Genders 22

Postcommunism and the Body Politic

Ellen E. Berry

• Verlag: NYU Press
• Jahr: 1995
• ISBN:
  9780814786130
• Thema: Scienze sociali
• Thema: Studi di genere

The epidemic of mass rape in the former Yugoslavia has illustrated once again, and in particularly brutal fashion, the inextricable relationship between national politics, sexual politics, and body politics. The nexus of these three forces is highly charged in any culture, at any time in history, but especially so among cultures in which rapid, even cataclysmic, changes in material realities and national self-conceptions are eroding or overwhelming previously secure boundaries.
The postcommunist moment in the so-called Second World--Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union--has dramatically exposed the opportunities and dangers that arise when the political, cultural, and economic foundations of a society are de- and then re-structured. Gender roles and relations, expressions of sexuality or attempts to recontain them, representations of the body, especially the female body, and the larger, cultural meanings it assumes, are particularly marked sites to witness the performance of complex national dramas of crisis and change.
This groundbreaking volume turns its attention to the Second World, specifically to such subjects as the birth of the sex media and porn industry in Russia; Russian women and alcoholism; cinema in post-communist Hungary; patriotism and gender in Poland; sexual dissidence in Eastern Europe; and women in the former Yugoslavia.

> [ go to the Genders website ]

ONE
Bug Inspectors and Beauty Queens: The Problems of Translating Feminism into Russian

Beth Holmgren

A few years ago, when the Russian writer and lecturer-provocateur Tat’iana Tolstaia was endorsing the “truth” of Francine du Plessix Gray’s book on Soviet women, she penned this grim portrait of Western feminists rapping on the collective door of Soviet women and grilling them in the “cold, rigid manner” of bug inspectors: “How do your men oppress you? Why don’t they wash the dishes? Why don’t they prepare the meals? Why don’t they allow women into politics? Why don’t women rebel against the phallocracy?”¹ As comforting as it might be to dismiss this image as typical Tolstoyan reductionism, a less extreme version of it recurs in the commentary of Ol’ga Lipovskaia, the editor/publisher of the journal Zhenskoe chtenie (Women’s reading). Lipovskaia remarks on Western feminists’ bewildered, sometimes alienating contacts with Soviet women — the “real confusion of purposes and activities” manifest in various official meetings between the two groups, Western women’s one-track insistence on the value of their own agendas, the problem with effectively translating the most basic Western terms like “feminism,” “emancipation,” and “gender” for a slogan-weary Soviet audience.²

Impressions from the other side of the border record similar misconnections and sometimes vent a counter-dismay. Reporting in a January 1993 issue of the Nation, Andrew Kopkind notes the lack of a Russian feminist movement and Russian adoption “in the space of a few months” of “some of the West’s most reactionary gender roles and sexual stereotypes.”³ As he selectively interviews self-avowed Russian feminists like Lipovskaia and Anastasiia Posadskaia (the director of Moscow’s Center for Gender Studies), Kopkind relays stories and statistics sure to upset a Western feminist readership — for example, Russian women’s seeming acquiescence to a new, markedly Western brand of sexploitation (55) or the polls showing the rising number of Russian women who yearn to be full-time homemakers or aspire no further than the very often prone position of “secretary to a biznesman who earns hard currency” (50). In an article of 11 February 1993 for the Los Angeles Times, Elizabeth Shogren simply frames her survey of Russian women in Western terms, stating that these women “[b]y their own choice and because of mounting new social pressures … are less liberated, in the feminist sense, than they were when the Communist Party ruled the country.”⁴ Even Shogren’s Russian source, the social anthropologist Irina Popova, seemingly relies on American analogies: “Russian society is going through a phase similar to that in 1950s America, when homemakers and wholesome stars were idealized, … but because of a rebellion against the state-decreed sexual puritanism of the Soviet era, the ideal Russian woman is more sex kitten than homecoming queen.”

All of these attempted border crossings, with whatever intent or audience in mind, underscore the real difficulties of translating and transposing even a mainstream Western awareness of gender issues into the Russian (or generally Slavic) context. As one observer remarks, such crossings are liable to produce a kind of “mirror inversion” of images: Whereas Russian women sight the bogeywoman of doctrinaire or self-involved Western feminists, Western women lament what is for them the inexplicable “backwardness” of Russian women retreating to the home or readily consenting to play well-paid male sex object.⁵ This mutual misunderstanding seems especially pointed today, but it has existed for decades and pervades both popular attitudes and presumably more complex and considered trends in scholarship. I can offer myself as witness and accessory to this phenomenon. As an American woman trained to be a Slavist and beginning my teaching career in the late 1980s (when women’s studies programs were being established throughout the American university system), I have experienced these border troubles firsthand and at length. Already minted as a traditional scholar, I only learned about gender studies “on the job” from patient colleagues in other fields, and much to my surprised delight, this exposure revitalized and transformed my own research and teaching. Yet I quickly discovered that the integration of gender studies into Slavic studies involved complicated acts of translation and adaptation — acts that distanced me somewhat from my colleagues in women’s studies and for the most part disaffected or bemused my Slavist colleagues. As I have taught and written my way back and forth across this border, I have come to appreciate that the misunderstanding between Western women and Russian women and, by extension, the recurring difficulties of integrating gender studies into Slavic studies, stem from complex differences between first and second worlds, between two very separate contexts of experience, expectation, and expression. This essay attempts only a utilitarian sketch of these border troubles mainly drawn from a first world angle and focused on a limited number of examples, but it provides, hopefully, a somewhat experienced traveler’s “tips” for making a friendly border crossing, a mutually informed and transformative exchange with women in postcommunist Russia.

WHOSE FEMINISM?

When Shogren speaks of Russian women “being less liberated, in a feminist sense,” when Kopkind records the absence of a feminist movement, or when I glibly introduce the term “gender studies,” we cannot presume a common ideology, but we seem to rely on a common heritage — one founded mainly on the experience of certain privileged groups of Western women and especially manifest in Western feminist movements of the late 1960s. This is not to claim that Shogren, Kopkind, and I represent the broad spectrum of extant Western feminisms or to argue that these feminisms can be reduced to a 1960s agenda. But if we are not to generalize our historical experience (especially when we are assaying comparisons with non-Western women), then it is imperative that we acknowledge the long-lasting formative influence (both positive and negative) of that earlier agenda and its regional context. The 1960s movements largely formed in protest against the situation of middle-class white women in advanced capitalist states — specifically, against their socially assigned and enforced roles as wife, mother, and homemaker; the legal and actual inequities in their professional, social, and economic status as compared with that of middle-class white men; and the general exploitation and commodification of women as objects of desire. Predictably enough, when feminist scholarship furthered this protest, it focused first on its own “first” conditions and articulators — on the models, experiences, and works of privileged first world women. This specialized focus prevailed for some time, as did the notion of gender as the unifying category of identity, subsuming other categories like race, class, or sexuality.

Over the last quarter of a century, this bias has provoked much protest, factionalism, and metamorphosis among Western women’s groups; internal debate has facilitated a dismantling of traditional presumptions about gender and sexual identity, a greater acknowledgment of class and race differences, the generation of a plurality of feminisms. But despite the attempts of Western feminists to theorize and accommodate difference, we face perhaps the greatest challenge in relating to non-Western women, for such relations require the negotiation of the most complex differences and antagonisms and suffer most acutely from tendencies to generalize the local and stereotype the other. To date, this challenge has been most vividly illustrated and amply studied in relations between first world and third world women. It seems particularly telling that, at least in the early stages of their inquiry, critics writing from third world perspectives asserted regional bias rather than plurality in their readings of Western women; they critiqued Western feminists in general for “shortsightedness in defining the meaning of gender in terms of middle-class white experiences, and in terms of internal racism, classism, and homophobia.”⁶ Elaborating this position in her pioneering essay, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Chandra Talpade Mohanty charges that Western feminists’ presumption of gender as the main source of identity, oppression, and therefore solidarity “implies a notion of gender or sexual difference or even patriarchy which can be applied universally and cross-culturally” and establishes middle-class white Western women as a “normative referent” against which women of other races, classes, and especially third world nations seem lacking or “underdeveloped.”⁷

However debatable her position, Mohanty’s protest and critique should alert us to the possibility of a similar “early” dynamic between first world and second world women.⁸ If relations between Western feminists and women in the postcolonial world sometimes recall (or are perceived to recall) the blind opposition of Western imperialism versus colonial resistance, Western approaches to Slavic women can be read as similarly myopic, if somewhat less condescending. Certainly conditions were ripe for miscommunication. By the late twentieth century, decades of cold war politics and Stalinist repression had curiously distorted relations between Soviet women and a wide array of Western feminist groups; in both “camps,” the propaganda deployed to demonize the “other” superpower often inadvertently fostered a kind of blinkered idealization. From the vantage point of Western women (even liberal feminists), the public gains of Soviet women under socialism seemed undeniable — the Soviet constitution’s guarantee of women’s equal professional and economic rights, the access of Soviet women to most areas of the work force, the state’s at least partial support for working women (paid maternity leave, public day care). In turn, Western focus on these coveted achievements at times obscured or dismissed the special problems of Soviet women (their unrelieved domestic labor, the lack of consumer goods and services that would ease their domestic burden, the political victimization they shared with men). In fact, in her introduction to Soviet Sisterhood in 1985, Barbara Holland readily admits Western feminists’ self-serving nostalgia for the “new Soviet woman” of the 1920s, that almost-realized socialist feminist:

Feminists in the West may feel nostalgic for the determined pioneers of the past who, their red kerchiefs firmly knotted round their heads, climbed into the driving seat of a tractor or picked up a shovel on a building site. We may be hurt by the ridicule now attached to these images by Soviet women, themselves anxious to buy our fashionable jeans and dresses, and leave their dirty overalls behind.⁹

It seems predictable, then, that this sort of nostalgia would elicit protest, debate, and correspondingly reductive readings from the Russian side. It is interesting to note that a Russian feminist (Anastasiia Posadskaia quoted by Kopkind) redirects Mohanty’s complaints about Western “shortsightedness,” in this instance generalizing and critiquing the model of Marxist feminists:

When we met with Western feminists we were struck by their social frame. They were Marxists. We argued with them so much I even cried. How could I say that the system that did all this to me was good? No one wants to hear about solidarity in this country anymore, because for years it was imposed: solidarity with South Africa, solidarity with Cuba. For Western women socialism was a question of values. They said, “At least the Communists put liberation down on paper.” (55)

At this point in our relations, if Western feminists are to see beyond their nostalgia and Russian women are to hear beyond an alienating political rhetoric, then we all must commit to more historically informed, contextually sensitive ways of seeing, hearing, and speaking. We may even need to devise a language of paraphrase to defuse those political buzzwords (the legacy of American and Soviet cold war rhetoric, the mar-ketspeak of Western developmental politics) that continue to polarize us.

THE CAUSES OF RUSSIAN WOMEN

Indeed, once we examine the political traditions and historical experience of Russian women, we can appreciate that they have had ample cause to critique their own “determined pioneers” and to dismiss Western “nostalgia.” If the category of gender has been promoted at times at the expense of all other categories of identity by Western feminists, it has been a self-erasing or non-category — indeed, a non-term — in Russian and Soviet societies. To be sure, a “woman’s question” was raised in mid-nineteenth-century Russia to protest noblewomen’s unequal legal, political, and economic status and a Russian feminist tradition (under a variety of names) could be said to extend from the 1860s until the October revolution.¹⁰ Yet, for the most part, Russian women have eschewed specifically feminist programs for what they believed to be the larger, more urgent causes of populism or socialism or, in the Soviet period, Party loyalty or dissidence. For them the unifying, galvanizing categories of oppression and solidarity were those of class and allegiance or resistance to the state (be it tsarist or Soviet). Although the program (and sometimes even the practice) of women’s equal rights was automatically included in many nineteenth-century revolutionary movements, it remains significant that socialist groups (including the Bolshevik party) denounced any explicitly feminist movement as an exclusionary bourgeois by-product, the self-indulgent agenda of privileged middle- or upper-class women.¹¹ Not unlike women activists in various third world countries, Russian women were historically conditioned to scorn the presumably middle-class bias of feminism and its seemingly extravagant emphasis on individual fulfillment — especially in light of the material hardships and deficits continually plaguing Russian society.

Moreover, while seventy-odd years of Soviet rule certainly legislated the public image of the happy working woman, its less publicized realities shaped very different desires and goals in its female citizens. The “paper rights” issued to Soviet women guaranteed them an equal status and professional access unprecedented (and still unmatched) in the Western world, but, imposed as they were on an uninvolved populace, these laws neither produced nor were the product of a widespread social revolution. The “right to work” was extended more as responsibility than empowerment, and after a rather chaotic period of social experimentation in the 1920s, Soviet women were left with a monstrous double burden: the state tacitly endorsed their traditional assignment of housework and child care but invested minimal resources in supporting and supplying the domestic sphere.¹² For all the official rhetoric of equality between the sexes, essentialist notions of men’s and women’s capabilities and roles went unchallenged in daily practice and general social and cultural attitudes, with men and the “masculine” valued as the universal and most accomplished norm, and women and the “feminine” regarded as more limited, secondary, and often second-rate.

Yet, contrary to Western expectations, this double burden and practical inequality did not foment any sizable feminist campaign for a domestic revolution. Instead, the eventual binary opposition of Stalinist state versus society — that determiner of all value — generated an almost inverted scenario. Due to the perils and political compromises of public life and a successful “career...