Ellen E. Berry - Genders 22: Postcommunism and the Body Politic

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Amittai Aviram
Ellen Berry
Nancy Campbell
Mary Wilson Carpenter
Kate Cummings
Samir Dayal
Desley Deacon
Abouali Farmanfarmaian
Thomas Foster
Ann Gibson
Lynda Hart
Anne Herrmann
Gail Hershatter
Anne Higonnet
Annamarie Jagose
Paul Mattick
Marta Snchez
James Saslow
Jane Shattuc
Elaine Showalter
Carol Siegel
Alan Sinfield
Cynthia Weber
Jeffrey Weeks
Jonathan Weinberg
Kath Weston
Carol Zemel

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PART ONE
Gendering the Postcommunist Landscape

PART TWO
Reforming Culture

As a contemporary global phenomenon, postmodernism has been characterized by such features as: a generalized crisis in the dominant meta-narratives of Western culture, provoked in part by challenges arising from what these narratives have historically repressed; accelerated time-space compressions; vastly novel restructurings generated by global capitalist investments, communication systems, and information networks; violent reassertions of nationalisms and ethnic fundamentalisms as well as crises in the authority of previously dominant systems including the nation-state as a sociopolitical entity; international migrations of intellectuals, ethnic groups, labor resources, religious movements, and political formations that, again, challenge older conventional boundaries of national economies, identities, and cultures; and a global homogenizing of culture coexisting with both newly emerging local traditions and diverse transcultural flows that exceed bilateral exchanges between nation-states.

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. 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 Historys 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. 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,

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 Chows 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