Genders 22. Ellen E. Berry
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developing such shared sensibilities involves understanding more accurately the nature and specific effects of the transition to postcommunism as they are manifested in various East European locations. This applies particularly to the differential material effects of the postcommunist moment on men and women, a difference remarked on in nearly all of the essays. These differences serve as forceful reminders of the fact that “nationalisms are from the outset constituted in gender power”10 and that when national identities are in crisis women often bear the weight. Such a recognition has largely been ignored in Western media discourses about Eastern Europe which have concentrated almost exclusively on the development of the public sphere, in particular on the economics of the drive toward capitalism in the former Eastern bloc. But as Nanette Funk, among others, has pointed out, women’s interests are often being sacrificed in transitions to a market economy. Between 60 and 70 percent of the unemployed in many of these societies are women, as returning women to the private sphere becomes a central mechanism for the move from a full-employment economic system to a quasi-capitalist one. So too, new restrictions in many countries on previously unrestricted abortion rights — combined with a lack of other methods of birth control — consign women even more fully to the maternal role as they ease women from the paid work force, thereby reducing competition with men for jobs. These restrictions act to exclude women from participating in processes to rebuild political as well as economic systems leading to what Russian feminist Olga Lipovskaia calls “the emergence of so-called ‘male’ democracy.” As Hana Havelkova puts it in summarizing the current Czech context, “It may be one of the paradoxes of history that reaction to the communist experience brings forth in ideology, political thinking, and economic practice extremely strong conservative elements, more conservative than was the trend in pre-communist Czech society.”11
These and other efforts to reassert control over women’s bodies in material fact also point to the symbolic roles that women are often made to play in attempts to reformulate national identities and in processes of national myth-making. In her analysis of the Russian body politic, for example, Harriet Murav argues that, while a return to the home by large numbers of Russian women shoufd not automatically be viewed as wholly regressive, it nonetheless is serving regressive ends in some cases. Her essay demonstrates the ways in which the image of woman as mother and keeper of domestic space is employed in the work of the conservative “Village Prose” writers as part of their vision of “a new totality of nation, blood, and soil, a strict Russocentrism immune to the incursions of difference.” In this way women’s actual bodies are usurped for the symbolization of a conservative Russian body politic. Ewa Hauser identifies a similar move in Poland where “Instead of a vague ‘return to Europe,’ a return to a repressive patriarchal ‘gender regime’ is in the making,” one legitimated at a national level through a combination of traditional patriotism and Catholic piety.
Many of the essays included here — Murav’s and Hauser’s among them — also identify cultural practices that critique and propose alternatives to these regressive new national scripts or that rework previous formulations and histories. These include efforts to construct alternative signifying practices and representational strategies — such as overt ironic or parodic inversions of the glorified maternal images found among the Village Prose writers — as well as more covert coded critiques such as the strategies used to encode “sexual dissidence” that Moss explores. They include as well attempts to construct new cultural spaces and genres for the performance of counter-narratives of nation and gender, such as the postcommunist cabaret of Olga Lipinska that Hauser explores in her discussion of new political theater in Poland, and the protocol writing of East German women that Sieg analyzes which encodes the struggle to negotiate between a critique of patriarchy and a commitment to socialism.
Gendering the national body politic often renders invisible the material realities of individual women’s lives as “woman” becomes the mute symbolic ground upon which transactions of nationalist history are enacted. Efforts to contest and refigure such reductive symbolizations frequently focus on incorporating those voices and experiences that have been distorted, actively silenced, or simply unrepresented. Relaxation of state censorship practices has helped to make this “new realism” possible. In her essay, Teresa Polowy explores changing literary depictions of alcoholism in Russian literature as a focal point for growing concerns about such issues as gender roles and relations and the increase in social and domestic violence in contemporary Russian culture. Since the early 1980s the subject has been treated with greater openness largely due to the emergence of women’s writing as “a viable literary voice in Russia.” Whereas previous depictions by male writers tended to focus on the culture and rituals of male drinking and to portray women as either meekly submissive or domineering and shrewish in relation to alcoholic spouses, recent women’s writing is notable for its attention to women’s everyday lived experiences with the effects of alcoholism. In their frank treatment of this and other social themes, including especially the dynamics of interpersonal and familial relations, and in their refusal to offer pat solutions to these complex issues women writers in contemporary Russia contribute substantially to unmasking the violence of everyday life which, as N. Ivanova claims, is contemporary culture’s “primary task.”12
Catherine Portuges analyzes a similar trend in the work of women film directors in postcommunist Hungary who, in their production of films “under the triple signs of autobiography, exile, and marginality,” contest previous understandings of Hungarian national cinema. Like many contemporary Russian women, these directors, partly in an effort to recover historical and national memories repressed in the Soviet era, foreground many formerly taboo topics, ranging from the existence of Stalinist labor camps and the persecution of ethnic minorities to accounts of suicide and depictions of homelessness. Yet these efforts to portray the experiences of those most disadvantaged in a postcommunist moment — women, racial and ethnic minorities, the aged among them — often are construed as “tantamount to a betrayal of these fragile new democracies.”
Katrin Sieg maps GDR women’s development of and contribution to a distinctive new genre, the protocol, from the 1970s to the 1990s, including especially the ways in which this writing develops a subjective narrative history of women’s lives in the East, a “feminist historiographical model” that in many ways contests official histories, subject formations, and gender prescriptions. This counter-history helped to expose “those contradictions whose accumulation and intensification precipitated the ideological collapse” of the GDR. Moreover, as a mutable genre based on collective memory, one therefore able to accommodate multiple, sometimes conflicting voices, the protocols developed in the 1990s have proven useful in further assessing the realities of the past and in addressing the turmoils of contemporary postcommunist society. Karen Remmler also analyzes instances of counter-history and resistant remembrance in GDR women’s writing, an analysis which suggests that changed representations of women in the social imaginary may be viewed as necessary steps to producing actual social change including, again, changes in official accounts of the past. Focusing in particular on representations of the female body as a site for the production of this critical counter-memory, Remmler argues that the writing practices of GDR women often permitted the imaginative if not the overt development of an oppositional subjectivity, one that allowed some women to “imagine a socialist livelihood imbued with a desire to break out of state dictated modes of emancipation.” Remmler stresses that this “oppositional Utopian consciousness” was more widely evident in the work of writers from the 1970s and early 1980s; by the late 1980s the worsening economic and political situation in the GDR culminated in expressions of extreme pessimism played out through images of the female body as physically diseased and psychologically disordered.
Both the importance of returning the repressed to history and public discourse, and the complexities arising from attempts to do so, are nowhere more dramatically evident than in expressions of sexuality in contemporary postcommunist cultures. As Russian sexologist Igor Kon notes, the current sexual revolution in Russia is taking place amid a climate of profound economic, social, political, cultural, and moral crisis among a “sexually ignorant and fundamentally sexist population in spite of the thin upper layer of fairly primitive egalitarian ideology that is inclined to ignore sexual difference.”13 The sexual illiteracy of the Russian public and the almost complete lack of a sex culture there are legacies of the longstanding official puritanism