Networks between „East” and „West“. Intensifying scholarly communication between Austria and Eastern Europe in Women’s and Gender History

A comment on Edith Saurer, Margareth Lanzinger and Elisabeth Frysak eds., Women’s Movements. Networks and Debates in post-communist Countries in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Köln et. al 2006
Therese Garstenauer

Commenting on the volume edited by Edith Saurer, Margareth Lanzinger and Elisabeth Frysak, I am not only interested in the impressive variety of contributions but also in the conditions of the making of this book. Furthermore, I am interested in the connotations of „East“ and „West“ in this context.
Collaboration across borders, here, does not only imply the necessity to put up with different academic cultures (as has been mentioned in the introduction to the volume), but also with hierarchies. The conference held in 2004 and the volume that collects the contributions to the conference represent an attempt to overcome hierarchies, or at least to deal with them in a productive manner.
I quote from the conference’s call for papers:
„Even today, thirteen years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, it is often only the western part of the continent that is meant when there is talk of Europe. The situation is especially condensed in terms of women’s studies and gender research: in its western form, this is closely linked with the social and political experiences and situations or recent decades in the contexts of the genesis, its further developments and changes. Scholars from eastern and south-eastern Europe were not integrated, or at least not to the same degree, in the development of new issues, themes and approaches, and subsequently in changing terminologies and alternating discourses.“
This paragraph aptly describes a situation in which Eastern European scholars are not fully acknowledged as subjects and Eastern Europe is not fully acknowledged as an object of European historiography.
The call for papers states furthermore: „One aim was the foundation for a democratic way of dealing with diversity in Europe and for political integration. Beyond established contacts the project would like to stimulate research work and history(ies) about feminism, gender and women’s movement within post-Communist countries. The project is interested in•the most important paradigms, phases, developments concepts, terms, history of feminism and/or gender origins of women’s movement(s) within the several countries.“
Academia, however, is not democratically organized. Academic structures develop within social and historical contexts. It is not necessarily the best and wisest who are heard, but those who can make themselves heard. And this depends on many things.
A need to catch up with the „West“?
Collaboration between „Western“ scholars and their colleagues from post-socialist countries has often had a certain implication for the latter: the need to get acquainted with a field of study that is new to oneself but has been developed and discussed for some decades elsewhere. I will illustrate this claim with some observations pertaining to post-soviet Russia, a context that I am somewhat familiar with. Sociologists Anna Temkina and Elena Zdravomyslova from St. Petersburg characterize the situation of Gender Studies as follows:
„The main concepts of gender research – gender, feminism, women’s subjectivity – have been taken over from Western feminist discourse and were introduced to the Russian public early in the 1990s; Russian gender studies began to develop as a whole thanks to the application of Western concepts and theories.“
Although not every Russian gender scholar will subscribe to this point of view, and despite the considerable body of scholarship in Russian that has been developed to this day, the crucial role of imports from whatever „West“ (USA, United Kingdom, Germany, France…) can not be denied in this context.
Usually, theories and methods travel from the „West“ to the „East“. The „East“, in turn, provides empirical data. Or, referring to statements from interviews that I conducted for my dissertation (and my own experience): To travel to Russia means for „Western“ scholars to explore the region, to interview people, to do research in archives and maybe to brush up one’s language skills. For Russian scholars, going to the „West“ means to travel, to study, to educate oneself, to work in library, to have access to „general“ knowledge that is not available or hard to get in Russia.
With this division of tasks in mind, I would like to take a look at the articles in the volume at hand. It consists of 34 articles contributed by scholars from 18 countries: Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, the USA and the Ukraine.
24 of these articles are about one’s own country, i. e. a Hungarian author writes about Hungary, a Croatian about Croatia etc.
Five of the articles dealt with an „other“ context, i. e. a German scholar writes about Poland. In four of these cases, the authors are „Westerners“, and the national context investigated is Eastern European. Five articles can not be assigned to one national context.
The ratio of theoretical scholarship and empirical research in this volume would merit some closer consideration. An overview of all the articles reveals a strong leaning towards concrete themes (such as persons, organizations, women’s movements, legal matters, political debates), more often than not within one national context. There is no obvious division between theoretical/abstract/conceptual articles on one hand and empirical/concrete/applied articles on the other. This is interesting all the more since the call for papers asked explicitly for concepts and theories crucial in Eastern European Women’s and Gender History.
In this context, it is of some interest to ask for continuities: Was there Women’s history in socialist states? Andrea Petö speaks of Eastern Europe as a „terra incognita“ of Women’s history, using the metaphor of a „red blanket“. As far as Russia is concerned, there are differing points of view: Two authors of the volume at hand make opposite statements. Irina Zherebkina writes: „In the post-Soviet period, the discourse of ‘thinking sex’ which has been prohibited in the Soviet Union, first appeared more than ten years ago in the revolutionary field of gender studies“. Natalia Pushkareva on the other hand dates the first steps of Russian Women’s history back to the early 19th century and claims that to some extent during the 1970s and 1980s, scholars of Women’s history on either sides of the iron curtain were doing very similar things without knowing about each other’s work.
I think it is worthwhile to further pursue the issue of Women’s history in Eastern Europe before 1989, or rather before regular and intensive exchange with „Western“ colleagues has been possible.
Language
To say that language plays a role here is a truism. English serves, as in other academic fields, as a lingua franca, which makes it another means of inclusion as well as exclusion, of communication as well as hegemony. Nina Lykke, for one, has pointed out the prevalence of articles from native speakers from the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia in English-language European journals of Women’s and Gender Studies. Some journals that originate from non-English speaking regions (e. g. „NORA” the journal of Nordic Women’s Studies) are publishing in English (and not Swedish, Norwegian or Finnish, which I appreciate, as I am unable to read any of the Scandinavian languages). But even if a journal such as the European Journal of Women’s Studies has an editorial policy of encouraging the submission of papers in the (non-English) native languages of the authors, someone will at some point have to translate or at least proofread it. And this boils down to extra time and/or money for those who are not native or fluent speakers of English. We are far from discussing the contents and quality of a scholarly work yet, we are considering the mere odds and opportunities to get published and thus visible/readable for a larger audience in the first place.
West? East?
It would be wrong to overlook differences and inequalities that do exist (despite one’s wishes that it was not so). On the other hand: a focus on „East“–“West“-relations can also lead to reifying the two sides. Joan Scott has warned of imagining „Eastern Europe“, and „Western feminism“, and the like as monolithic entities.
The focus on relations between Central Eastern/South Eastern Europe and the „West“ must not tempt one to imagine the relations within Gender Studies in the „West“ all egalitarian.
Although German-speaking countries are seen as „Western“ from an Eastern European perspective, German-speaking Gender scholars themselves strongly draw on US-American literature. The most prestigious journals of Gender Studies are based in the UK and the USA.
Lately, I learned at a European Gender Studies conference that British Gender scholars are not very willing to read publications by continental European colleagues – even if the papers are written in English. At the same conference the US-American theorist Judith Butler said in her keynote speech – well-meaning and probably unwillingly paternalistically – that European scholars were by now developing and should develop ideas of their own, independent of US-American debates. This statement struck me particularly because I have heard similar arguments in Russian contexts, but in these cases as affirmative self-descriptions, not as a diagnosis from the outside.
Conclusion
Marina Blagojevi?, a sociologist who lives and works in Belgrade and Budapest, describes the (South) Eastern European Countries as situated in a semi-periphery of Social sciences (with reference to Wallersteins world system). From this position it is very difficult to make substantial and theoretical statements that are also acknowledged by an international scholarly community.
„… an excellent woman social scientist at the semi-periphery can hardly be the creator of excellent knowledge while staying at the semiperiphery, even if she succeeds in doing such impossible work, mainly because there will be no one to take notice of it.“
The opportunities to participate in an international community of Feminist and/or Women’s Studies scholars are confined to a responsive role or to that of providing empirical data about the particular post-communist condition – data that will be analysed and interpreted by using (seemingly universally valid) Western models or theories.
Andrea Petö wrote in 2004: „Nearly each East European Country has produced a first collection of conference papers on their ›own‹ national women’s history. But very few papers had actually been developed later into monographs, and even fewer of them are used in the classroom.“
It seems, there is a lot more to be done, not only with regard to writing one’s own national Women’s history, but also to transcend national boundaries. Projects like the conference and resultant volume, focussing on the communication with central eastern and south eastern European colleagues are feasible ways of taking notice of one another and of taking one another serious. And these are indispensable preconditions for collaboration on a more egalitarian basis.