organize gender relations, with the fourth Part deliberating how lived experiences conformed to—and challenged—such ideological visions. The fifth and six Parts are similarly paired in their dialogue with each other, with the fifth examining the ambiguity of the postcommunist transitions and the sixth focusing on gender-specific policy debates, all the while considering the global, regional, state-centric, and local dynamics.
The study of gender in CEE&E is multidimensional, interdisciplinary, and relevant for professed and practiced ideology, policy, and everyday lives. It is transnational, intersectional, and reflexive, informed by intense debates and learning from the ongoing scholarly contentions. Over the last three decades, gender has become an integral, if derided, part of the study of CEE&E across the social sciences. This study is an important part of the decentering of the West in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, especially with its nuanced and innovative theorizing on the intersections of class, ethnicity, and race outside of western frameworks. With the rise of anti-gender movements and leaders since the global financial crisis and their opposition to democracy and gender equality, these kinds of approaches to interpreting the intersections between gender and politics are crucial to understanding and undermining these logics and moving toward gender justice.
1
Between regional and transnational contexts
Maria Bucur
At its most expansive definition, Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E) contains both the world’s largest landmass and is home to over half a billion people. It is a space with a dizzying diversity of languages and other cultural attributes, and with a rich past in every aspect of human endeavor. Yet it has been the object of less interest in gender analysis than other parts of the world, especially the Americas and Western Europe. Scholars of CEE&E have framed answers to questions about how gender regimes are established and negotiated over time through specific spatial contexts: local, regional, national, transnational, or global. By gender regimes I mean the articulation of gender norms through state policies, as well as cultural institutions like religious denominations and kinship practices. Choices made to shift among them generate geographic hierarchies of meaning.
When feminist activists and scholars frame the nation as the proper context for understanding gender regimes, they often render the local or transnational as secondary or even invisible for understanding gender norms. In other cases, explicit tension among spatial frameworks becomes productive for gender analysis. Local events become more meaningful when various layers of other spatially defined norms or processes are examined together: the national could be important for specific legislation, the transnational relevant for cultural networks, the local for cultural resignifications of gender policies. The intersection of various spatial contexts is particularly meaningful when gender analysis interrogates the relationship between intentional, institutionalized action, such as government policies about LGBTQ rights, and fluid discourses, like pride marches. This chapter points to the limits and productive possibilities of moving among geographic registers as strategies for understanding gender in CEE&E.
The region: What’s in a name?
In the early 2000s, when I joined Francisca de Haan and Krassimira Daskalova to establish Aspasia, we had numerous discussions about the geographic reach and appropriate nomenclature. We ended up with “the International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History,” which is not an elegant or even precise definition of the journal’s geographic reach, since countries like Turkey and Russia lie not only in Europe. It was a compromise aimed to encourage wide participation from scholars of gender and women’s history, as well as wide interest among readers from this region. We were confident that gender norms in this area had more in common than near invisibility in the historiography. Premodern Empires (Ottoman, Russian, Habsburg) that controlled much of the region generated gender regimes for parts of CEE&E as these states grew or shrank in size. Sometimes these shifts meant that older gender policies and discourses would be replaced by new ones. But sometimes political changes on the surface left gender regimes established in previous Empires somewhat untouched. For instance, the Central European Habsburg Empire struggled to gain and maintain legitimacy over inheritance practices in Southeastern European places like Croatia and Bosnia (Krešić 2011). The two sub-regions had localized practices connected to religious dogma and customary law that gave women different rights than men. In Bosnia, therefore, one can speak about Central Europe as relevant geography for understanding the intentions of the Vienna-based Habsburg regime. Southeastern Europe is relevant for understanding the Islamic schools that afforded women specific avenues for claiming inheritance (Zečević 2007). But Central Europe does not describe a unitary set of expectations, values, or discourses about gender norms. Though the strongly Catholic Habsburg Empire dominated this region, it did not impose Catholic gender norms on non-Catholic subjects. The result was the juxtaposition of different, even contradictory principles and policies about marriage, divorce, inheritance, and other elements of gender roles (see also Wingfield, Chapter 28 in this Handbook).
Religious institutions and practices predominant in parts of CEE&E are important for understanding the development of gender regimes both before secularization in the 20th century and also since the end of the Cold War. Yet they do not amount to a solid geographical region with specific, unique attributes. Even on matters of heteronormativity, the perspective of various Christian churches on homosexuality differed significantly from that of Islamic schools of thought in the region. The Christian discourses and the specific punishments leveled against non-heterosexual behavior were more disparaging and drastic than any form of heteronormative disciplining taking place in Islamic communities. Even Orthodox Christianity, largely circumscribed to CEE&E, is a religion with significant regional variance, often impacted by the religious institutions of the specific Empire that ruled over Orthodox populations. The history and impact of Orthodox Christianity in Russia, where some categories of women had more property rights, is very different from the history of Orthodox Christianity in Romania, for instance (Bucur 2018b; Marrese 2002).
Eastern Europe has been used in gender analysis more frequently than Central or Southeastern Europe, as “Eastern” served to identify countries with a state socialist regime in Europe after World War II and it was used primarily outside of the region, initially by politicians and scholars operating through the polarizing framework of the Cold War (Wolchik and Meyer 1985). The Soviet Union and its satellite countries presented gender equality early on as a mark of the communist regimes’ democratic accomplishments and progressive foundations. The (in)famous 1959 Kitchen Debate between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev served as a staging ground for making opposing claims on behalf of women’s emancipation on the basis of technological advancements (Hamilton and Phillips 2014).
A more self-critical position on the part of North American Sovietologists developed within the feminist scholarship in the 1980s. Some perspectives were more sympathetic to Marxist ideas about gender equality and to anti-colonial perspectives on capitalism (Boxer 2007). The neat West/East, capitalist/communist binary became more complicated when feminist scholars and activists, such as Angela Davis (1981), began to introduce questions about racism in gender analysis. More recently, some scholars from former communist countries have assumed Eastern Europe as a self-referential term to highlight both the communist legacies wit...
