Gender Generations And Communism In Central And Eastern Europe And Beyond

Communism in twentieth-century Europe is predominantly narrated as a totalitarian movement and/or regime. This book aims to go beyond this narrative and provide an alternative framework to describe the communist past. This reframing is possible thanks to the concepts of generation and gender, which are used in the book as analytical categories in an intersectional overlap. The publication covers twentieth-century Poland, Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, the Soviet Union/Russia, former Yugoslavia, Turkish communities in West Germany, Italy, and Cuba (as a comparative point of reference). It provides a theoretical frame and overview chapters on several important gender and generation narratives about communism, anticommunism, and postcommunism. Its starting point is the belief that although methodological reflection on communism, as well as on generations and gender, is conducted extensively in contemporary research, the overlapping of these three terms is still rare. The main focus in the first part is on methodological issues. The second part features studies which depict the possibility of generational-gender interpretations of history. The third part is informed by biographical perspectives. The last part shows how the problem of generations and gender is staged via the medium of literature and how it can be narrated.

The Afterlife of the Shoah in Central and Eastern European Cultures is a collection of essays by literary scholars from Germany, the US, and Central Eastern Europe offering insight into the specific ways of representing the Shoah and its aftereffects as well as its entanglement with other catastrophic events in the region. Introducing the conceptual frame of postcatastrophe, the collected essays explore the discursive and artistic space the Shoah occupies in the countries between Moscow and Berlin. Postcatastrophe is informed by the knowledge of other concepts of "post" and shares their insight into forms of transmission and latency; in contrast to them, explores the after-effects of extreme events on a collective, aesthetic, and political rather than a personal level. The articles use the concept of postcatastrophe as a key to understanding the entangled and conflicted cultures of remembrance in postsocialist literatures and the arts dealing with events, phenomena, and developments that refuse to remain in the past and still continue to shape perceptions of today’s societies in Eastern Europe. As a contribution to memory studies as well as to literary criticism with a special focus on Shoah remembrance after socialism, this book is of great interest to students and scholars of European history, and those interested in historical memory more broadly.

This Handbook is the key reference for contemporary historical and political approaches to gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Leading scholars examine the region’s highly diverse politics, histories, cultures, ethnicities, and religions, and how these structures intersect with gender alongside class, sexuality, coloniality, and racism. Comprising 51 chapters, the Handbook is divided into six thematic parts: Part I Conceptual debates and methodological differences Part II Feminist and women’s movements cooperating and colliding Part III Constructions of gender in different ideologies Part IV Lived experiences of individuals in different regimes Part V The ambiguous postcommunist transitions Part VI Postcommunist policy issues With a focus on defining debates, the collection considers how the shared experiences, especially communism, affect political forces’ organization of gender through a broad variety of topics including feminisms, ideology, violence, independence, regime transition, and public policy. It is a foundational collection that will become invaluable to scholars and students across a range of disciplines including Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Central-Eastern European and Eurasian Studies.

This book examines women’s activism in and beyond Central and Eastern Europe and transnationally within and across different historical periods, political regimes, and scales of activism. The authors explore the wide range of activist agendas, repertoires, and forums in which women sought to advocate for their gender and labour interests. Women were engaged in trade unions, women-only organizations, state institutions, and international and intellectual networks, and were active on the shopfloor. Rectifying geopolitical and thematic imbalances in labour and gender history, this volume is a valuable resource for scholars and students of women’s activism, social movements, political and intellectual history, and transnationalism. Contributors are: Eloisa Betti, Masha Bratishcheva, Jan A. Burek, Selin Çağatay, Daria Dyakonova, Mátyás Erdélyi, Dóra Fedeles-Czeferner, Eric Fure-Slocum, Alexandra Ghiț, Olga Gnydiuk, Maren Hachmeister, Veronika Helfert, Natalia Jarska, Marie Láníková, Ivelina Masheva, Jean-Pierre Liotard-Vogt, Denisa Nešťáková, Sophia Polek, Zhanna Popova, Büşra Satı, Masha Shpolberg, Georg Spitaler, Jelena Tešija, Eszter Varsa, Johanna Wolf and Susan Zimmermann.

This work is a critical intervention into the archive of female identity; it reflects on the ways in which the Central and Eastern European female ideal was constructed, represented, and embodied in communist societies and on its transformation resulting from the political, economic, and social changes specific to the post-communist social and political transitions. During the communist period, the female ideal was constituted as a heroic mother and worker, both a revolutionary and a state bureaucrat, which were regarded as key elements in the processes of industrial development and production. She was portrayed as physically strong and with rugged rather than with feminized attributes. After the post-communist regime collapsed, the female ideal’s traits changed and instead took on the feminine attributes that are familiar in the West’s consumer-oriented societies. Each chapter in the volume explores different aspects of these changes and links those changes to national security, nationalism, and relations with Western societies, while focusing on a variety of genres of expression such as films, music, plays, literature, press reports, television talk shows, and ethnographic research. The topics explored in this volume open a space for discussion and reflection about how radical social change intimately affected the lives and identities of women, and their positions in society, resulting in various policy initiatives involving women’s social and political roles. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of gender studies, comparative politics, Eastern European studies, and cultural studies.

This Handbook addresses the role of women in communism as a global, social and political movement for the first time, exploring their lives, forms of activism, political strategies and transnational networks. Comprising twenty-five chapters, based on new and primary research, the book presents the lives of self-identified communist women from a truly international perspective and outlines their struggles against fascism and colonialism, and for women’s emancipation and national liberation. By using the lens of transnational political biography, the chapters capture the broader picture of these women’s lives, unpacking the links between the so-called public and private, the power structures and inequalities of their societies, the formal networks and politics in which they were involved, and the informal connections and friendships that supported their activism both at the national and international level. Challenging androcentric and Eurocentric narratives about communism, this Handbook reveals the active and significant roles of women in nineteenth- and twentieth-century communist movements and regimes, and highlights the importance of communist women in shaping the agenda for women’s rights worldwide.

The thirteen authors of this collective work undertook to articulate matter-of-fact critiques of the dominant narrative about communism in Poland while offering new analyses of the concept, and also examining the manifestations of anticommunism. Approaching communist ideas and practices, programs and their implementations, as an inseparable whole, they examine the issues of emancipation, upward social mobility, and changes in the cultural canon. The authors refuse to treat communism in Poland in simplistic categories of totalitarianism, absolute evil and Soviet colonization, and similarly refuse to equate communism and fascism. Nor do they adopt the neoliberal view of communism as a project doomed to failure. While wholly exempt from nostalgia, these essays show that beyond oppression and bad governance, communism was also a regime in which people pursued a variety of goals and sincerely attempted to build a better world for themselves. The book is interdisciplinary and applies the tools of social history, intellectual history, political philosophy, anthropology, literature, cultural studies, and gender studies to provide a nuanced view of the communist regimes in east-central Europe.

In the wake of communism’s decline, women’s concerns had become increasingly important in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Yet most discussions of post-communism changes had neglected women’s experiences. Originally published in 1993, this title was the first collection of its kind, presenting original essays by women scholars, politicians, activists, and former dissidents from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, along with essays by Western feminists and scholars. They discuss gender politics during the often turbulent transition and crises of post-communism, offering vivid accounts and analyses of the conditions facing women in each country.