Abstract
To shed light on the local appropriations and the usages made of internationalised knowledge on “gender”, a “zooming-in” approach was used here. Drawing the prosopography of a sample of several dozens of “gender pioneers” based in the academic and the NGO sectors in 15 post-socialist countries, this chapter synthesises the main social features of these professionals. They mobilised their pre- and post-1989 social resources to position themselves both as “gender” scholars and women’s rights activists in their respective countries and as “Eastern-European feminists” in the post-Cold War global arenas. Their trajectories have been simultaneously vectors and expression of the democratisation and liberalisation processes that made possible the establishing of “gender” as a new field of knowledge production in the post-socialist region.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Their average year of birth is 1955. Three-fourths of the total population were concentrated in former Yugoslavia (28%), Poland and Bulgaria (12% each), and Hungary and Romania (11% each).
- 3.
Of the population, 83% had studied abroad (particularly as postgraduates), 88% had international professional experiences in various capacities (particularly temporary collaborations with international organisations and academic institutions), and almost all had published abroad or in a foreign language. One-fourth of the sample had received an international award and 71% belonged to an international board (of scientific or civil-society bodies). The majority of the members of the population under study matched at least one of the aspects indicating internationalisation (91%). Of the sample, 69% occupied a stable academic position, with the share amounting to 72% when including temporary positions and collaborations. Putting aside the cases where information on the topic was unavailable, 88% of the sample were members and often founders of an NGO after 1989, while 54% of them had taken dissident stances during the late socialist regimes; 31% had government and other expert missions; 25% were awarded distinctions for their civic activism; and 14% had run for office in elections and were involved in party politics. In all, 84% of the individuals matched at least one of these indicators and 52% of them matched two of them.
- 4.
The source for this data is a directory of NEWW members.
- 5.
More than three-fourths of the people who entered the field before 1996 were born before 1960, while only a little more than a half of those who entered the field later were in this situation. The average year of birth is 1952 for the former and 1958 for the latter.
- 6.
The data used here were publicly available on the websites of their home institutions at the time of my original writing in the second half of the 2010s and were not updated for the purpose of the English translation of the book. The individual trajectories summarised in this section do not claim to account for the whole real-life biographies of the scholars and activists under study and they are mainly considered as a series of positions in a space of possibilities. Based on the perspective and the methods of the sociology of “social fields” understood as relational spaces shaped by structural positions and resources combined with competing, context-related position-taking (Bourdieu 1984, 2015; Sapiro 2020), I use them merely as indicators allowing to uncover and objectively describe the perimeter and the main dynamics of the social space of “gender knowledge” production in the 1990s in the former socialist countries. Given the public visibility and the reputation of the actors as well as the public nature of the sources, fully anonymising this population was neither possible nor appropriate.
- 7.
I refer to Revillard (2009) for the notion of “critical expert”.
- 8.
This was an anthropologist based at University of California Los Angeles, specialising in Eastern European studies and close to NEWW.
- 9.
Online resume: http://psychology.psiedu.ubbcluj.ro/files/cv/adriana%20baban/CVEnglish_Adriana_Baban%20Noiembrie2013.pdf (accessed on 7 December 2015).
- 10.
Online resume: http://phls.uni-sofia.bg/documents/articles/1019/CV-DASKALOVA.pdf (archived 3 December 2015).
- 11.
Online resume: http://snspa.academia.edu/MiroiuMihaela/CurriculumVitae (archived 3 December 2015).
- 12.
Personal webpage: http://ceu.academia.edu/AndreaPeto (archived on 11 December 2015).
- 13.
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urszula_Nowakowska; http://www.cpk.org.pl/174,urszula-nowakowska-dyrektorka-cpk.html (archived on 3 December 2015).
- 14.
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanda_Nowicka; http://www.wandanowicka.eu (accessed on 3 December 2015).
- 15.
https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/55696/Limanowska_P_E_102806.pdf (archived 2 July 2015).
- 16.
For instance the International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC), an organisation built in the US and active in Asia, Africa and Latin America (http://iwhc.org). See Joachim (2007), Caulier (2010, 2014) for details on its history and activities.
- 17.
Interview with Sonja Drljević, 15 January 2014.
- 18.
Online resume: http://www.gb.rs/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/CV-Marina-Blagojevic-Hughson.pdf (archived 3 December 2015).
- 19.
Critical movements emerged in Great Britain, France and Italy between 1960 and 1980, aimed at questioning traditional psychiatric treatment and medical institutions.
- 20.
Biographic summary based on interviews, blog posts and a presentation downloaded from http://www.boell.de/en/democracy/democracy-press-release-anne-klein-womens-award-2013-lepa-mladjenovic-16207.html (archived 3 December 2015).
- 21.
The name of the periodical was Bread and Roses, indicating both solidarity with international women’s mobilisations and awareness of the history of feminist movements on which the new group was building its references (Bagić 1997).
- 22.
Published interviews: http://www.ziher.hr/durda-knezevic-o-svojim-djelima-i-aktivizmu/; http://www.zarez.hr/clanci/feministkinjom-se-postaje (archived 16 April 2018).
- 23.
“L’e-héroïne du Kosovo”, Transfert.net, 14 May, 2002. See http://www.transfert.net/i8464 (archived 7 May 2015); also http://www.colby.edu/oakinstitute/about/previous-oak-fellows/2001-oak-fellow-sevdie-ahmeti/ (archived 30 April 2015).
- 24.
Online resume: https://people.ceu.edu/sites/people.ceu.hu/files/profile/attachment/1410/cvzentai-2015.pdf (archived 11 December 2015).
- 25.
First located in her apartment, the documentation centre was presented in various publications and testimonies of NEWW members as one of the first success stories of post-socialist feminism and sometimes also as a success story of the network itself. See Snitow (2020: 91–96).
- 26.
http://www.owen-berlin.de/ueber-uns/vorstand.php (archived 16 April 2018).
- 27.
The issue of the institutionalisation of feminist thinking as gender-studies programmes in academia has often been debated in scholarship, including in the national contexts I have studied. For a definition of the institutionalisation of gender studies as a new academic discipline, see Griffin (2005), who lists a series of indicators such as: the number of permanent positions, of specialised study programmes and of research centres in a country; the employment status of people facilitating their activities; the capacity of such programmes to grant diplomas and the level of diplomas; the amount and the duration of funding; recognition by higher-education authorities (Griffin 2005: 90 ff). See also Heilbron and Gingras (2015) for collected works considering the socio-genesis of disciplines in the social sciences.
Bibliography
Press
Scrozza, T. (2008) Licnost Godine—Sonja Liht, presednica Beogradskog Fonda Za Politicku Izuzetnost. Vreme 888. 10 December 2008.
General References
Bagić, A. (1997) Bread and Roses. In: T. Renne (ed.) Ana’s Land. Sisterhood in Eastern Europe. Boulder CO: Westview Press, 201.
Blanchard, P., Dudouet, F.-X. and Vion, A. (2015) Le cœur des affaires de la zone euro. Une analyse structurale et séquentielle des élites économiques transnationales. Cultures&Conflits 98: 71–99.
Bonfiglioli, C. (2008) Belgrade 1978. Remembering the conference ‘Drugarica Žena. Žensko Pitanje—Novi Pristup?/Comrade Woman. The Women’s Question: A New Approach?’ 30 years after. MA thesis, Utrecht University, Utrecht.
Bonfiglioli, C. (2018) Feminist Translations in Socialist Context: The Case of Yugoslavia. Gender&History 30 (1): 240–254.
Bourdieu, P. (1984) Homo Academicus. Paris: Minuit.
Bourdieu, P. (2015) Sociologie générale, Cours au College de France 1981–1983 (vol. 1), Paris: Raisons d’agir/Seuil.
Caulier, M. (2010) The population revolution. From population policies to reproductive health and women’s rights politics. International Review of Sociology/Revue internationale de sociologie 20 (2): 347–376.
Caulier, M. (2014) De la population au genre. Philanthropie, ONG et biopolitiques dans la globalisation. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Cîrstocea, I. (2019a) Entre vocation militante et profession émergente: l’expertise de genre en contexte postsocialiste. In: C. Verschuur (ed.) Savoirs féministes au Sud. Expertes en genre et tournant décolonial. Paris: L’Harmattan, 179–204.
Cîrstocea, I. (2019c) “Gender”: A Transnational Feminist Socialization “Platform” (Eastern Europe, 1990–2000). In: I. Cîrstocea, D. Lacombe and E. Marteu (eds) Globalization of Gender. Mobilizations, Frameworks of Action, Knowledge. London: Routledge, 19–38.
Drakulić, S. (1993) The Balkan Express. New York: W.W. Norton.
Drakulić, S. (1999) As If I Am Not There. London: Abacus.
Drakulić, S. (2004) They would never hurt a fly. War criminals on trial in The Hague. London: Abacus.
Frýdlová, P. (2014) Women’s Memory of Socialism: 15 Years of International Research, Archiving and Public Promotion. In: S. Carotenuto, R. Jambrešić-Kirin and S. Prlenda (eds) A feminist critique of knowledge production. Naples. University Press, 203–216.
Griffin, G. (ed.) (2005) Doing Women’s Studies. Employment Opportunities, Personal Impacts and Social Consequences. London: Zed Books.
Hechler, D. and Pasternack, P. (2014) From transformation to transfer. The transformation of the East German academic system 1989/90–1995. Revue d’études contemporaines Est-Ouest 45 (1): 207–227.
Heilbron, J. and Gingras, Y. (eds) (2015) Espaces des disciplines et pratiques interdisciplinaires (special issue). Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 210.
Ingrao, C. and Emmert, T. A. (eds) (2009) Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies: A scholars’ initiative. Washington DC: Purdue University Press, West Lafayette (IN): United States Institute of Peace Press.
Iveković, R. (1999) Autopsia dei Balcani: saggio di psico-politica. Milan: Raffaello Cortina.
Iveković, R. (2003) Le sexe de la nation. Paris: Léo Scheer.
Joachim, J. (2007) Agenda Setting, the UN, and NGOs. Gender Violence and Reproductive Rights. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.
Lemercier, C. and Picard, E. (2011) Quelle approche prosopographique? halshs-00521512, version 2, 3.052011.
Lóránd, Z. (2018) The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Miškovska Kajevska, A. (2017) Feminist Activism at War. Belgrade and Zagreb feminists in the 1990s. New York: Routledge.
Moser, C. (2013) Féminismes en traductions. Théories voyageuses et traductions culturelles. Paris: Editions des Archives contemporaines.
Nikolchina, M. (2002) The Seminar: Mode d’emploi. Impure Spaces in the Light of Late Totalitarianism. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13 (1): 96–127.
Prečan, V. (ed.) (2015) Kocka, ktera nikdy nespi II/The Cat Who Nevers Sleeps II. Prague: James H. Ottaway, JR.
Revillard, A. (2009) L’expertise critique, force d’une institution faible? Le Comité du travail féminin et la genèse d’une politique d’égalité professionnelle en France (1965–1983). Revue française de science politique 59 (2): 279–300.
Sapiro, G. (ed.) (2020) Dictionnaire international Bourdieu. Paris: CNRS Editions.
Saunier, P.-Y. (2004) Circulations, connexions et espaces transnationaux. Genèses. Sciences sociales et histoire 57 (4): 110–126.
Saunier, P.-Y. (2008) Learning by Doing. Notes about the Making of The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History. Journal of Modern European History 2: 159–180.
Saunier, P.-Y. (2013) Transnational History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Snitow, A. (2020) Visitors: An American Feminist in East Central Europe. New York: NYU Press.
Tarrow, S. (2005) Rooted cosmpolitans and transnational activists. In S. Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 35–56.
Topalov, C. (1999) Laboratoires du nouveau siècle. La nébuleuse réformatrice et ses réseaux en France, 1880–1914. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS.
Zahariević, A. (2015) Dissidents, disloyal citizens and partisans of emancipation: Feminist citizenship in Yugoslavia and post-Yugoslav spaces. Women’s Studies International Forum 49: 93–100.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cîrstocea, I. (2022). Feminist Scholars, Activists and Experts. In: Learning Gender after the Cold War. Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97888-4_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97888-4_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-97887-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-97888-4
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)