Gender and History of
tive or reformist visions with roots in state
Revolutions in Eastern
and Central Europe
C. LAURA LOVIN
University of Strathclyde, Scotland
JOANNA REGULSKA
University of California, Davis, USA
The time period examined in this entry
includes watershed historical moments, such
as the Russian Revolution of 1917, the end
of World War II in 1945, and the fall of
state-socialist regimes of Central and Eastern
Europe (CEE) and of the Soviet Union in
1989. It also extends to the years of European
Union (EU) accession of 10 CEE countries
as well as to the global financial crises of the
2000s and 2010s.
In discussing the postsocialist period, this
entry examines the repercussions of the 1989
moment and the political, economic, and
sociocultural transformations that materi-
alized with the fall of state socialism. These
transformations were significantly shaped by
the newly acquired global hegemony of the
free-market economy and liberal democracy.
The gains of democracy and political free-
dom that followed 1989 were accompanied by
losses in economic stability for a considerable
segment of the population across the region.
Furthermore, the endorsement of patriar-
chal, nationalist, and chauvinistic attitudes
diminished the social, political, and eco-
nomic agency of women, ethnic minorities,
and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
(LGBT) communities in many countries of
the CEE. Proceeding down the neoliberal
path suppressed alternative trajectories that
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, First Edition. Edited by Nancy A. Naples.
2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118663219.wbegss273
could have activated post-state-socialist resis-
socialism.
Two misconceptions tend to prevail in
political and sociological analyses of the
CEE countries. The first, most often encoun-
tered within political theory that emphasizes
democratization, is consistent with liberal
and neoliberal ideological systems. This
paradigm represents the CEE countries at the
beginning of the 1990s as nation-states at the
start of an institution-building race. The insti-
tutions of the West are viewed as the finish
line of the race, a desirable and natural end
point whose contingent histories are erased in
the face of violent, exploitative, and predatory
colonial interventions of Western states. The
second misconception is consistent with anti-
capitalist critiques, which challenge global
capitalism and the hegemony of neoliber-
alism but in so doing strip the region of
agency and reposition the CEE countries as
the victims of the West (Linch 2013).
It is important to be cognizant of the reduc-
tive character of these mutually exclusive lines
of argumentation while also remaining aware
of the uneven distribution of power across
geopolitical regions. This entry considers
the transformations that the region went
through during the past century by account-
ing for shifting geopolitical boundaries and
uneven power relations among regions. Most
importantly it accounts for the agency of the
people who shaped these changes by opting
for specific institutions, articulating critiques,
and envisioning futures. Womens mobiliza-
tions for social justice have emerged from
the interaction between local and translocal
scales and have sought to address gender
issues and inequalities produced within the
circumstances of state socialism as well as
2 GENDER AND HISTORY OF REVOLU TION S I N EASTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE
postsocialism. For more than two decades
women from the CEE have mobilized around
issues of economic discrimination and polit-
ical representation. They have reclaimed
their bodies and organized in support of
reproductive rights and against violence
against women. While their multidirectional
collaborations at the local, national, and
transnational scales have not always been
harmonious, together with their allies from
LGBT movements they have challenged
heteronormative and heterosexist definitions
of family and sexuality. They have formed
alliances and coalitions with activists who
fought for ethnic and racial justice. Some men
joined these struggles, but their collaboration
with womens and feminist organizations
around the region was rather sporadic and
mostly coalesced around the issues of sexual
orientation (Regulska and Grabowska 2013).
ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATIONS
The emancipation of women that followed
World War II was central to the imple-
mentation and validation of the new order
orchestrated by the Soviet Union for the CEE
countries. At the intersection of economic,
political, and ideological imperatives, the
position of women in the region was radi-
cally transformed by reforms that in theory
granted them full political, economic, and
legal equality with men. This transformation
of sociocultural structures was mediated by
the objectives of accelerated industrialization,
centrally planned economies, and a policy
of intensive labor employment that required
and guaranteed work for all able-bodied cit-
izens. The incorporation of women into wage
labor was thus fueled both by the need for
womens labor power and by a commitment
to womens equality, though it was also driven
by the realities of the demographic situation
in the postwar period. Womens entry into
the paid economy led to the dissolution
of the family wage and the establishment
of centralized and state-controlled salaries
under the slogan equal pay for equal work.
Womens educational achievement was high
on the emancipation agenda. These changes,
however, should not be seen simply as
the top-down imposition of the principles of
equality as spelled out by Friedrich Engels and
Vladimir Lenin and implemented by the com-
munist parties of the region. At the turn of
the twentieth century, working-class women
from Eastern Europe took to the streets of
cities like Ivanovo-Voznesenk, Odessa, Riga,
and Warsaw to march and demonstrate for
political equality and the right to vote; they
joined strikes, riots, and large walkouts; and
they ultimately entered trade unions and
political parties in spite of the fierce resis-
tance they encountered. Women from the
intelligentsia were active reformers and revo-
lutionaries who worked alongside progressive
men toward the goal of improving working
conditions (Clements 1994). A blueprint
emerged from the belief that women and
men should not be treated differently while in
the workforce a transformational blueprint
that initially envisioned that women and men
could and would work the same jobs for the
same wages and have the same promotion and
leadership opportunities. Reproductive work,
it was envisioned, would be partially replaced
by public day care and the provision of com-
munal spaces and neighborhood facilities,
such as playrooms for children, laundry facil-
ities, libraries, and places to watch movies.
The hardship of the double burden was an
important issue on the revolutionary agenda
of Bolshevik women, who thought that the
private duties routinely assigned to women
should be reassigned to the public domain
as a corrective. The problem of the double
burden continued to preoccupy women for
generations to come. However, in spite of
their efforts, by the 1960s the emancipation
of women from reproductive work had been
 GENDER AND HISTORY OF REVOLU TION S I N EASTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE
dropped from official reform priorities. This
was due to the cost and ineffectiveness of
changing the structure of domestic work
from free to waged labor as well as to the
lack of support from male leaders, who could
not easily part with the free benefits granted
by their spouses presence in the household
(Fodor 2006).
The vision for equality formulated by
Bolshevik women was not shared across the
region. Socialist women in postwar Poland,
for instance, embraced womens maternal
identity and advocated protective labor leg-
islation (Fidelis 2010). The abandonment of
the goal of emancipating women from repro-
ductive work was also influenced by abrupt
declines in birth rates across the region, the
consolidation of nationalist sentiments, and
Joseph Stalins regressive position regarding
womens emancipation. Due to these factors,
the blueprint of womens emancipation was
reconfigured, and womens role as mothers
and responsible domestic providers was redis-
covered and institutionalized (Fodor 2006).
The ensuing pronatalist policies pursued
in Romania under Nicolae Ceausescus
regime had particularly devastating effects on
women. The relegation of women to domestic
work and motherhood, their continuously
required presence in the paid economy, and
the scarcity of consumer goods on the CEE
markets overburdened women with second
and third shifts of unpaid labor. By way of
addressing this issue, lower-level jobs were
offered as one possibility for relieving the
demands on womens time, a double-edged
solution that also brought along fewer oppor-
tunities for promotion and raises (Fodor
2006). Moreover, in spite of the de jure equal
pay for equal work, gender-related wage gaps
were a consistent feature of the economic
landscape across the state-socialist world.
Women thus tended to be employed in sec-
tors of the economy with lower wages, such as
education, service, retail, medicine, and light
3
industry, and their educational trajectory was
implicitly different. Qualitative data suggest
that, along with overt discrimination, another
factor was womens willingness, under the
pressure of their domestic and childcare
responsibilities, to maintain employment in
positions below their qualifications in order
to be closer to home and better manage their
time. Paid maternity leave with job guaran-
tees, mothers and family allowances, public
childcare facilities, paid days off in case of ill-
ness, and other measures were implemented
in order to help women and alleviate some of
their work burden.
After 1989, the restructuring of the state-
socialist economies through privatization,
wage liberalization, and critical cuts to social
spending led to mass unemployment, social
inequality, and poverty, as well as to a perva-
sive sense of insecurity, instability, and lack
of prospects (Fodor 2006). The post-1989
reforms weakened and eliminated many of
the benefits discussed above and called into
question past principles of equality. This
restructuring offered new opportunities for
some but at the same time marginalized
and disempowered other individuals and
groups. Women were especially affected by
the dismantling of social support. While such
support would not have fully realized radical
visions for equality between women and
men, it nevertheless helped women through
the hardship of their double and triple work
shifts. The relatively proactive role of state
socialism in balancing work and family life
was replaced by policies that mitigated public
contributions to funding childcare facilities,
maternity leave, and parental sick leave.
While there are variations within this
general trend, employment activity rates for
women decreased between 1990 and 2004 in
all countries of the CEE. Younger women aged
2024 are overrepresented among the unem-
ployed. While their enrollment in secondary
and tertiary education was a contributing
4 GENDER AND HISTORY OF REVOLU TION S I N EASTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE
factor, the disappearance of work and the
need to exit paid employment in order to
care for children contributed significantly
to this situation (Fodor 2006). The lack of
local economic opportunities has led to work
migration, both intranational (to better-
developed regions) and transnational (to
better-developed CEE or Western European
countries). This is a solution that has enabled
economic stability for women and men from
the CEE but that has also had numerous
negative consequences for children and their
families. The declining economic and social
status of women alongside the transnational-
ization of labor has also pushed women into
dangerous situations of labor exploitation.
Trafficking in women represents a new
phenomenon in the region, with women
being trafficked mainly into the sex industries
in Western Europe and secondarily within
the CEE. Similarly, sex work has become a
reality of daily life for many women, and local
sex industries have become sites of consump-
tion for the men in neighboring Western
European countries who cross the border in
solicitation of sex (Regulska 2004). Women
across the region responded to these changes
with education and outreach programs imple-
mented by non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) to train women for new professions
in order to provide them with access to com-
puters and the Internet, as well as to lobby for
the creation of new workplaces.
The global financial crisis undermined
the prospects for stability that the CEEs so-
called transitional economies were supposed
to bring (Guieu 2013). Eurostat data show
a persistent gender employment gap, with
alarming indicators for gender pay gaps.
Womens pay lags behind mens by 18 percent
in Hungary, 20.5 percent in Slovakia, and
21 percent in the Czech Republic. Elderly
women from the region are particularly vul-
nerable to poverty (Guieu 2013). And given
the wage differentials just mentioned and
their correlation with lower pensions, a pre-
carious future awaits the younger generation
of women.
Austerity, the policy most often deployed
in response to the global financial crisis,
entailed cuts in pensions, the minimization
of public sector expenses, or, as in the case
of Hungary, the suppression of subsidies for
public transport and energy. Women were
affected as employees of public institutions
and as beneficiaries of public services. More
than ever, individual women function as
substitutes for public or private child- and
elderly-care services. The fact that women
turn to part-time work and to temporary,
seasonal, and contract work twice as often as
men speaks clearly to the lack of employment
opportunities, the unresolved gender equality
issues related to the double burden, and, given
the lesser or nonexistent benefits that accom-
pany these forms of work, to the insecurity
and instability of their lives (Guieu 2013).
Once again, it is womens organizations
that have consistently responded to these
issues. NGOs help individual women and rel-
evant stakeholders to improve their economic
literacy and to acquire an understanding of
economic concepts and processes, an under-
standing that might then enable them to
lobby or become advocates for gender and
economic justice. Many NGOs across the
CEE focus on providing services, training,
and employment information to single moth-
ers, young professionals, women over the age
of 50, unemployed women, and many other
groups of women who have been largely
excluded from the benefits of economic
transformations (Lovin 2013).
POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS
Even though women played a crucial role
in the 1989 revolutionary transformations
across the region, the political systems that
replaced CEE state socialisms often proved
 GENDER AND HISTORY OF REVOLU TION S I N EASTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE
inhospitable to the inclusion of womens
interests in the new agendas and thus led
to the marginalization of women. Democ-
ratization has affected womens political
participation in rather contradictory ways
(Regulska and Grabowska 2013). Womens
participation in parliamentary politics and
their chances of winning elections plum-
meted in the early 1990s, but by the beginning
of the new millennium there were visible
signs that this trend had reversed (Regulska
2001). In response to being pushed out of the
political arena, women expanded the scope
of their mobilizations, taking advantage of
supranational and global resources. Their
relative success in transforming political par-
ties and state institutions to afford visibility
to women politicians and womens interests
is evident throughout the region. However,
feminist critics argue that these changes
merely affect the surface structures of the
political apparatuses of CEE, as party leaders
continued to be resistant to rethinking their
political agendas in ways that reflect gender-
sensitive conceptualizations of social equality.
Women politicians moved their agenda of
gender equality forward through two political
strategies: advancing women within existing
political parties and the establishment of
womens parties. The first strategy led to the
creation of womens units within political
parties (as in the case of Romania and Serbia,
where womens committees were built into
the structures of existing political parties) and
the establishment of quotas for women on
party election lists or within party leadership.
The concerted actions of women politicians,
womens NGOs, and their transnational allies
since the early 2000s have resulted in the
establishment of womens parties in Belarus,
Poland, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine.
NGOs conceptualization of gender equal-
ity constructed women as a homogeneous
interest group, most often defined by moth-
erhood, which served to further narrow the
5
scope of the womens issues that appeared
on party agendas to objectives such as ade-
quate medical services for pregnant women,
profamily policies, and support for single
mothers. While their scope was not entirely
limited to these issues, it is important to note
that often political agendas steered clear of
radical feminist demands, such as the right to
abortion in Poland (Regulska and Grabowska
2013).
According to scholars, politicians, and pol-
icymakers alike, womens NGOs, which were
founded during the decade that followed the
dismantling of state-socialist regimes, played
a crucial role in setting the terms of and
priorities for womens mobilizations (Regul-
ska and Grabowska 2013). These choices
enabled a sense that the CEEs trajectory
was coincident with that of Western Europe
and served as proof of the regions much-
awaited departure from the terms dictated
by the Eastern political hegemon, the Soviet
Union. An equally consequential moment
of geopolitical reorientation came when
some of the CEE countries joined the EU
in the first decade of the 2000s. Throughout
most of the CEE, the end of state socialism
sparked countries to imagine the possibility
of a European return (Regulska 2001, 2009;
Regulska and Grabowska 2013). But given
the external imposition of rules, regulations,
standards, norms, and practices on candidate
countries, the process of EU enlargement
eastward might be understood as a form of
proxy colonization, of reinventing Europe
through a new mode of institutional and
regulatory colonization.
The EU forcefully promoted gender main-
streaming and gender equality in official state
discourses and apparatuses. In turn, womens
NGOs took on the role of watchdogs moni-
toring national institutions. The effects of new
vocabularies (e.g., gender opportunities)
and the role of EU and US funding agencies in
setting NGO agendas have been criticized by
6 GENDER AND HISTORY OF REVOLU TION S I N EASTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE
scholars and activists in the region. In the case
of Romania, these phenomena contributed
to the proliferation of public debates that
lacked depth and grounding in the everyday
realities of gender inequality (Lovin 2013).
At the same time, NGOs continue to be key
actors that work alongside state institutions
as official or unofficial advisors, providing
them with data, information, and access to
networks. The EU language of equal oppor-
tunities also affected the gender equality
policies developed in Armenia, Georgia,
and Ukraine, countries situated outside EU
jurisdiction.
While the language of gender equali-
ty and equal opportunities constructed
womens issues in ways compatible with prin-
ciples of political and economic liberalism
in response to the operations of neoliberal
global political economies, the genealogies
and trajectories of gender activism in post-
state-socialist countries are in fact more
complex. Not all countries in the region have
completed the process of joining the EU;
however, their journeys toward the moment
of EU integration were similar. What was
perceived with great enthusiasm by the CEE
countries as a return to Europe proved to be
a difficult process set in motion by a host of
new and unexpected power relations between
CEE countries and the EU (Regulska 2009).
Countries like Romania and Bulgaria still
face difficulties, and their citizens cannot
fully exercise their work rights in some of the
older EU member countries.
Despite the complicated power dynamics
involved in EU accession, womens groups
have also successfully used the transna-
tional arena to challenge patriarchal regimes
of power. Womens mobilizations against
regimes of patriarchal power are also notable
in the arenas of ethnicity and sexuality.
For instance, after a decade of local and
national struggles to repeal repressive anti-
abortion legislation, Polish activists from the
Federation of Women and Family Planning
decided to turn to transnational sites of
mobilization. By challenging the abortion
legislation in the European Court of Human
Rights, they showed how mechanisms beyond
national borders can be utilized to confront
national challenges and patriarchal concep-
tions of national culture. These mechanisms
are fueled by new forms of social power
that tap into horizontal networks of local,
national, and transnational loci of political
engagement (Regulska and Grabowska 2013).
While some NGOs focus their work exclu-
sively on a particular issue such as LGBT or
ethnic oppression, several equality-oriented
initiatives employ intersectional analyses
that account for the complex effects of eth-
nicity, gender, sexuality, and class in their
interventions (Regulska 2009; Regulska
and Grabowska 2013). Such is the case for
Romani women and their local and transna-
tional mobilizations to address a postsocialist
environment that subjects them to structural
unemployment, deficient housing, lack of
sanitation, ghettoization, school segregation,
lack of access to healthcare, and institutional
racism (Magyari-Vincze 2009).
As its effects are being felt throughout
the region, neoliberalism is losing its appeal,
especially for younger generations of women.
Many of them continue to collaborate with
NGOs, yet they have become increas-
ingly skeptical of the institutionalization
of womens mobilizations. Currently, they
direct their efforts toward the formation
and consolidation of social networks with
alternative organizational structures and that
seek to politicize public spaces such as streets,
plazas, parliament buildings, shopping cen-
ters, art scenes, and social media. While
challenging the hegemonic framing of social
justice issues, they nevertheless do not make
a clean break with the previous stage but
rather maintain connective threads that link
them to institutionalized forms of womens
 GENDER AND HISTORY OF REVOLU TION S I N EASTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE
mobilization and activism from the region.
By utilizing these networks, young feminists
from the region have been able to challenge
existing vocabularies and initiate dialogues,
activities that have led to the formulation
of new terms and approaches to gender jus-
tice and equality. By calling into question
neoliberal solutions to current inequalities,
approaching the categories of gender, equal-
ity, opportunity, politics, and justice in their
historical specificity, and ultimately opting
for fluid modes of membership in various
informal womens groups, younger femi-
nists open new ways of doing feminism in
the CEE.
Such is the case of the collaboration
between the Polish artist Karolina Bregula
and the NGO Campaign against Homopho-
bia (CAH). Since 2002, with financial support
from the local government and agencies in
the Netherlands, Bregula and CAH recruited
30 lesbian and gay couples who agreed to be
photographed walking hand in hand. These
pictures were then displayed in art galleries
and on billboards throughout the largest
cities in Poland. Under pressure from the
church and conservative parties, many of
the cities withdrew from their commitment
to display the photographs on billboards in
public spaces. When they were eventually
exhibited, the posters were destroyed and
deemed extremely provocative by oppo-
nents of lesbian and gay rights. Some of
the galleries that kept their commitment
to CAH and showed Bregulas photographs
faced drastic repercussions and had their
funding from national and local govern-
ment agencies suspended (Mizielinska 2011).
A year later, taking routes forged by the
transnational collaborations between the
LGBT movements from the region, Bregulas
photographs were shown in Bucharest, at
the art gallery of the Goethe Institute, as
part of the first Romanian Gay Festivals
program.
7
SOCIOCULTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS
The campaign orchestrated by CAH and
Bregula shows that the distinctions between
political change and sociocultural change
may be useful for analytical purposes, but
they are not accurate descriptors of social
realities. LGBT struggles against criminal-
ization, discrimination, and homophobia,
along with mobilizations for civil rights, have
led to essential sociocultural transformations
throughout post-state-socialist terrain. While
LGBT rights are still out of reach for most
of the region, extraordinary steps have been
taken at the grassroots level, as well as nation-
ally and transnationally, to make visible the
discrimination and violence encountered by
LGBT people in their everyday lives, to alter
the legislative frameworks that criminalized
homosexuality, and, ultimately, to challenge
the institutions and cultural practices that
constitute non-heteronormative sexualities
as deviant and morally flawed. While strug-
gles are taking place throughout the region,
it is important to keep in mind that there
are significant differences in the cultural
redefinitions of sexuality occurring across
post-state-socialist space.
The Bucharest-based LGBT organization
ACCEPT deserves credit for orchestrating
the national and transnational campaigns
that led to the decriminalization of homo-
sexuality by the 2001 repeal of Article 200 of
Romanias penal code. Having to work within
a political and social environment that was
almost in its entirety hostile to LGBT rights,
ACCEPTs campaigns engaged a strategic
homonormativity that aimed to normalize
lesbian and gay identities by emphasizing
commonalities with their heteronormative
counterparts in relation to love, family,
and domesticity (Lovin 2004). Along with
this assimilationist tactic, ACCEPT shaped
the debates over lesbian and gay rights by
using a binary vocabulary of traditionalism
8 GENDER AND HISTORY OF REVOLU TION S I N EASTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE
versus modernity and consistently empha-
sizing the importance of lesbian and gay
rights for Romanias recognition as com-
parable with its counterparts in the West
(Lovin 2004). Resources at the European
level were invaluable to these activists.
Indeed, the transnational networks estab-
lished to further LGBT rights locally have
clearly demonstrated the benefits of engaging
with European partners as well as con-
tributing to the formation of a transnational
repertoire that included and valorized local
templates for understanding sexuality and
strategies to achieve change.
The reorganization of sexuality has
included not only LGBT rights issues but
also transformations of heterosexual family
forms. Despite localized variations, cross-
regional demographic data show common
trends: a decline in fertility rates to below two
children per woman, an increase in divorce
rates, a decrease in marriage rates, the rise of
cohabitation as a substitute for marriage, a
surge in single motherhood, and a tendency
among younger couples to have their first
child outside of marriage (Regulska 2004).
Romani women continue to live their lives
in the midst of multiple and intertwining
forms of discrimination, as members of a
marginalized and racialized minority and
as women within patriarchal communities.
In relation to these trends, Romani women
tend to marry at relatively younger ages and
to have more children than national aver-
ages, and their children register the highest
infant mortality rates in Europe (Regulska
2004). The racist presumption of Roma over-
population led to the violation of their
reproductive rights in countries like Romania
and Slovakia. Romani women, an already
underserved social group, were subjected to
racist policies of fertility control implemented
by both national and transnational agencies
that were designed to appease the fears of
majority populations.
Today Romani women are actively working
toward better reproductive health policies by
collaborating with NGOs, medical experts,
and central and local government agencies.
However, by normalizing the idea that it is
Roma womens duty to give birth to more
children in order to ensure the preservation
of the community, the patriarchal tenets
of the Roma movement further constrain
the opportunities for women to assert their
reproductive rights (Magyari-Vincze 2009).
With the dismantling of state-centered
socialist regimes, the CEE came under
the spell of capitalist consumerism. Once
deprived of consumer goods, women in the
CEE found themselves in a world that not
only abounded with consumer commodities,
but also instantly required them to embrace
unachievable ideals of youth, fashionable-
ness, and slimness. Female artists responded
to these new phenomena promptly by offer-
ing critiques of the new expectations for
gender roles and new normative terms for
their embodiment. Tanja Ostojic, an artist
born in the former Yugoslavia who lives in
what is now Serbia, has taken the inequali-
ties emerging from neoliberal ideology and
global capitalism as the object of her critique.
Her projects range from photography to
performance and consistently address the
gendered aspects of transnational migration,
class, racism, and biopolitics in a post-state-
socialist Europe. Her work reflects on the
fluctuating boundaries that produce new
spaces of exclusion and gendered dwelling
that are deemed illegitimate, such as the
figures of the illegal alien or the prostitute.
Finally, Slovenian video artists Marina Gr-
inic and Aina Smid challenge the gendered
power dynamics of contemporary geopolitics
that position the CEE countries as the femi-
nine others of Western Europe. Their works
render visible an immense repertoire of now-
repressed discourses and knowledges from
the cultural reserve of the spaces described
 GENDER AND HISTORY OF REVOLU TION S I N EASTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE
today by the term post-state-socialist. Their
montages intervene into the politics of rep-
resentation of the new Europe as gestures
of radical decolonization that demonstrate
that at the core of Western, Eurocentric
epistemologies lie racialized processes of
subjectivity production. Their works intend
to raise awareness among Western consumers
of art regarding relations between power and
knowledge, encouraging them to approach
their investments critically and eventually
transition into new modes of knowing and
being in the world.
The development of gender studies pro-
grams within and outside of academia
represents another significant transformation
in the CEE. The interdisciplinary field of gen-
der studies materialized as the institutional
result of complex strategic interventions of
scholars from the region and their local and
transnational allies. Their efforts to create
spaces outside and within the university in
which they could research and teach gender
mobilized university administrators, private
investors, NGOs, and governmental actors
who eventually, in some countries, recog-
nized the value of the emerging field and
provided the support necessary for the estab-
lishment of gender studies programs. The
struggles have been enormous, with mixed
success. In many cases, when Western donors
funded these programs, the success of gender
studies has produced contradictory effects.
Transnational feminism emerged as a
departure from US-centric feminist knowl-
edge production and as a critique of the
homogenizing, othering depictions of women
in the third world or Africa. It also amounted
to an interrogation of the centrality and
authority of the West vis--vis womens
global issues. As an analytical mode, transna-
tional feminism addressed the problematic
aspects both in binary theoretical constructs
(such as the local versus the global) and ical apathy, and false consciousness (Lovin
political terms (such as global sisterhood).
9
Feminists emphasize the geopolitical linkages
that sustain contemporary manifestations of
oppression, inequality, power, culture, and
politics (Suchland 2011). The second world,
however, has largely disappeared from anal-
yses of the transnational and from the scale
of the global. The reasons for this disap-
pearance are complex. This problem persists,
however, despite the recurring discussions of
the CEEs non-region status or the powerful
arguments in favor of adding perspectives
from the former second world to current
debates.
Constructions of the postsocialist region
as altogether on board with processes of
Europeanization and market democratiza-
tion exclude the CEE from the geography
of the critiques of Western and first world
imperialism and neocolonialism (Regulska
and Grabowska 2013). This portrayal results
from scholarly work that erases the links
between the resistances that emerged from
postcolonial contexts and the resistances
developed in opposition to the totalitarian
regimes of CEE and the former Soviet Union
(Grabowska 2012).
The journey to democracy and capitalism
did not lead to the outcomes that many
people in the CEE imagined in 1989. As
already discussed, women from the region
promptly responded to hardships that materi-
alized with the dismantling of public services
and the abandonment of notions of equal
participation between women and men in
politics or labor markets. Their responses
in many cases resembled the ways women in
the West tackled similar hardships. However,
CEE women were less concerned to narrate
their actions, positions, and identities in
terms of either gender or feminism. Western
feminist theory, along with a few sporadic
feminist voices from the region, promptly
diagnosed this stance as backwardness, polit-
2013).
10 GENDER AND HISTORY OF REVOLU TION S I N EASTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE
Such misconceptions continued the
pattern of erasure that rendered invisible
womens concerns and womens agentive par-
ticipation in the production of state-socialist
gender regimes. They also rendered invisible
critical insights regarding de facto and de
jure gender equality, wage labor, reproductive
rights, and abortion. Transnational feminism
has its own complicated associations with
Western feminist discourses and institu-
tions. In relation to the CEE, the emergence
of transnational feminist frameworks did
not lead to a radical reconceptualization of
geopolitical boundaries or to a comprehen-
sive reconsideration of transnational linkages,
yet it did foster new connections that created
entry points that CEE feminists utilized to
engage in dialogues, challenge hegemonies,
and construct both counterhegemonies and
new forms of mobilization.
SEE ALSO: Communism in Eastern Europe;
Economic Globalization and Gender; Feminist
Activism; Feminist Movements in Historical
and Comparative Perspective; Gender, Politics,
and the State in Central and Eastern Europe
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