Genders 22. Ellen E. Berry
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ambivalent, and heterogeneous, filled with both the perils and the possibilities arising from radical transformations in inherited, established orders. Within a postmodern moment “everything is contestable, nothing is off limits and no outcomes are guaranteed,” as Andrew Ross puts it.2
The postcommunist moment in the so-called second world — Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union — would seem to offer dramatic evidence of this postmodern crisis in the authority of previously dominant systems, a social, political, economic, and cultural crisis of de- and re-structuration that holds multiple perils and opens multiple possibilities. This special issue of Genders aims to map aspects of these dramatic and ongoing processes of political and sociocultural transformation in the second world. It does so through an exploration of the varied contingencies and interdependencies among national politics, sexual politics, and body politics, the “lived crises endured by national and sexual bodies.”3 This is a highly charged nexus in any historical moment or cultural location. It is especially so among cultures in which rapid, sometimes cataclysmic changes in material realities and national self-conceptions are occurring as previously secure boundaries of all kinds become more permeable and even disappear. Gender roles and relations, expressions of sexuality or attempts to recontain them, representations of the body — especially the female body — and the larger cultural meanings it assumes, are particularly striking sites for witnessing the performance of complex national dramas of crisis and change.
Delineating the complex and varied connections between constructions of national and sexual identity has been an important focus of recent research. Anthologies such as Nationalisms and Sexualities and Scattered Hegemonies, and journal issues such as Genders 10 on “Theorizing Nationality, Sexuality, and Race” and Gender and History’s special number on “Gender, Nationalisms and National Identities,” have explored the multiple ways in which gender, national affiliation, and sexual attachment “interact with, constitute or otherwise mutually illuminate each other” in specific cultural contexts and historical moments. They examine how, that is, socio-political, economic, and ideological transformations influence previous consolidations of national and sexual identities, in particular how crises in gender and sexual identities are used to “manage” crises in national self-concept.4 However, for a number of reasons, not least of which has been the relative unavailability of information from and about the Second World, most discussions have tended to focus almost exclusively on postcolonial contexts or a first world-third world nexus. What does incorporation of a second world postcommunist context add to these evolving theories concerning the cultural specificity of gender and national constructions in moments of transition and to theories of transnational flows — including especially feminist movements — in a postmodern moment? Similarly, as a number of the following essays point out, issues of gender and sexuality which have preoccupied Western scholars have, until quite recently, largely been ignored among scholars of state socialist cultures both in this country and in the second world, a deemphasis that replicates the insistent erasure of the body, sexuality, and gender relations as topics of public discourse in these cultures. How do certain terms and concepts central to Western theories function to illuminate these vastly different cultural contexts? How do the marked differences of these contexts in turn help to refine our theories and the questions we ask?
The importance of assuming a mutually interrogative stance as a means of constructing more complete and nuanced accounts of the effects of location and difference is nowhere more evident than in the encounter between first and second worlds. For if “nations are forever haunted by their various definitional others,”5 then it is crucial to acknowledge the distinct roles that Soviet and Eastern bloc cultures have played historically in processes of national self-definition in the West and how such symbolic roles may condition and limit the terms of contemporary encounters. In her essay here, Beth Holmgren positions herself as a cultural mediator of sorts in order to reflect upon the multiple impediments to understandings among Western and Eastern women at this historical moment. These include the dangers of applying Western feminist assumptions, agendas, and concepts to explain what are in fact “two very different contexts of experience, expectation and expression.” If Western feminists are to escape making negative judgments about such seemingly regressive moves as Russian women returning to the home or, conversely, if we are to see beyond our nostalgia for socialist feminist ideals perceived as fully accomplished in the former USSR, and if slogan-weary Russian women are to hear something other than an alienating political rhetoric in their contacts with Western feminists then, as Holmgren puts it, “we all must commit to more historically informed, contextually sensitive ways of seeing, hearing, and speaking. We may even need to devise a language of paraphrase to defuse those political buzzwords (the legacy of American and Soviet cold war rhetoric, the market speak of Western developmental politics) that continue to polarize us.”6
Vida Penezic explores the ways in which this cold war legacy, understood broadly as a specific paradigm of comprehension, may continue to limit our categories of analysis as a set of unacknowledged, perhaps unacknowledgeable, assumptions. Her analysis of the difference of the Yugoslavian woman presumed (even demanded) by U.S. speakers underscores Rey Chow’s observation that efforts to acknowledge the effects of national differences on gender and sexual identity often have the effect of reifying the very differences in question. As Chow puts it in discussing Chinese women, “The attempt to deconstruct the hegemony of patriarchal discourses through feminism is itself foreclosed by the emphasis on ‘Chinese’ as a mark of absolute difference…. It is when the West’s ‘other women’ are prescribed their ‘own’ national and ethnic identity in this way that they are most excluded from having a claim to the reality of their existence.”7 Penezic argues that the transformations leading to a post-communist moment on the global stage must necessarily imply changes in both the first world and the former second world, changes that too frequently remain unrecognized and untheorized. Such changes are best understood within an as-yet-incomplete shift in the cold war paradigm and the emergence of a new transcultural, transnational moment.
In Katrin Sieg’s essay a different site of confrontation between Western assumptions and Eastern women’s lives is invoked: the impasse between West German and former GDR feminists in the newly unified Germany. Despite the significant role played by GDR women in the revolution of 1989, a unified feminist movement (and thus a more powerful negotiating position within the post-Wall patriarchy) has failed to materialize. Such an impasse illustrates “the entanglement of feminist critiques with nationalist imperatives and constraints,” thereby providing an instructive example to a feminist movement “increasingly self-conscious about the multiple axes of power criss crossing its heterogeneous constituencies.” Moreover, Sieg’s analysis of GDR women’s critiques of socialist patriarchy as they appear in the genre of the protocol uncovers feminist significatory strategies that “differ drastically from those addressed to late capitalism” and which therefore offer insights that might usefully “inflect and inform the theorizing and politicking of Western feminisms.”8
Kevin Moss’s essay on the underground closet provides another example of the ways in which an analysis of non-Western discourses may usefully expand and refine Western theories. Moss employs Eve Sedgwick’s model of the epistemology of the closet to analyze the strategies used by East European writers to conceal not only sexual but — primarily — political dissidence. Despite Sedgwick’s assertion that understanding virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be not merely incomplete but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it omits a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition, Moss demonstrates that in East European culture in the Soviet period, the major axis of definition structuring thought is not sexual but political. That is, the thematics of knowledge and ignorance is not exclusive to homosexuality alone as Sedgwick implies but functions in relation to other topics depending on the context. These essays and others included here suggest the importance of positing a multidirectionality of cultural flows and influences so that our exchanges with the postcommunist world might produce the possibility of change on both sides of the former East/West divide. Such an understanding is one precondition for developing what bell hooks calls “those shared sensibilities which cross the boundaries of class, gender, race [nation, ideological orientation, political heritage] … and promote recognition of common commitments …