Gender (In)equality and Gender Politics in Southeastern Europe (original) (raw)

EURR 4202/5202 HIST 5212 History and Politics of Gender in Modern Eastern Europe

Throughout the course, students will critically examine sources and literature for some of the crucial issues that marked the gender history of Eastern Europe in the 20 th century. We will observe gender history from a transnational perspective, bringing together different regions and exploring the topics such as the interwar feminist movements, the Second World War and its impacts, the communist revolutions and gender policies, queer cultures, the collapse of socialism and post-socialist gender policies. The focus will be on the movement of ideas and people, asking questions about how gender informed broader policies and social interventions, but also how understandings about gender and sexuality were changing during the 20 th Century. By investigating these far-reaching questions, we will try to uncover the lives of ordinary people discussing their agency and the shared gendered experiences across the region.

Urges and obstacles:: Chances for feminism in eastern europe

Women's Studies International Forum, 1999

Synopsis-This article debates the potential for building feminism in Hungary-a country where, under State Socialism, women's emancipation was considered already resolved. More recently, under the economic impact of globalization and the re-establishment of the market economy, full employment and the state provision of social services are disappearing. Women's groups are now split between, for example, reclaiming women's traditional status in motherhood, and saving state nurseries. The impact of such contradictions, and the conflicts between feminism and tradition, are illustrated here by an analysis of how feminist issues are debated in the Hungarian media. This article concludes that, in times of change, feminists face the challenge of allowing time for a process of healing in society, as well as facing differences between women locally and nationally, before being able to build a feminism that challenges wider power relationships at national and international levels.

Introduction: Contested Concepts in Gender and Social Politics

Contested Concepts in Gender and Social Politics, 2002

The purpose of the book is to present some of the key contested concepts in gender and social politics using cross-national perspectives and to contribute to the gendering of theory in the social sciences. Our approach is interdisciplinary, comparative and policy-oriented. It is interdisciplinary in that we integrate research in sociology, history, social policy and political theory. It is comparative in that we confront the convergences and divergences in the development of European welfare states. It is policy-oriented through our analyses of the shifts in political discourses and the changes in socio-political configurations that mirror changing gender relations. The research themes reflect our interest in the transitions of welfare states, democracy and citizenship, and focus on recent changes in the meaning and politics of social care, paid work, fatherhood and gender equality. We built our research around a common core of theories and conceptual vocabularies that we developed during a decade of cross-national and interdisciplinary dialogues. The authors were all participants in the European Network on Theory and Research on 'Women, Welfare State and Citizenship' 1 and comprise the team of scholars who worked within the European Community thematic network: Gender and Citizenship: Social Integration and Social Exclusion in European Welfare States (1996-1999). 2 The book is the fruit of a long-term research cooperation between this group of scholars that produced several books and articles (Lewis, 1993, 1997; Hobson, 2000, 2001). The question arose of how to capture the richness of these dialogues in one book. The idea for a book on contested concepts owes some of its inspiration to Raymond Williams' Keywords (1983). 3 Like Williams, who came back from the war feeling that his compatriots were not speaking the same language, we too realized that three decades of gender research had joggled male-stream academic discourse and writing. Would we find a process of gendering within different conceptual reservoirs? As was true of the Keywords venture, we too began our project with a keen awareness of context, not only that concepts have a trajectory and meanings that accrue

A Mayflower turned Titanic: The Metamorphosis of Political Patriarchy in Romania

femina politica, 2006

The post-communist transition is a paradigmatic case for gender politics. The passengers of the gender post communist "Mayflower" came together from a similar starting point which ended as the "Titanic". By the end of the first post-communist 15 years gender equity became an empty imported provision written in the Constitution and in the laws. Imported equal opportunity norms are a necessary, but an insufficient condition. Such norms were imposed before the necessary norms, institutions and practices of a fair competition. The dominant strategy was related to the reparatory justice and not to the retributive one. From a political point of view, men were positively discriminated as privileged victims of transition. Also, because their access to resources was almost exclusive, they enjoyed a preferential treatment as favorite clients. Women went into the market and were submitted to it with a very skinny protection. This is the reason why I call such simple imports "a costless state feminism", as a consequence of a "room-service" feminist politics. We are living in a very complex society which experiences a popular and illegitimate post-feminist agenda before a political feminism inspired by the second and third wave. In the same time, our case is illustrative for the lack of connections between competition, merits and the results in terms of women access to resources and power. modern one) and ignoring its steps. I shall try to offer you a comprehensive perspective, based on my research on what happened for good and worse with the feminist political agenda when the two separated worlds came together after the Cold War 1 .