Eastern Europe: Gender Research,

Knowledge Production and Institutions

Andrea Pető

Inhalt
1 The Beginnings of Gender Research in Eastern Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2 Institutionalisation of Gender Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3 Research Areas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4 Future Tendencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Abstract
Gender research in Eastern Europe started with the transition to democracy and
neoliberal market economy. The roots of this development, the pre-1989 research
on social inequalities, and the import of English as a language of inquiry
combined with intellectual reference points determined its institutions, outreach
and impact. We can differentiate three phases of institutionalization: 1. before
Eastern European countries joined the EU; 2. after the introduction of the
Bologna process; 3. the post-2008 emergence of anti-gender movements that
currently question the foundation, terminology, and politics of gender studies.

Keywords
Gender · Gender Studies in Eastern Europe · Anti-Gender Movements ·
Academic Feminism · Politics of Location

A. Pető (*)
Central European University, Budapest, Hungary
E-Mail: petoa@ceu.edu

# Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH 2018 1

B. Kortendiek et al. (Hrsg.), Handbuch Interdisziplinäre Geschlechterforschung,
Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-12500-4_153-1
2 A. Pető

1 The Beginnings of Gender Research in Eastern Europe

Gender as a category of analysis reached Central Europe together with neoliberal

market economy and Anglo-Saxon dominance in science after 1989. Jiřina
Šmejkalová argued that feminism entered Eastern Europe with the “wrong pas-
sport,” and explained that this was the reason for its relative lack of success
(Šmejkalova 1996). Boydston pointed out that those who were promoting “gender
as a category of analysis” were becoming “propagandists of a particular epistemo-
logical order” (Boydston 2008, p. 560). Both parts of this statement: “propagandists”
and also the “new epistemological order” present certain methodological and poli-
tical problems for analyzing gender research in Eastern Europe. Furthermore, the
belief that gender studies was “born from nothing” makes pre-1989 scholarship
along with other emancipatory traditions invisible in the region.
Since 1989 the higher education system in former communist countries has
changed profoundly. The state opened up to different academic approaches, in the
meantime the logic of selection changed from political meritocracy to financial
elitism. Gender studies benefited from this new openness and gained backing,
although sometimes it lost institutional competitions for financial support.
A special characteristic of the Sovietized Eastern European academic infrastruc-
ture was the existence of research institutes affiliated with the Academies of Scien-
ces, which gathered those academics whom the communist regime forbade to teach
at higher educational institutions. Even though this relatively flexible structure was
accessible in 1989, gender studies developed outside of this framework, mostly in
the non-governmental organization (NGO) sphere. Meanwhile, and sometimes
independently from the developments in the NGO sphere, lectures and courses in
gender studies were being taught by norm entrepreneurs in various disciplinary
departments.
In Eastern Europe academics arrived at the field of gender studies from three
disciplines and three key factors contributed to the institutionalization of gender
studies. The first was research on social inequalities and women’s employment,
which were pioneering fields of research that allowed cooperation with colleagues
from beyond the Iron Curtain as early as the beginning of the 1980s. (This beginning
proved to be a fatal embrace, however, as the joint research on general issues such as
social policies, poverty and inequality currently glosses over gender differences.)
Thus it was no coincidence that in Hungary the first Women’s Studies Center was
established at the Karl Marx University of Economy (now the Corvinus University
of Budapest), as this was the institution in which research projects that examined
women’s employment and social stratification were conducted (Pető 2006). The
same explains the prominence of gender research at the Czech Academy of Sciences’
Institute of Sociology.
The first step to institutionalization is to accredit gender studies as a separate
discipline, which has not been successful even at the European Union level, as the
European Commission funding schemes do not acknowledge gender studies as a
separate discipline. The second step is the inclusion of gender studies approaches in
traditional disciplines of humanities such as history, literary studies and linguistics.
Eastern Europe: Gender Research, Knowledge Production and Institutions 3

Since most feminists in post-socialist countries were academics, highly trained and
multilingual female intellectuals who engaged with scholarship in countries beyond
the Iron Curtain, they began to integrate gender studies into the institutions of higher
education early on. This was the second factor that contributed to the institutiona-
lization of gender studies: feminist literary studies and linguistics as well as English
and American studies departments played key roles in this development in Budapest,
Szeged and Debrecen (Hungary), Łódź (Poland) and Brno (Czech Republic),
because it was relatively easy for them to build gender-related approaches and works
into their curricula and even into their degree programs. The fact that gender studies
was mostly embedded in the humanities and less in the social sciences contributed to
the “cultural turn” in Eastern European gender studies.
The third factor was the close relationship of women’s NGOs to societal stake-
holders. Gender studies has always developed in close connection with the society it
was a part of, mutually responding and shaping each others’ intellectual climate.
Slovakian women’s NGO ASPEKT was able to establish a women’s center which
not only worked on documentation and research, but also provided university-level
education in gender studies outside the institutional structure of universities. In
countries where higher education was controlled not only by the traditional higher
education system but also by a strict antidemocratic state, e.g., Croatia and Serbia in
the 1990s, these parallel institutions offered the only chance for university students
to learn about alternative, gender-sensitive knowledge models and connect with
relevant international academic networks. The training offered by NGOs has focused
on domestic violence, female entrepreneurship and LGBT tolerance, and while they
primarily relied on external resources, they pushed for changes in norms and
attitudes. These NGOs also started libraries and publication programs. The war in
the former Yugoslavia strengthened the NGOs as foreign funding was available for
these activities, although they pushed these organizations to provide social services.
Gender studies in Eastern Europe have also been a generational issue. The
founders, these dedicated and accomplished academics, are now in their mid-50s.
This part of the world has not seen a second wave of feminist academics, with the
exception of the former Yugoslavia where academic feminism, together with
activism, has been present since the 1960s. Since the 1990s women who were
previously active in the democratic opposition have found their intellectual and
political homes within the confines of institutionalized disciplines like sociology,
examples of whom are Anna Wessely of Hungary, Jiřina Šiklová of Czechoslovakia
and Małgorzata Fuszara of Poland. This was mainly due to the fact that there were
neither chairs nor professorships for gender studies at universities – except at the
Central European University in Budapest –, therefore professors were appointed in
their own disciplines, not in gender studies. The lack of organized women’s move-
ments in the region had another effect. While in North America and Western Europe
the process of institutionalization was preceded by significant debates, dialogue and
political pressure from the side of women’s movements, these political factors were
nonexistent in Eastern Europe, therefore academic feminism became the major
driving force of gender studies.
4 A. Pető

2 Institutionalisation of Gender Studies

The institutionalization of European women’s studies started around the same time
that gender studies centers were founded in Eastern Europe (Braidotti and Griffin
2002). WISE – Women’s International Studies Europe, founded in 1990; and AOIFE
– Association of Institutions of Feminist Education and Research in Europe, founded
in 1997 started the tradition of the tri-annual Feminist Research Conferences. The
Erasmus/Socrates funding supporting ATHENA (Advanced Thematic Network in
Activities in Women’s Studies in Europe) had more than one hundred member
institutions, some of them from Eastern Europe. When the European Union funding
stopped, these three organizations were merged in 2009 to become AtGender. Both
the leadership and the membership realized that participation by those from impo-
verished Eastern Europe in conferences that charged high fees was impossible
without the host institution’s financial support. Out of the nine European Feminist
Research Conferences, two were organized in Eastern Europe (Łódź 2006, and at the
CEU in Budapest, 2012).

2.1 Institutionalization of Gender Studies in Higher Education

The position of gender studies in the higher education system of Eastern European
countries varies greatly depending on geopolitical realities. For instance, since the
Baltic countries have strong ties with the Scandinavian countries, mainstreaming
gender studies was the way forward after Women’s Studies Centers at the University
of Vilnius, Tallin and Riga were founded. The Visegrad countries, as well as Russia,
Ukraine and Belarus mostly developed personal, institutional and academic coope-
ration with Anglo-Saxon feminism. In the German context the Heinrich Böll and
Friedrich Ebert Foundations played a significant role organizing conferences and
publishing edited volumes on the state of the art in gender research.
All around Eastern Europe the representatives of the profession do everything in
their might to institutionalize academic feminism in their own disciplines, and to
make it a part of public discourse. They have been trying to influence the mainstream
through translations, book reviews, conferences and published conference presenta-
tions as well as monographs. Unfortunately it proved to be impossible to proceed in
reconceptualizing the “new epistemological order” in the long run, as Boydston had
put it, without strong and secure institutional positions. In some cases there had been
opportunities to start gender studies centers outside capital cities, e.g., in Kharkiv,
Brno, Łódź, Miskolc, depending on the local politics and the embeddedness of the
academics working there. In the post-Soviet context ethnic Russians living as a
minority played a key role in the process of institutionalization, such as Irina
Novikova in Latvia, or Tatiana Zherebkina in Ukraine. By the end of the first decade
of the new millennium gender studies had some academic presence in nearly all
universities in Central Europe, either as a topic touched upon in mainstream courses,
or as an elective course which was offered because of the enthusiasm of dedicated
teachers. These norm entrepreneurs, female intellectuals, academics, “propagan-
Eastern Europe: Gender Research, Knowledge Production and Institutions 5

dists”, who through their language skills or fields of specialization had been in
contact with scholars on the other side of the former Iron Curtain, started introducing
gender studies and gender sensitivity to various higher education institutions.
The process of growth of the European Union has changed the framework of
higher education. Women’s NGOs involved in gender studies education and research
had difficulties meeting the criteria of the complicated EU grants while previous
donors, mostly the Open Society Institute stopped giving grants to organizations in
EU member states. The Bologna Process, creating a unified higher educational
sphere, has reorganized educational institutions and curricula simultaneously, and
this process has encouraged gender studies scholars to re-examine the place of
gender studies in academia (Tuning 2010). In countries that formerly belonged to
the Soviet Block but now are members of the EU, the introduction of the Bologna
Process ended a relatively peaceful and unregulated period of institutionalization.
The fight for fee paying students following the logic of neoliberal academia has
started and sometimes that threatened the position of independent interdisciplinary
academic units such as gender studies. The representatives of the profession did as
much as they could to secure the place of “academic feminism” in a transforming
educational sphere.
The EU’s Eastern expansion changed the possibilities of the gender studies
programs in the field of research. Since 2000 the EU Framework and other research
programs have been prioritizing programs with a consortium member from Eastern
Europe. This top down policy, which made big research grants available, helped not
only to create critical, socially relevant knowledge about these countries, but also set
up links between the different gender research centers. Major Framework 5, 6, 7 and
Horizon2020 grants were investigating gender topics defined by the European
Commission (EC) with partner institutions from Eastern Europe, though very few
of them had been coordinated by Eastern European partners.
One of the major advantages of the Bologna system was the increased opportu-
nity of student mobility. As for peregrination, or the migration of students, they are
heading to places where they receive high-quality, interesting and relevant educa-
tion, which has had serious political and strategic consequences (Juhász et al. 2005).
Although Eastern Europe has generally been a place of dispatch rather than a host
country, the few established gender studies centers in Eastern Europe quickly
became part of the international exchange processes: They send their students abroad
and also host gender studies students from abroad. Therefore, in this context gender
studies has become a pioneering field in the area of student mobility and internatio-
nalization in Europe.

2.2 Institutions and Topics

The Budapest-based Central European University (CEU) together with the Open
Society Institute has played a key role in supporting the institutionalization of gender
studies in Eastern Europe. At CEU the first one-year MA program accredited by the
State of New York started in 1996, followed by two-year MA programs accredited
6 A. Pető

by the Hungarian State and a PhD program accredited by the State of New York. The
CEU Gender Studies Department hosted curriculum developing workshops as well
as numerous conferences fostering ties between different schools of scholarship in
gender studies.
In the case of the former Soviet Union, novel scholarly collectives were founded
after the introduction of the gender studies paradigm: Women’s Studies at Kazan
University (1991), at the European University St Petersburg Elena Zdravomyslova
and Anna Temkina founded gender studies in sociology; Tatiana Zherebkina did the
same in the Kharkov Center of Gender Research (1994) in the humanities. Summer
schools organized by the Kharkov Center funded by MacArthur covered topics such
as feminist methodologies, East-West dialogue, women’s studies, nationalism,
politics, love and art and new political challenges. The Moscow Center of Gender
Research (1990) mostly focused on policy research, the Ivanovo Center for Gender
Studies (1996) and Tver Center for Women’s and Gender Studies (1998) also served
as a niche for research. Pushkareva called this period the “golden rain” period of the
1990s, when financial aid flew into the regions hoping to promote the construction of
a Western style of gender equality language and policy together with the new elite
whowas working in English (Liljeström 2016). During that period gender studies
programs sometimes replaced the newly freed-up space in the curriculum that
Marxism-Leninism had formerly occupied, and were often taught by the same staff.
As a result, and with foreign funding flowing to the former Soviet Union, in
2005–2006 there were more than one hundred institutions that taught courses on
gender studies and fifteen operational gender studies research centers (Liljeström
2016). The successful integration, however, was overshadowed by the lack of
engagement with problems specific to Russia as well as the self-isolation due to
translation issues. These led to gender studies being an easy target for forces critical
of the neoliberal transformation in Russia, which, starting in the early 2000s,
supported the institutionalization of “feminalogija” an interdisciplinary subject that
opposes the epistemological foundation of gender studies. The legacy of the Soviet
Union’s involvement in the “solving women’s question” agenda still remains under-
studied because scholarship prefered to follow the postmodern and poststructuralist
intellectual trajectory. The invisibilization of feminist oppositional forces in the
Soviet Union, like Tatyana Mamonova and her colleagues, who were forced into
exile, partly because of police harassment and partly because of their disappointment
with the male-centered opposition, remained understudied and did not serve as a
reference point for the newly founded gender studies programs. Labeling gender
studies “theirs” and “feminalogija” as “ours” (there has been a tradition of creating
dichotomies in Russian history) cornered gender studies into a difficult political and
institutional position when the neoliberal transition was followed by Putin’s illiberal
rule. The transformation touched not only the centralized content of education but
also the process of institutionalization, and now, in 2017, gender studies centers and
departments have started to close down. The last one standing is the Gender Studies
Program at the European University in St. Petersburg, a private university whose
license was revoked simultaneously to the political attacks against CEU. In Belo-
russia the Center for Gender Studies at the European Humanities University (1997),
Eastern Europe: Gender Research, Knowledge Production and Institutions 7

which hosted a pioneering gender studies program that organized one of the first
conferences on gender history in Eastern Europe, was forced to relocate to Vilnius,
Lithuania in 2005 (Gapova et al. 2002). Conflict between Russian minority and
“native” scholars in Ukraine and Latvia broke out due to the geopolitical turn in the
early 2010s, and ethnic Russian gender studies scholars found themselves isolated
from the gender studies community. The war in Ukraine brought additional attention
and funding to gender studies scholars in Kiev from the Western donors.
Specialists graduating from gender studies programs in Eastern Europe find two
types employment outside of academia. Either they join the governmental apparatus
of the state’s equal opportunity machinery, which after the EU accession needs new
cadres, or they stay in the local and international NGOs working on issues regarding
equal opportunity. The opportunity of working for the state has changed substanti-
ally since the 2008 triple crisis and with the rise of anti-gender movements.

2.3 Textbooks, Translations and Journals

Geopolitical location also effects differences detectable in the materials used in

education. The future of gender studies as an epistemic community is connected to
post-structuralism and the English language. Therefore, it is deeply connected to
translations into the local languages. The relationship of translations and situated
knowledges has been raised by different authors (e.g., Davis 2014). The aim is to
create a “native” academic language, the first phase of which tackles the most
obvious problem: that of translating the term “gender” itself (Translating sex/gender,
AtGender 2015).
Due to very small markets, there was a limited availability of original textbooks
written in national languages, so for many years, textbooks printed abroad were
translated or just simply used instead, a practice that is still common in certain cases.
Therefore, the language proficiency of gender studies students in Eastern Europe is
usually high and the divide between the educational material and cutting-edge and
fresh scholarship is narrow.
Construction of the discipline’s vocabulary has been crucial for integrating
gender studies into higher education. Starting in the 1990s, the Open Society
Institute financed the translation of major books written in English into Eastern
European languages. To date, nearly every Eastern European country has produced a
first collection of books in the national language that are used in gender studies
education as a first step in the accreditation of national programs.
Still, the existing textbooks are mainly compilations of translations of major book
chapters and articles or summaries of local research. Because the discipline of gender
studies was not integrated in the BA level of education, with the exception of the
University of Brno, most of the reading lists are in English at the MA level.
Eastern European gender studies knowledge production is published in journals
in the vernacular languages. The journals Aspekt (Bratislava), Gender, Rovne pri-
leyitosti, vyzkum/Gender and Research (Prague), TNTeF (Szeged) are published in
the local vernacular, with summaries in English or with bilingual issues. The new
8 A. Pető

journal Krytyka Feministychna: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer

Studies (Kiev) founded in 2015 publishes peer reviewed articles in English.

3 Research Areas

Besides the canonized gender studies topics there are two specific areas where
scholars researching gender studies are focusing: the politics of location and the
legacy of the emancipatory tradition.

3.1 Politics of Location

European women’s studies contributed to the invisibility of research and teaching

done in Eastern Europe. ‘Europe,’ as an imagined community, the meanings and
borders of which have been constantly renegotiated, put gender studies scholars
from Eastern Europe in a difficult position. Their inclusion into ‘European women’s
studies’ was based on how they were different, i.e., coming from a post-communist
context, but exactly that approach made it impossible to address their pressing issues
outside the area studies perspective. The area studies approach is a result of the Cold
War binary and ideological differences. This sharp division was criticized by Nikol-
china in her analysis of Bulgarian intellectual practices (Nikolchina 2002). Eastern
Europe became unmarked by location, and therefore the politics of location within
the region remained unreflected. Therefore, while European women’s studies has
been concerned with decolonizing transnational feminist scholarship, it failed to
reflect on the process of colonizing Eastern European women’s studies.
This is mainly because the assumption and starting point of institutionalization
has always been that women’s studies operates in English. English as a lingua franca
is due to the hegemony of Anglo-American culture, and “Anglo-American feminists
will unknowingly entangle themselves in global universalization” (Lykke 2004,
p. 76). In the two major European journals of women’s studies, Feminist Theory
and The European Journal of Women’s Studies, scholars based in Eastern Europe are
underrepresented (Lykke 2004). Regional knowledges remain invisible due to lin-
guistic, economic and conceptual issues.
The asymmetrical relations and interactions between “the West and the rest” had
an impact on scholarly, methodological positions and on defining the concept
of”local”. In the geopolitical spaces “feminists in the West always know where the
late comers are heading because we have already been there” (Liljeström 2016).
Gender studies knowledge, however, is constructed in cooperation and interaction
with local actors.
Eastern Europe: Gender Research, Knowledge Production and Institutions 9

3.2 Legacy of Emancipatory Traditions

The discussion on whether “communist feminism” has existed at all is a major

debate with long-lasting impact in gender studies in Eastern Europe, especially after
the paradigm change of the emergence of anti-gender movements (Oates-Indruchova
2016). The summarizing dossier of Aspasia, The International Yearbook of Central,
Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History (Vol. 6 and 7)
focused on the history of women’s and gender studies in Central, Eastern and
Southern Europe, highlighting the achievements it has made. It is very understan-
dable that, due to the disillusionment with neoliberal policies, critical intellectuals
would revisit and turn to the evaluation and re-evaluation of state feminism as it
existed under communism (but also beforehand). This scholarship mostly focuses on
the different women’s organizations on national and international levels. The debate
about the work of Funk and Drakulić raised questions about the democratic deficit of
women’s movements during communism together with questions of agency and
subjectivity (Drakulić 2015; Pető 2015; Funk 2014; Ghodsee 2015).

4 Future Tendencies

The process of Europeanization combined with the EU’s normative value of equality
plus the geopolitical concerns of expansion seemingly put gender studies on a
winning ticket. However, after 2008 the triple crisis sparked a new discussion about
the relationship of gender studies and the neoliberal project (Kováts 2016). Recently
gender studies scholars were caught by surprise by the wide social interest for their
work. In Poland “gender” was chosen as the 2013 word of the year because it had
been discussed so widely. Gender studies faculty members’ e-mail inboxes have
been filled with inquiries about their research and invitations to public debates in
different media. However, the 2008 crisis also opened up space for the pre-existing
criticism (Kováts and Poim 2015; Grzebalska et al. 2017). The emergence of anti-
gender movements as a reaction to the 2008 triple crisis – financial, security,
migration – dramatically changed the framework in which gender studies has been
operating in Eastern Europe. Anti-gender movements are populist neoconservative
movements that, in response to the crisis of the neoliberal world order, use the
concept of “gender” to mobilize not only against gender studies, but also against
LGBTQIT rights, the Istanbul Convention, sexual education in schools and inter-
national organizations such as the EU, the UN and the WHO. Some representatives
are affiliated with different churches, others are secular and use the anti-gender
position to criticize neoliberalism (Grzebalska 2016). It is a Gramscian “socialisa-
tional movement” aiming for a new world order.
The crucial question is whether the work of academic feminists meets the
expectations of what Fassin calls “double exposure,” as the anti-gender movements,
demonstrations and discourse brought national and also international recognition to
gender studies scholars (Pető 2017a, b). The public exposure of gender as an
analytical concept and gender studies as a science has made the profession ever
10 A. Pető

more political as it found itself in the midst of an open political struggle. In a sense
this is nothing new, as gender studies has always had strong and dialogic relationship
with social activism. Nontheless, the current situation has shown those who had seen
the future of gender studies in the comfortable academic ivory tower that this dream
was a fragile illusion. Teaching queer studies in Russia is conceptualized as a real
possibility under difficult circumstances, such as the emergence of anti-gender
movements and banning foreign donors who support educational activity (Konda-
kov 2016). As Roman Kuhar convincingly argued in his analysis of the develop-
ments in Slovenia and Croatia, the anti-gender movements’ use of “scientific”
evidence against “gender ideology” signals a paradigm change in science as we
know it (Kuhar 2015). Any scientific data can now be contested based on normative
moral positions.
Gender studies in Eastern Europe will remain an exceptional fiel of contention.
This is not only due to the new Iron Curtain which is being pulled closed along the
border between the “East” and “West” of Europe as far as economic potential and
opportunities are concerned, it is also due to the increasing hegemonic fight sur-
rounding the concept of gender (Grzebalska et al. 2017). Gender studies can be one
of the critical fields exploring, reflecting and fighting this “new-old difference”
through student and faculty exchange and common research projects.

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