Genders 22. Ellen E. Berry
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forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press.
26. “Russofobiia” was first circulated in samizdat’ form and was first published in Nash sovremennik in 1989.
27. Rasputin, “Cherchez la Femme,” 171.
28. Ibid., 171.
29. Vasilii Belov, “Vospitanie po doktoru Spoku” In Belov, Izbrannye proizvedniia v trekh tomakh, vol. 2 (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1983), 305.
30. For more on the folklore of the rusalki, see Hubbs, Mother Russia, 27–36.
31. Belov, “Vospitanie,” 317.
32. “V kakom sostoianii nakhoditsia russkaia natsiia,” Nash sovremennik 3 (1993): 148.
33. See Natal’ia Ivanova, “Russkii vopros,” Znamia 1 (1992): 192.
34. For more on Gorenshtein and the controversy surrounding his works, see my “A Curse on Russia: Gorenshtein’s Anti-Psalom and the Critics,” Russian Review 52 (April 1993): 213–27.
35. Fridrikh Gorenshtein, “Poslednee leto na Volge,” Znamia (January 1992): 35. Further references to this work will be included parenthetically in the text.
36. A literary precedent for some aspects of the narrator’s relationship with Liuba may be found in Dostoevsky, whom the narrator mentions more than once in the story. In The Idiot the Swiss peasant girl Marie, seduced and abandoned by her lover, now ill with tuberculosis, is the target of the local children, who throw stones at her. Prince Myshkin becomes her benefactor and teaches the children to love her. In “Last Summer” the local children throw stones at Liuba, but the narrator cannot defend her. She defends him against the oldest one, a teenage bully.
37. One of Ivanova’s many essays has recently been translated into English. See Natal’ia Ivanova, “Bakhtin’s Concept of the Grotesque and the Art of Petrushevskaia and Tolstaia,” in Fruits of Her Plume: Essays on Contemporary Russian Women’s Culture, ed. Helena Goscilo (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 21–32.
38. Ivanova, “Russkii vopros,” 200.
39. I take the phrase from ibid., 204.
40. For translations of Tolstaia, see, for example, On the Golden Porch, trans. Antonia W. Bouis (New York: Random House, 1989); for Petrushevkaia, see, for example, “Our Crowd,” in Helena Goscilo and Byron Lindsey, eds., Glasnost: An Anthology of Russian Literature under Gorbachev (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1990).
41. Helena Goscilo, “Speaking Bodies: Erotic Zones Rhetorized,” in Fruits of Her Plume, 140.
42. Helena Goscilo, “Monsters Monomaniacal, Marital, and Medical,” in Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture, ed. Jane T. Costlow, Stephanie Sandler, and Judith Vowles (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 217. For more on the image of the body in recent fiction, see the introduction to this collection.
43. For a study of “hospital prose,” see Helena Goscilo, “Women’s Wards and Wardens: The Hospital in Contemporary Russian Women’s Fiction,” Canadian Woman Studies 10, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 83–86.
44. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Robin Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 99.
45. Natali’ia Sukhanova, “Delos,” in Chistenk’kaia zhizn’ (Moscow: Moladaia gvardiia, 1990), 321.
46. For a discussion that emphasizes Sukhanova’s anti-abortion stance, see Heldt, “Gynoglasnost,” 468–69.
47. See Iulia Voznesenskaia, Zhenskii dekameron (Tel-Aviv: Zerkalo, 1987). All references will be given parenthetically in the text. For a somewhat abridged English translation, see Julia Voznesenskaya, The Women’s Decameron, trans. W. B. Linton (New York: Quartet Books, 1986).
48. Marina Palei, “Preface” to “Den’ topolinogo pukha,” in Novye Amazonki, ed. S. V. Vasilenko (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1991), 276. I am grateful to Ol’ga Borovaia for presenting me with this collection.
49. See, for example, Costlow et al., “Introduction” to Sexuality and the Body, 32.
50. Marina Palei, “Kabiriia s obvodnogo kanala,” Novyi mir (March 1991), no. 3: 48–81.
51. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18.
52. For more on Palei and the gaze, see Goscilo, “Speaking Bodies,” 156–57.
53. Irina Polianskaia, “Chistaia zona,” in Vasilenko, Novye Amazonki, 32.
THREE Women in Yugoslavia
Vida Penezic
INTRODUCTION
As a woman from the “former Yugoslavia” who now lives in the United States, I am occasionally asked to speak about women in Yugoslavia. The request usually comes in the context of an interest in women of Eastern Europe, and has been, since the fall of the Eastern bloc, asked with an increased frequency. Whenever I am asked to speak about this topic, however, I experience unease which has little to do with the actual situation of women in Yugoslavia, and much more with the context and the assumptions within which this question is posed in American popular discourse. This unease has become so overwhelming that it has effectively blocked all my efforts to address the topic. In this essay, therefore, instead of talking about women in Yugoslavia, I explicate some of the reasons for my uneasiness with the request. This essay does not focus on specific traits and living conditions of women in Yugoslavia, but on some aspects of the context in which questions about specific characteristics of Yugoslavian women (and, more generally, East European women) are asked within American popular discourse. Out of a number of very complex political and scholarly issues that the topic raises I will here focus on three. The first concerns the implied nature of the “new” political and discursive space created out of the former first and second worlds. The second concerns the nature of cultural categories as studiable objects. The third concerns the need to partly rewrite current scholarly (and, perhaps, political) paradigms in order to effectively speak about the world today. The fall of the Eastern bloc can, among other things, be seen as a potential joining of what used to be two ostensibly different worlds (the first and the second) into a larger and more complex political and discursive space. This opens an interesting question: what is (going to be) the socio-cultural nature of this newly (re)created space? What is this new, “fircond,” world going to be like? The answer to this question is at issue whenever I am asked about women in Yugoslavia within the context of the Eastern bloc. And it is the assumptions about this space implied in the question that cause my unease. More specifically: (1) Yugoslavia is (re)positioned as an Eastern bloc country; and (2) to Yugoslavia is ascribed the difference and inferiority reserved in American popular discourse for an “other,” particularly for an other from the former “evil empire.” This indicates a distinctly American definition of the discursive space of the “fircond” world, since this particular positioning of Yugoslavia is an American one: the Eastern bloc frequently saw the country as Western, while by the rest of the world it was sometimes seen as third world, because of its nonaligned politics. In the first part of this essay, I discuss these issues by situating them in the context of two paradigms: cold-war and cultural diversity.
In the second part of the essay, I look at the question about women in Yugoslavia in the context of culturally constructed categories as studiable objects. Contemporary culture scholars tend to see all cultural categories as constructed. Seeing concepts such as Yugoslavian women and the Eastern Bloc as constructed rather than natural or self-evident might mean the “end of [American] innocence” with respect to the cold-war paradigm and the desire for genuine “cross-bloc” communication;