Gendering Postsocialism

Old Legacies and New Hierarchies

Yulia Gradskova, Ildikó Asztalos Morell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351585576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Gendering Postsocialism explores changes in gendered norms and expectations in Eastern Europe and Eurasia after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The dismantlement of state socialism in these regions triggered monumental shifts in their economic landscape, the involvement of their welfare states in social citizenship and, crucially, their established gender norms and relations, all contributing to the formation of the postsocialist citizen.

Case studies examine a wide range of issues across 15 countries of the post-Soviet era. These include gender aspects of the developments in education in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Hungary, controversies around abortion legislation in Poland, migrant women and housing as a gendered problem in Russia, challenges facing women's NGOs in Bosnia, and identity formation of unemployed men in Lithuania. This close analysis reveals how different variations of neoliberal ideology, centred around the notion of the self-reliant and self-determining individual, have strongly influenced postsocialist gender identities, whilst simultaneously showing significant trends for a "retraditionalising" of gender norms and expectations.

This volume suggests that despite integration with global political and free market systems, the postsocialist gendered subject combines strategies from the past with those from contemporary ideologies to navigate new multifaceted injustices around gender in Eastern Europe and Eurasia.

1 The gendered subject of postsocialism

State-socialist legacies, global challenges and (re)building of tradition

Ildikó Asztalos Morell, Yulia Gradskova

When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and when, two years later, the Soviet Union crumbled and was divided into 15 independent states, the huge space formerly called the Communist Bloc or the countries of state socialism seemed to disappear forever, and an unprecedented process of change began. This process was just as unique from a historical perspective as the earlier attempts to build communism and/or state socialism. The changes had different speeds and directions, and while some states embraced the process of democratisation in order to “return to Europe”, others were experimenting with the ideals of a strong authoritarian state, religion, and a “return to tradition” to build a new society.

Now, however, nearly 30 years later, the different countries of this huge geographical space often continue to be addressed according to their common past, or as countries still in a state of transition or transformation from their previous condition – as postsocialist. In some cases the communist past seems to have been totally overcome, and these countries are recognised as European and democratic states with well-functioning market economies (as in the case of many countries that have joined the European Union). However, their position in the formerly socialist space can suddenly be remembered in exceptional circumstances, like during the refugee crisis of 2015 (Dalakoglou, 2016). In other cases, the changes do not seem to be thorough due to the emergence of authoritarian regimes and corruption. Thus, the states that have experienced slower changes are more frequently referred to through their past as “formerly” or “post” socialist.

In deference to these temporal interpretations, following Madina Tlostanova, we approach postsocialism not only in temporal terms, but also in spatial terms – as a space populated by millions of people whose experience is “underconceptualized” in the analysis of globalisation (Tlostanova, 2017, pp. 1–3). In choosing to analyse postsocialism as a “critical standpoint” in order to avoid the essentialisation of the region (Stella, 2015, p. 133), we consider it important to explore gendered changes focusing on institutions, discourses, memories, identities, and fantasies that in one way or another connect to this postsocialist condition.

Although taking place in varied shapes and degrees, the dismantlement of state socialism and the emergence of “capitalism” in the former state-socialist countries led to radical shifts in their economies as well as in the welfare state’s involvement in social citizenship. Gender relations were a key arena for the moulding of state-socialist citizenship where institutions, guarding women’s reproductive rights as well as their work opportunities, were raised to create the ideal socialist citizen. Gender norms and gender relations have also been a prime field for forming the postsocialist citizen. While we assume that the bondage between economic regimes and gender norms is not deterministic (Asztalos Morell, 1999), the contributions to this book further explore the connectivity between gender and economy without assuming reductionist causality or restricting the sphere of gender norms to the sphere of economic importance.

Thus, the main aim of this book is to explore changing gendered norms and expectations in relation to the postsocialist transformation in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. We explore how the gendered legacies of state socialism are entangled with the geopolitical reorientation of the region and the simultaneity of socio-economic, political, and cultural changes in this geographical space. How are gender expectations shaped in the conflict between impulses towards more gender equality versus the renaturalisation/retraditionalisation of gender norms, and how are the new gender norms entangled with the neoliberal economic demands, precarities, “multifaceted injustice” (Suchland, 2015, p. 188), new forms of socio-economic differentiation, and insecurities?¹ How can the analysis of gender norms and expectations in the space of former state socialism contribute to a study of global developments in gender relationships?

Theoretical approach

Following Raewyn Connell and Rebecca Pearse, we assume that womanhood and manhood are not exclusively imposed from the outside (Connell and Pearse, 2015a, pp. 72–74). Indeed, Candace West and Don Zimmerman (1987) showed in their seminal article “Doing gender” that gender norms are produced, reproduced, and challenged in the process of communication. Furthermore, according to Judith Butler, the heterosexual gender matrix – a specific regulatory framework for gender – is culture specific (Butler, 1999, p. 42). Norms always presuppose the active involvement of individuals in “doing gender” and cannot be seen as a stable construct based on biology. Gender simultaneously constitutes and is constituted by institutions. As Connell and Pearse (2015b) wrote:

The assumptions, rules and guidelines that we call “norms” are part of the weave of everyday life. They are embedded in institutions as much as they are in individual heads. […] A key question about gender norms, therefore, is how they are materialized in social life.

It is this materialisation of gender norms that is particularly important for most of the contributions in this book. While the gender norms of state socialism were embedded in the overall guarantees of work, education, and housing, they also in most countries supposed accessibility to abortion and childcare. The beginning of the postsocialist reforms, on the other hand, was connected not only with freedom for political activity and new gender ideals, but also with changing material constraints in the sphere of work, family life, leisure, and education.

Furthermore, as Connell and Pearse (2015b) stated, institutions play a particularly important role in the reproduction of norms of gender inequality, but still gender norms can be changed and the “pressures for change are coming from many sources”. However, the changes are often ambiguous. Thus, in this book we explore how much the gender norms have changed since 1989, what the important sources of the “postsocialist” gender norms are, and how they materialise.

Norms are also seen as gaining expression through technologies and practices of governing. From the perspective of governmentality theory (Dean, 2010), action in accordance to desired patterns does not require violent oppression when norms are internalised. While totalitarian regimes were installed via the use of force, later state socialism reproduced itself through the agency of the subjects of state-socialist regimes. To some extent, state-socialist gender norms were also shaped by the interests of citizens and became integrated into everyday praxis (Chernova, 2008; Gradskova, 2012).

Neither can we perceive state socialism as a unified system of norms. Diverse national and local conditions formed and shaped the institutions through time and national variations on gender regimes inside of the state-socialist camp emerged, among other ways, through local resistance. From its beginning state socialism aimed to unset the established gender norms, which assumed women’s availability as care providers (Goven, 2002). While the state was meant to rationalise, and provide for childcare, women were to be liberated via engagement in spheres of life that previously belonged to men. As part of this modernistic, emancipatory vision, women were to be enabled to engage in work, education and were to enjoy sexual rights similar to men. As a counterforce, from the 1960s onwards, a restoration of “natural” gender norms unfolded. For example, in Hungary the 1956 revolution marked a shift from the gender-homogenising policies of the 1950s (Goven, 2002). After the early 1960s, the social importance of maternity was re-evaluated, leading to the introduction of the three-year paid childcare benefit system in 1967, which was unique for its time (Asztalos Morell, 1999). This re-naturalised gender order led to the strengthening of the model of the maternalistic welfare state (Glass and Fodor, 2007). Maternalistic reproductive benefits emerged in most former state-socialist countries based on the dual construction of women’s alleged emancipation, envisaged through participation in the labour force, which was made possible by state intervention and a political commitment to enable women to combine wage labour and unpaid care duties in the family (Carlbäck, 2007). In the Soviet Union, the period of childcare leave was never as long as it was in Hungary. However, it grew over time, particularly during the perestroika years (from 1985). Meanwhile, the proportion of children attending childcare facilities was generally high in state-socialist countries. In the final years of the Soviet Union, about 70 per cent of all children between the ages of 3 and 7 attended childcare facilities (Gradskova, 2012).

Two broad grounds for the critique of the state-socialist emancipatory project emerged already during late state socialism. On the one hand, the critique of “women’s policies” was incorporated into the critique of etatism and paternalism. Indeed, Goven (2000) argued that state-socialist women’s policies often were seen by the liberal critical samizdat opposition as an expression of the alliance between women and the paternalistic state and as an intrusion on the sanctity of the family. Thus, the liberal opposition inside the socialist camp pledged for the reconstitution of the sanctity of the bourgeois family (Einhorn, 2006).

On the other hand, as it is well known, state-socialist policies towards women were criticised by Western feminism (Einhorn, 2006; Liljeström, 1995). The maternalistic welfare regimes of state socialism did not impact the privilege that men had in lacking responsibility for care work in the family, although it weakened their role as the main providers for the family (Asztalos Morell, 1999; Åberg, 2016). The state-socialist gender regime did not challenge the heteronormative matrix and was complacent towards issues of gender-based violence. Within the state-socialist paradigm of production, both men’s and women’s wage work was needed for the economy, even if in different spheres. The state-socialist countries were secularised and facilitated abortion, but were pro-natalist. However, with the exception of the most totalitarian regimes, such as that in Romania (McIntyre, 1985), they promoted childbirth via diverse childcare policies.

After 1989/1991 changes in norms occurred on different levels, including those of individual agency, institutional rules and practices, state intervention, civil movements, and market transitions. We explore, in particular, the gendered outcomes of the divergent forms through which the state-socialist construction of maternalist welfare regimes were dismantled (Glass and Fodor, 2007), and we see this dismantling as inspired and enhanced by neoliberal as well as gender-conservative thinking and practice (Aidukaite, 2009). However, while gender norms formed during state socialism were resisted, their legacies were carried on in complex ways, through the footprints of mind-sets and/or through opportunity structures – institutions that state socialism carved out (Glass and Fodor, 2007; Asztalos Morell et al., 2005).

Another important aspect of postsocialist transformation that is under-researched and that is analysed in this book includes the new governmentality and its effects on the individual level. Indeed, the new economic order has often demanded a new, more flexible self, a person who is competitive, flexible, and oriented towards individual success (Makovicky, 2014; Lerner, 2011). Contributors analyse how different contexts and variations of the gendered (dis)appropriation of the neoliberal ideology of the self-reliant individual influence gender norms and identities.

While the establishment of state-socialist regimes emerged through collisions with pre-socialist gender regimes and norms, the postsocialist formation of gender regimes in the era of capitalist transition emerged in the interplay between global challenges and influences as well as local responses and resistances. Neither the global nor the local can be simplified, and this book’s contributions explore particular cases of these complexities.

Indeed we see developments in the former space of state socialism not as isolated and specific, but as influenced by global processes and developments. Globalisation in general terms has been perceived as a growth of “trans-planetary” and “super-territorial” connectivity between people (Scholte, 2005, p. 82). This perception of globalisation sees it as the “re-spatialisation of social life”, that is, broader than liberalisation, internationalisation, or Westernisation. The intensification of super-territorial connectivity has accelerated with the expansion of digital technologies and the Internet since the 1980s. This process has dissolved the limitations of space and time (Beck, 2015), allowing a revolutionary transformation of the global expansion of economic transactions and the diffusion of ideas. At the same time this global transfusion has been interrelated with the expansion of the neoliberalist paradigm of market supremacy and techniques of self-governance. Scholte has described neoliberalism as the prevailing policy discourse for globalisation since the 1980s (Scholte, 2005, p. 39).

The former state-socialist realm, divided by the new borders of political and economic spaces, entered the postsocialist era with the intent of converging toward capitalism. This path emerged along the “self-colonising” discourse (Éber, 2016) of the “catching up” narrative (Petö, 2016) and aimed to implement democracy and human rights, but it became entangled with a specific version of the capitalism of the developed West that embraced the neoliberal path. This version of capitalism was based on the principles of market fundamentalism (Kováts, 2016, see also Standing, 2014). The formerly over-centralised economies of state socialism after 1989 were exposed to globally influenced constraints shaped by policies in line with the Washington Consensus,² and often by the politics of deregulation of the state and the cutting of public expenditures designed with the help of Western advisers. In the beginning of the 1990s, the welfare regimes of the newly independent countries were under economic pressure by transnational monetary institutions.³ These pressed forward policy packages for economic, social, and cultural transformation. “Shock therapy”, together with incorporation into the global market, brought forward the mass decline of production capacity in many of the postsocialist countries, leading to mass unemployment. To different degrees, the deregulation of the market, combined with the introduction of workfare regimes and retrenchment of the welfare state, led to large-scale redistributions of wealth (Kóczé, 2016). Dual societies emerged within countries along intersectional (including both ethnic- and gender-based) cleavages (Ferge, 2003; Kóczé, 2016).

Meanwhile, the economic gap between former state-socialist and capitalist countries has not been overcome. Regional inequalities between postsocialist countries and core capitalist countries, as well as between economically more or less developed postsocialist countries, have emerged and been reproduced. These have contributed to transnational mobilities with gender specific incorporation of women through care migration and trafficking. Thus, the growing influence of the global logic of neoliberalism obscured “the great sea of exploitation” (Suchland, 2015, p. 7).

In this book we see gender as interacting with other categories in shaping different dimensions of the experiences of the citizens of the postsocialist countries (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1244). In particular, the intersection of gender with class, ethnicity, and religion is important for our study of the norms, spaces, and marginalities of postsocialism. The (re)establishment of the independent states throughout the wide territories of South and Eastern Europe and Eurasia contributed to the growth of national feelings and cultural development, but in some cases these were connected with the reinforcement of discrimination alongside old (imperial/colonial) and new division lines (as in the case of migrant workers from Central Asia in Russia or in the case of Roma women in Hungary experiencing multiple levels of discrimination).

Changes in the role of the state as well as changes connected to the promotion of transnational gender-equality institutions have often provoked counter-reactions from gendered postsocialist societies and individuals (Gradskova & Sanders, 2015). The region has experienced protests against welfare cuts, but it has also seen the spread of political movements and ideas on re-establishing traditional family and gender roles. Thus, contributions to this volume explore processes of changing gender norms on the level of individual agency, institutional transformation, social and political mobilisation, and state policy formation in national and transnational contexts.

Due to our interest in the social and material, rather than in the purely political and ideological aspects of this transformation, in this book we decided to use the concept of “post-state socialism” rather than “post-communism”. This concept also seems to be more helpful in analysing changes in the gender norms embedded in social institutions. However, we use the terms post-state socialist and postsocialist interchangeably. Finally, a focus on de-etatisation of social institutions helps in our analysis of the socialist remains and their meaning for contemporary gender norms and hierarchies.

Even if the scholarship on postsocialist changes numbers several thousand volumes, only a small part of it addresses the fact that all of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. The gendered subject of postsocialism: state-socialist legacies, global challenges and (re)building of tradition
• PART 1: New gendered geographies
• PART 2: Neoliberal governance and the gendered enterprising self
• PART 3: Resilient legacies of state socialism
• PART 4: The postsocialist societies between marketisation, democratisation and retraditionalisation
• Index