{"id":502,"date":"2007-10-11T16:51:54","date_gmt":"2007-10-11T14:51:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.univie.ac.at\/Geschichte\/salon21\/?p=502"},"modified":"2025-01-06T09:48:29","modified_gmt":"2025-01-06T09:48:29","slug":"volume-womens-movements-comment-by-therese-garstenauer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/salon21.univie.ac.at\/?p=502","title":{"rendered":"Therese Garstenauer: A comment on Edith Saurer, Margareth Lanzinger and Elisabeth Frysak (eds.): Women\u2019s Movements. Networks and Debates in post-communist Countries in the 19th and 20th Centuries, K\u00f6ln et. al 2006"},"content":{"rendered":"

Networks between \u201eEast\u201d and \u201eWest\u201c. Intensifying scholarly communication between Austria and Eastern Europe in Women\u2019s and Gender History. A comment on Edith Saurer, Margareth Lanzinger and Elisabeth Frysak eds., Women\u2019s Movements. Networks and Debates in post-communist Countries in the 19th and 20th Centuries, K\u00f6ln et. al 2006<\/strong>
\nTherese Garstenauer<\/p>\n

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 \u201eEast\u201c and \u201eWest\u201c 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.<\/p>\n

I quote from the conference\u2019s call for papers: \u201eEven 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.\u201c<\/p>\n

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: \u201eOne 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\u2022the most important paradigms, phases, developments concepts, terms, history of feminism and\/or gender origins of women’s movement(s) within the several countries.\u201c
\nAcademia, 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 \u201eWest\u201c?<\/p>\n

Collaboration between \u201eWestern\u201c 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:<\/p>\n

\u201eThe main concepts of gender research \u2013 gender, feminism, women\u2019s subjectivity \u2013 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.\u201c
\nAlthough 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 \u201eWest\u201c (USA, United Kingdom, Germany, France\u2026) can not be denied in this context. Usually, theories and methods travel from the \u201eWest\u201c to the \u201eEast\u201c. The \u201eEast\u201c, 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 \u201eWestern\u201c scholars to explore the region, to interview people, to do research in archives and maybe to brush up one\u2019s language skills. For Russian scholars, going to the \u201eWest\u201c means to travel, to study, to educate oneself, to work in library, to have access to \u201egeneral\u201c knowledge that is not available or hard to get in Russia.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s own country, i. e. a Hungarian author writes about Hungary, a Croatian about Croatia etc. Five of the articles dealt with an \u201eother\u201c context, i. e. a German scholar writes about Poland. In four of these cases, the authors are \u201eWesterners\u201c, and the national context investigated is Eastern European. Five articles can not be assigned to one national context.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s and Gender History.<\/p>\n

In this context, it is of some interest to ask for continuities: Was there Women\u2019s history in socialist states? Andrea Pet\u00f6 speaks of Eastern Europe as a \u201eterra incognita\u201c of Women\u2019s history, using the metaphor of a \u201ered blanket\u201c. 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: \u201eIn the post-Soviet period, the discourse of \u2018thinking sex\u2019 which has been prohibited in the Soviet Union, first appeared more than ten years ago in the revolutionary field of gender studies\u201c. Natalia Pushkareva on the other hand dates the first steps of Russian Women\u2019s history back to the early 19th century and claims that to some extent during the 1970s and 1980s, scholars of Women\u2019s history on either sides of the iron curtain were doing very similar things without knowing about each other\u2019s work. I think it is worthwhile to further pursue the issue of Women\u2019s history in Eastern Europe before 1989, or rather before regular and intensive exchange with \u201eWestern\u201c colleagues has been possible.<\/p>\n

Language<\/strong>
\nTo 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\u2019s and Gender Studies. Some journals that originate from non-English speaking regions (e. g. \u201eNORA\u201d the journal of Nordic Women\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

West? East?<\/strong>
\nIt would be wrong to overlook differences and inequalities that do exist (despite one\u2019s wishes that it was not so). On the other hand: a focus on \u201eEast\u201c\u2013\u201cWest\u201c-relations can also lead to reifying the two sides. Joan Scott has warned of imagining \u201eEastern Europe\u201c, and \u201eWestern feminism\u201c, and the like as monolithic entities. The focus on relations between Central Eastern\/South Eastern Europe and the \u201eWest\u201c must not tempt one to imagine the relations within Gender Studies in the \u201eWest\u201c all egalitarian. Although German-speaking countries are seen as \u201eWestern\u201c 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.
\nLately, I learned at a European Gender Studies conference that British Gender scholars are not very willing to read publications by continental European colleagues \u2013 even if the papers are written in English. At the same conference the US-American theorist Judith Butler said in her keynote speech \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/strong>
\nMarina Blagojevic, 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.
\n\u201e… 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.\u201c
\nThe opportunities to participate in an international community of Feminist and\/or Women\u2019s 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.
\nAndrea Pet\u00f6 wrote in 2004: \u201eNearly each East European Country has produced a first collection of conference papers on their \u203aown\u2039 national women\u2019s history. But very few papers had actually been developed later into monographs, and even fewer of them are used in the classroom.\u201c
\nIt seems, there is a lot more to be done, not only with regard to writing one\u2019s own national Women\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Networks between \u201eEast\u201d and \u201eWest\u201c. Intensifying scholarly communication between Austria and Eastern Europe in Women\u2019s and Gender History. A comment on Edith Saurer, Margareth Lanzinger and Elisabeth Frysak eds., Women\u2019s Movements. Networks and Debates in post-communist Countries in the 19th and 20th Centuries, K\u00f6ln et. al 2006 Therese Garstenauer Commenting on the volume edited by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,15,7,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-web-sources","category-reports","category-history-of-european-womens-movements","category-migration-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/salon21.univie.ac.at\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/salon21.univie.ac.at\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/salon21.univie.ac.at\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salon21.univie.ac.at\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salon21.univie.ac.at\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=502"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/salon21.univie.ac.at\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78832,"href":"https:\/\/salon21.univie.ac.at\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502\/revisions\/78832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/salon21.univie.ac.at\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salon21.univie.ac.at\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salon21.univie.ac.at\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}