Czech Feminisms

Perspectives on Gender in East Central Europe

Iveta Jusová, Jirina Šiklová

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780253021939
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Féminisme et théorie féministe

Sixteen essays "apply the intersectional theory in an inspiring way in the analysis of gender issues in the past and in contemporary Czech society" ( Aspasia ). In this wide-ranging study of women's and gender issues in the pre- and post-1989 Czech Republic, contributors engage with current feminist debates and theories of nation and identity to examine the historical and cultural transformations of Czech feminism. This collection of essays by leading scholars, artists, and activists, explores such topics as reproductive rights, state socialist welfare provisions, Czech women's NGOs, anarchofeminism, human trafficking, LGBT politics, masculinity, feminist art, among others. Foregrounding experiences of women and sexual and ethnic minorities in the Czech Republic, the contributors raise important questions about the transfer of feminist concepts across languages and cultures. As the economic orthodoxy of the European Union threatens to occlude relevant stories of the different national communities comprising the Eurozone, this book contributes to the understanding of the diverse origins from which something like a European community arises. "While the collection demands that we understand Czech uniqueness, at the same time it is at its best when this uniqueness comes into focus through comparative study." — Feminist Review "A colorful bouquet offering an overview of directions taken by Czech feminist scholarship since the 1990s." — Slavic Review

PART 1

GENDER ISSUES IN CZECH SOCIETY PRIOR TO 1989

1	SITUATING CZECH IDENTITY
	Postcolonial Theory and “the European Dividend”
	IVETA JUSOVÁ

IN 1993, THE publication of Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union marked one of the first post-1989 English-language scholarly anthologies on Eastern European women. The express aim of Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller in editing their collection was to provide discursive space for women from post-1989 Eastern Europe to directly voice their perspectives and to “explain” to Western readers the situatedness of Eastern European women’s issues. From newly enabled (post-1989) encounters across borders, the situation appeared to call for explanations on both sides.

Along the lines of Simona Fojtová’s observations (addressed in greater detail later in this volume), throughout the 1990s, misunderstandings abounded between feminists from “the West” arriving in newly reopened Eastern European destinations and the women who had resided there all along. The initial impulse on the part of North American and Western European feminists traveling to the region seems to have been to look for the familiar in the unfamiliar, and the ensuing misrecognitions were often resented by Eastern European women writers and activists. The North American feminist academic discourse at the time—featuring both well-articulated postcolonial critiques and significant discussion concerning long-neglected intersections of race and gender—would seem to include a number of relevant cautions against presuming a universality of women’s experience. Yet Western feminism’s post–Cold War sojourns to the East curiously appeared to leave these lessons behind, to find them somehow inapplicable. Eastern European women were perceived as white and (more or less) European—and these surface appearances perhaps invited expectations for similarities rather than differences with mainstream Western feminisms. “They just needed to catch up with the West” was the initial assumption, although it was gradually replaced with a more tentative approach, following the first, often disorienting clashes and disappointments. The dominant strands of feminist discussions of difference in the United States at the time flowed along the lines of race or sexual orientation. In the Czech Republic (CR), and other countries of Eastern Europe, however, there were women who looked like the feminists arriving from the United States and Canada (predominantly of white European ancestry) but who still insisted on their specificity and difference. These women, while acknowledging that, yes, women and men were indeed treated differently in Eastern Europe, were not even necessarily convinced that feminism was needed.

It is fascinating to compare the 1993 anthology by Funk and Mueller, published soon after the dissolution of the Cold War barriers, with Joanna Regulska’s and Bonnie G. Smith’s 2012 Women and Gender in Postwar Europe, written two decades later. Clearly, Regulska and Smith found themselves facing a very different Europe than had Funk and Mueller in the early 1990s, one much less visibly divided along East-West lines perhaps, even if one also more internally differentiated. Indeed, already in 2000, Susan Gal and Gail Kligman noted an increasing convergence between East and West concerning women’s issues after 1989, and in 2008, Allaine Cerwonka even suggested that the continued emphasis on differences between East and West in scholarship dealing with Eastern European women risks further entrenching the existing power differentials and gulf between Eastern and Western feminists (814). Regulaska’s and Smith’s 2012 anthology seems to be responding to these calls as it represents post–World War II Europe comprehensively, interweaving voices from across East and West, North and South in a single volume. Differences within the same countries or regions are underscored, almost to the same degree as differences and similarities among the regions. While recognized as inherently demographically plural, Europe is also nudged here discursively in the direction of being recognizable as one. This narrative cross-weaving and integration seems inspired by the editors’ recognition of the continued undesirable associations connected with the idea of a separate East (and the continued negative ramifications for countries of being relegated into the East), as much as by the actual economic and political integration of the region through continued European Union (EU) eastward expansion. The question remains to what extent this project of (nuanced and differentiated) discursive reunification is reflected in “reality.” Addressing specifically the question of post-socialist contexts, Regulska and Grabowska could write in the 2012 anthology that “many post-state-socialist states are now considered part of the ‘developed’ world.” But they also immediately add that “the old divisions—based on the east and west of Europe—persist, and make activists and scholars raise questions about the specificity of east European feminism” (212).

ARE THESE EUROPEANS?

The persistence of the East-West demarcation—especially conceptually and in terms of cultural imagination—intrigues me as a Czechoslovak-born WGS and humanities scholar who has been bringing U.S. WGS students to the region for the past eleven years. Study abroad involves crossing borders and experiencing cross-cultural encounters in foreign settings. Throughout these physical and intellectual processes of transition, cultural associations, stereotypes, and preconceived notions (some that we might not have even been aware of possessing) become triggered more intensely than when learning about a subject at home. Available scholarly works, including political and sociological analyses of the region, such as the ones mentioned above, help ground students’ learning about Eastern Europe in facts and history, although these studies do not necessarily account for or counter the cultural associations through which these facts will be filtered and interpreted in students’ and other travelers’ minds. Neither do they always sufficiently address the global power relations within which U.S. students’ cross-cultural learning in the CR, and other Eastern/East Central European countries, takes place.

By the time we arrive in Prague, after already having spent several months in two or more Western European cities, some of my students curiously report expecting Czech people to be “slightly darker” with “prominent facial hair” (in the case of men) and “sexually virile” (again specifically regarding Czech men). Students recognize that these are “racialized images absent in my mind when thinking of Western Europe,” and are curious about where these preconceptions might be coming from. Leaving Prague, some students have commented, self-reflexively and sincerely yet with clear value judgment, on their perception of Czech fashion as backward (“stuck in the 90s time warp”), the population as too white and homogeneous, Czech gays and lesbians as insufficiently politically active, feminists as too straight, and people in the streets as staring at our gender-variant and racially mixed group too much. The fact that these value judgments of perceived “cultural delay” are harbored by otherwise generally well-prepared liberal arts college students who are encouraged in their curricula to question these kinds of presumptions and who overall make a conscientious effort to be culturally sensitive, makes these observations even more provocative and telling. As far as cultural imagination and mental mapping is concerned, the CR and Prague (geographically, of course, located to the northwest of Vienna) continue to be perceived as rather precariously and incompletely situated within Europe, despite political and economic analyses that appraise the CR as being one of the most solidly “arrived in Europe” from among the post-socialist countries. My students’ perceptions of the CR, somewhat irrespective of the facts they learn about the country, appear filtered through expectations and preconceptions disposing the Western viewer to evaluate the cultural differences encountered as inherently inferior or wanting.

Reflecting on these continuing East-West divisions in our mental geography, and, more importantly, on the stubborn hierarchy projected onto these divisions, I find Larry Wolff’s 1994 Inventing Eastern Europe invaluable, even though the picture of Eastern Europe painted there is rather monolithic. Guided by Edward Said’s postcolonial framework but paying close heed to the specificity of Eastern Europe, Wolff reminds us that the idea of Eastern Europe, accompanied by traditions and habits of conceptualizing the region as backward, is much older than the Cold War. He traces the invention of Eastern Europe to the Enlightenment, when the previous conventional mental orientation for thinking about the European Continent along a North-South axis (characteristic of the Renaissance) was gradually replaced with a new West-East orientation. Wolff makes a convincing argument that “Churchill’s demarcation of a boundary line ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic’ followed a line that was drawn and invested with meaning over two centuries” (4). If the invention of Eastern Europe as the “complementary other half of Western Europe” (4) predates the Cold War by two centuries, it is then perhaps less of a puzzle why the hierarchically organized West-East demarcation would prove so persistent, even with many Eastern European countries now officially integrated into the EU.

Combing through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German, British, French, and Austrian accounts of real and fictitious voyages into the Eastern “shadow” lands, Wolff delineates how the region gradually emerged and solidified as a mediating cultural zone “between European liberty and Asiatic despotism” (7). What the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers seem to have found particularly off-putting and worth remarking upon—besides the perceived “filth and misery,” serfdom, and sexual promiscuity—was the mixture (today we would say diversity) of races, nations, cultures, and customs. Phrases such as “an inconceivable melange,” “a motley aggregation of primitive people,” and “a racial mish-mash with strong Asiatic elements” proliferate in the excerpts quoted by Wolff, with frequent references to “swarms of Jews” (369, 28). This racial, cultural, and national heterogeneity, clearly assessed as inferior, combined with the incomprehensible (to Westerners) Slavic, Hungarian, and Romanian languages, helped produce the impression of the East as a land of nonsense, paradox, and unresolved contrasts.

Focusing mostly on British, German, and French accounts, Wolff captures the West as gazing at the East, but, of course, the East has long been looking back. The following quotation from a short story written by the late nineteenth-century Czech nationalist writer Gabriela Preissová demonstrates that Czechs, Moravians, Slovaks, and no doubt others from among the “motley of incomprehensible races and nations” were well aware of the gaze and perceived it in terms of lopsided power relations.¹ A fictional Viennese baroness, who comes to witness a harvest celebration and be entertained by seasonal workers’ national dances, is depicted as objectifying Moravian workers through her folklorist’s curious gaze:

“Ranger, ask them to sing something for us,” the baroness said. “I am much interested in studying such originalities. What nation is it?”

“They are Slovaks,” the ranger answered with his neck bowed, “mostly from higher Hungary.”

“Do they speak Hungarian?” the baroness inquired, looking around through her monocle.

“No, madam. They speak a Slavic language similar to Czech.”…

“The ladyship wishes to hear one of your songs.”

“Something national,” the baroness added. (1896 [1889], 95, my translation)

Preissová represents the baroness unsympathetically, as a critical caricature of nineteenth-century Austrian urbanites whose interest in understanding the people of the empire did not go beyond their folklorist curiosity about the songs they did not understand and the costumes they collected.

It is interesting to compare how Western travelers of what perhaps now seems like a distant past once perceived Eastern Europe with what their counterparts say today. While in the eighteenth and nineteenth century visitors complained about the region as presumably excessively racially diverse, today it is often the opposite. My American students regularly comment on the racial uniformity of the Czech population. Whereas in the past Westerners seem to have been preconditioned to value homogeneity, and they assessed Eastern Europe as inferior because of the perceived excess of diversity that they encountered there, U.S. students today have increasingly been acclimated to valuing diversity and multiculturalism, and they find the Czech lands inadequate once again, although this time it is for the perceived lack of diversity of the population. There is certainly some truth to this perception, although the relative ethnic homogeneity must be first and foremost understood in its historical context of post–World War II reconstruction in Eastern Europe reliant almost exclusively on the labor of local populations, in contradistinction to late-colonial and then postcolonial political-economic migrations in the West. Against such a backdrop, shaped through four decades of local continuity with relatively little broader geographic migratory influences, the East inevitably has come to feature some noticeable demographic homogeneity.

But beyond any complaints of “lagging behind” in terms of overt multicultural mix, Eastern/East Central Europeans, including the Czechs, continue to be othered in other ways as well—and often this othering is articulated in gendered and sexualized language. Wolff discusses how in the past, Eastern Europe was perceived as sexually promiscuous and a place to explore and enact forbidden sexual fantasies (1994, 57). The sense of the region’s primitiveness and backwardness, in fact, rested to a large extent on presumptions about its population’s sexual profligacy. While the region had become effectively closed off to Western visitors after 1948, following 1989 (speaking specifically of the CR again), the perception of sexual promiscuity was quickly picked up again and reconstructed by (and for) Western travelers. As Timothy M. Hall has articulated it, “Soon after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, tourists from neighboring Austria and Germany began visiting cities in what was then Czechoslovakia. They were drawn not only by curiosity about their neighbors … but also in increasing numbers by a growing sexual mystique around ‘Eastern’, Slavic women and men, seen as wild, passionate, uninhibited—in some ways more primitive and natural than the restrained and civilized Germans” (2007, 458). Of course, this exoticizing rhetoric also served as an alibi for sexual exploitation purchased from the standpoint of significant economic advantage. Since 1989, the CR, and especially Prague, has become a major producer of pornography, particularly gay porn, and Anglophone and Germanophone male sex tourists have poured into what many of them perceive as “sexual paradise” (459) in search of cheap sex with not only local (and other Eastern European) women and gay men but, apparently, also local heterosexual men. Hall further notes, “Part of the Western gay fantasy of Slavic sexuality since the early 1990s derives from the relative availability in post-socialist countries of heterosexual-appearing men who are willing to engage in sex with other men” (458). The position of Czechs, women and men, as mostly providers of sexual services rather than paying clients would seem to reinforce their place among “the rest” rather than on an equal footing with the West.

While during socialism Czech and other Eastern European women were often represented in the West as asexual or masculine, as gray and shapeless workers, today, in contrast, not only are Czech women represented as highly sexualized but Czech men seem to figure in the Western cultural imaginary mostly as feminized. In this context, Jacqui True’s consideration of the post-1989 Czech economic and political situation through the prism of gender and sex representation is quite perceptive. She explores the ways in which Czech men are placed disadvantageously “in subject positions relative to Western men in global capitalism” (2003, 114). Examining local advertisements for Western European products and companies, True notes how Czech men are commonly constructed in them as “secondary, incomplete subjects, not yet rational or masculine enough to ‘return to Europe’” (114). True’s observation is congruous with Boris Buden’s 2010 insights, in “The Children of Postcommunism,” about the infantalization of post-socialist societies in Western spectators’ comments.² Buden ponders the preponderance of metaphors of immaturity and childhood in the Western “jargon of postcommunist transition,” noting the irony faced by Eastern European subjects: one day they are being celebrated for toppling totalitarian regimes, only to be declared “still in diapers” politically the next. Buden suggests there is no ambiguity regarding whose interests are served here: “There is no relation of domination that seems so natural and self-evident as the one between a child and a guardian, no mastery so innocent and justifiable as that over children,” and he speaks of the childhood metaphor as “a symptom of the new power relationship” between the self-proclaimed ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity Issues in the Czech Culture: Past and Present
• Part 1: Gender Issues in Czech Society Prior to 1989
• Part 2: Gender Issues in Czech Society Post–1989
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index