Collected Volume on Women’s Lives, Gender Relations and State Policy in Central and Eastern Europe under State Socialism

Deadline: June 15, 2007

Scholars working on gender and socialism in Central and Eastern Europe are invited to submit a 500-word abstract of an essay for a collected volume examining post-89 approaches to the study, research and analysis of women’s lives and issues of gender under state socialism.

The wealth of human and archival sources that have become available since the collapse of communism, combined with the increased use of cultural, social, gender, and oral history in studies of socialism, have provided crucial insight into gender in socialist societies — both as it was discursively represented and lived on an everyday level. This in turn has facilitated a more nuanced and complex understanding of women under socialism that challenges the bleak and homogenized portraits of women that were produced — in both feminist and non-feminist scholarship–prior to and immediately after 1989.

The new scholarship presented in this collected volume will draw on oral and written, statistical and archival sources that have become available to researchers since the dismantling of the Soviet Bloc. Scholars are invited to address thematic issues that have been especially fruitful and insightful for understanding gender roles and relations under socialism as well as broader methodological, theoretical, and historical issues surrounding gender as an analytical category in investigations of socialism.

TOPICS
We welcome submissions on a diversity of topics, which might include but are not limited to the following: the role of socialist women’s organizations and the socialist media in reformulating gender roles and relations and in politicizing women’s lives; changing notions of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality under socialism; women’s roles as workers, mothers, and consumers; gender and resistance; feminist discourse in the era of state socialism; the interplay between official discourses and subjective experiences in shaping gender roles and identities under socialism; revisiting feminist debates regarding the “evidence of experience” with regard to gender and socialist Eastern Europe; everyday life as a site of resistance, negotiation, or complicity; the politics of gender and memory in the study of socialist and post-socialist societies.

Additionally, we ask contributors to discuss their methodologies in the context of their departures from pre-1989 scholarship. We also invite scholars from Eastern Europe to address the institutional barriers to conducting and disseminating gender research in their respective countries. Moreover, we are interested in studies of the process and products of major transnational research projects begun in the 1990s, such as the transnational Women’s Memories Project coordinated by the Prague Gender Studies Center.

HOW TO APPLY
Please email or fax a 500-word abstract and CV by JUNE 15th to:
Jill Massino
Program of Gender Studies
Bowdoin College
Brunwick, Maine
Email: jmassino@bowdoin.edu

Shana Penn
Center for Jewish Studies
Graduate Theological Union
Berkeley, CA
Email: pennskaya@aol.com
Fax: 510 965 0097