Aspasia

The ongoing tragedy of Russia's war on Ukraine, already well into its second year, has sparked a fundamental reassessment in the field of Slavic Studies and calls for its decolonization. Long dominated by studies of Russia, the various disciplinary fields within Slavic Studies have engaged in numerous discussions and debates over the past year about how to decenter Slavic Studies, how to balance scholarship about the region, and how to recognize voices from the region that have been marginalized, ignored, and diminished. To this end, the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Pittsburg, in partnership with the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University and with the support of a long list of co-sponsors, organized a six-part virtual speakers series in Spring 2023 that brought together a diverse collection of professionals to discuss the need for and practical means to address the “outsized role Russia has played and continues to play in the field and what could and should be done about it.”¹ H-Russia, an H-Net online community, established a blog series on “Decolonizing Russian Studies” that has stimulated interesting conversations among scholars toward decentering Slavic Studies from multiple directions.² The journal Russian History issued a call for contributions to address such problems in the study of Russian history, and the journal Kritika, in collaboration with the Harriman Institute of Columbia University, is planning a conference and special journal issue on “Eurasia Decentered” for 2024. Moreover, the major US-based professional organization for Slavic Studies, the Association for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies (ASEEES), has selected “Decolonization” as its 2023 conference theme, asking its members to engage in the “reassessment and transformation of Russo-centric relationships of power and hierarchy both in the region and in how we study it.”³ Such interest among scholars to begin to reimagine scholarship about the region reflects the profound impact that Russia's war on Ukraine has had, even far from the front lines.

On 1 April 2023, the Central European University (CEU) Department of Gender Studies and Department of History held a panel and book launch to celebrate the retirement of Francisca de Haan and to recognize her scholarly contributions. Following a summary of the event, the texts of those who spoke that day are reproduced here, offering an opportunity to consider the impact Francisca de Haan had on her students, her colleagues, this journal, and the field of Central and Eastern European women's history in general through the words of those she impacted most directly.

This article examines the history of knowledge production about the former Eastern Bloc in the American and Polish academic contexts. It explores how debates about authority and authenticity are embedded in the deeper histories of area studies and in long-standing conflicts dating from the earliest years of the field of Slavic and East European Studies. The discussion about authority and authenticity within feminist circles mirrors larger conflicts between proponents of the totalitarian thesis and the so-called revisionists. The conflicts between these two schools precipitated a continuing epistemic crisis that also infects the academic cultures of Eastern Europe and is exacerbated by the neoliberalization of academic knowledge production. The epistemic cultures perpetuating Cold War stereotypes may lead to self-censorship or dissuade young researchers from studying the gendered aspects of lived experience in the communist era.

This article addresses women's legal status in urban areas in Albania during the late Middle Ages, particularly Shkodra, Durrës, Ulqini, Tivari, and others. The documentary sources of the time reveal the role and importance of women, and shed light on the legal and penal protection of her person, dignity, and honor. In cases of murder, assault, insult, violence, and rape against women, no individual, neither layperson nor clergy, had immunity from prosecution before the law. This article also addresses the political influence of Albanian noblewomen during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, as well as their privileges and rights to emigrate, mainly to the Republic of Venice and southern Italy, after the final Ottoman conquest of Albanian territories.

The phenomenon of female cross-dressing and gaining the social role of a man has been witnessed in the tribal patriarchal society of the remotest parts of the Dinaric region since the nineteenth century. Once found within both Slavic and Albanian populations, today sworn virgins have been rapidly vanishing, and are rarely still found in northern Albania. The fact that occurrence was equally common among Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim populations in the remotest mountain regions points to the phenomenon's ancientness. As women who aspired to the social status of men, sworn virgins did not cease to be women; only the “degree” of their womanhood or manhood varied. Examining this social phenomenon as a third gender, this article contextualizes it through Judith Butler's theory of performativity. It also focuses on the relatedness of the phenomenon to the ancient past, turning to existing theories, but also providing an original contribution to the third gender debate.

This article examines discourses on racial mixing in Siberia and its interpretations among the founders of Siberian regionalism. Debates about miscegenation were crucial for the development of racial theories in the late Russian Empire, as well as regionalists’ vision of Siberia and its colonization. Yet the importance of gender and sexuality for their ideas has been largely overlooked. The present article partially remedies this gender-blindness by centering gender, sexuality, and desire in the analysis of several writings by Afanasii Shchapov, Serafim Shashkov, and Nikolai Iadrintsev. The article argues that gender and gendered sexuality were essential for regionalists’ understanding of miscegenation, race, civilization, and the Russian Empire. As the research demonstrates, gender and sexuality not only undergirded, but also produced, figuratively and literally, race and empire.

Although sapphic modernism is a phenomenon thoroughly examined in Western European cultures, the history of East European sapphic writings remains a relatively neglected area, both in global lesbian and queer studies and in local histories. This article is devoted to nineteenth-century Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian literature. It outlines the complicated emergence of local queer studies and draws attention to the position of women's writing within it. It also discusses the tools provided by intersectional, transnational approaches. Combined with the extensive knowledge of global lesbian studies, these methods allow for the exploration of local histories of queer women writing, particularly from the Russian Empire's territories. This article highlights intersections between same-sex desire's literary expressibility and the writers’ affiliation within the same imperial structure, which forced different strategies of sapphic expressions to emerge from this intersection. To illustrate those strategies, the article discusses examples provided by Narcyza Żmichowska, Lesya Ukrainka, and Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal.

This article considers the experiences of Romanian men and women who expressed same-sex desire immediately following the collapse of Nicolae Ceaușescu's regime in 1989 until Romania's accession to the European Union in 2007. Drawing from the Adrian Newell Păun Queer Archives, this research puts at its forefront the voices of queer individuals to shine a light on the hardships of living as a sexual minority in the repressive environment of Romania in the 1990s. This research follows the broader framework of decolonizing Eastern European queer history by giving members of the LGBTQ+ community their rightful voices to tell the story of their plight and their perspectives in a country where they experienced widespread homophobia, transphobia, and discrimination. Through firsthand accounts, this article additionally exemplifies how queer individuals were able to survive hardship, to find their voices within their own community, and to begin experiencing and expressing themselves as a sexual minority.

In the West, the 1970s were the decade of rapid sexual liberalization. Similarly, in state-socialist Poland new approaches toward sex and nudity also gained momentum. Female nudes started being printed in the popular press and displayed in gallery rooms. Simultaneously, early feminist artists such as Natalia LL, Teresa Murak, and Ewa Partum experimented with nudity to question gendered discourses and social norms. This article compares popular nude photography exhibitions with the works of women artists to analyze two approaches toward female nudity that developed in 1970s Poland. Thus, it showcases the ambiguities surrounding the project of socialist sexual modernity and highlights conflicting visions of femininity and liberation.

Denisa Nešťákova, Katja Grosse-Sommer, Borbala Klacsmann, and Jakub Drabik, eds., If This Is a Woman: Studies on Women and Gender in the Holocaust, Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021, 292 pp., $119.00 (hardback), ISBN: 9781644697108.

Plachá Pavla, Zpřetrhané životy: Československé ženy v nacistickom koncentračnom tábora Ravensbrück v letech 1939–1945 (Torn lives: Czechoslovak women in the Ravensbrück Nazi concentration camp in 1939–1945), Prague: Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů, Puchra, 2021, 496 pp., €34.00 (hardback), ISBN: 9788075640628.

Kata Bohus, Peter Hallama, and Stephan Stach, eds., Growing in the Shadow of Antifascism: Remembering the Holocaust in State-Socialist Eastern Europe, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2022, 340 pp., €71.00 (hardback), ISBN: 9789633864357.

Nikolay Aretov, Zhelani i plasheshti: Chuzhdite zheni i muzhe v bulgarskata literature na gulgia devetnadeseti vek (Desired and frightening: Foreign women and men in Bulgarian literature of the long nineteenth century), Sofia: Queen Mab, 2023, 280pp., BGN 20 (paperback), ISBN: 978-954-533-208-1.

Eloisa Betti, Leda Papastefanaki, Marica Tolomelli, and Susan Zimmermann, eds., Women, Work and Activism: Chapters of an Inclusive History of Labor in the Long Twentieth Century, Work and Labor: Transdisciplinary Studies for the 21^st Century, vol. III, Budapest: CEU Press, 2022, xiv +354 pp., $95.00/€80.00/£68.00 (hardback), ISBN: 978-963-386-441-8.

Francisca de Haan, ed., The Palgrave Handbook of Communist Women Activists around the World, London: Palgrave, 2023, 701 pp., €213.99 (hardback), ISBN: 978-3-031-13126-4.

Milena Kirova, Bulgarskata literature prez XXI vek (2000–2020) (Bulgarian literature in the twenty-first century (2000–2020)), Part I, Sofia: Colibri, 2023, 287 pp., BGN 24 (paperback), ISBN: 978-619-02-1200-3.

Ina Merdjanova, ed., Women and Religiosity in Orthodox Christianity, New York: Fordham University Press, 2021, 336 pp., $35 (paperback), ISBN: 9780823298617.

Katja Mihurko Poniž, Biljana Dojčinović, and Maša Grdešić, Defiant Trajectories: Mapping Out Slavic Women Writers Routes, Ljubljana: Forum of Slavic Cultures, 2021, 96 pp., free online publication, https://www.fsk.si/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/WWR_DefiantTrajectories.pdf (accessed 3 July 2023), ISBN: 978-961-94672-7-5.

Jasmina V. Milanović, Žensko društvo 1875–1942 (The women's society, 1875–1945), Belgrade: Institute for Contemporary History, The Official Gazette, 2020, 638 pp., RSD 2.970, ISBN: 978-86-519-2579-8.

Valentina Mitkova, Pol, periodichen pechat i modernizatsia v Bulgaria (ot kraya na XIX do 40-te godini na XX vek) (Gender, periodicals, and modernization in Bulgaria (from the end of the 19th century to the 1940s)), Sofia: St. Kliment Ohridski University Press, 2022, 261 pp., BGN 20, ISBN: 978-954-07-5588-5.

Agnieszka Mrozik, Architektki PRL-u: Komunistki, literatura i emancypacja kobiet w powojennej Polsce (The architects of the PRL: Communist women, literature, and women's emancipation in postwar Poland), Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, Lupa Obscura, 2022, 532 pp., PLN 59 (paperback), ISBN: 978-83-66898-84-4.

Miglena S. Todorova, Unequal under Socialism: Race, Women, and Transnationalism in Bulgaria, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021, 218 pp., $31.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-4875-2841-6.

Zhivka Valiavicharska, Restless History: Political Imaginaries and their Discontents in Post-Stalinist Bulgaria, Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021, 275 pp., $36.46 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-2280-0583-4.

Susan Zimmermann, Frauenpolitik und Männergewerkschaft: Internationale Geschlechterpolitik, IGB-Gewerkschafterinnen und die Arbeiter- und Frauenbewegungen der Zwischenkriegszeit (Policies for women and men's trade unions: International gender politics, female IFTU unionists, and the labor and women's movements of the interwar period), Vienna: Löcker, 2021, 717 pp., €39.80 (paperback), ISBN: 978-3-99098-026-2.

Since the establishment of women's history as an academic research and educational field in the 1960s–1970s in the Western context—a field contesting traditional historical narratives (political, diplomatic, institutional) that located women on the periphery of historical processes—efforts have concentrated on the discovery and analysis of neglected facts of the past, the historical representation of gender interdependence, and the reconstruction of a credible male–female sociohistorical reality. Since the 1990s, in the context of changed political, social, and cultural realities, interest in the problems of the “second sex,”¹ its experiences and representations, and its role in historical events has intensified and gained greater public visibility in the east as well. Interpreted as a significant tool for drawing a comprehensive picture of women's past in Europe, scholarship on women's history in Eastern and Southeastern Europe has focused on various aspects of women's emancipation in the modern era, the relationships among power, gender, identity, modernization, nationalism, and national formation, women's role in the processes of cultural and civilizational construction, and their place in the context of traditionally established intellectual hierarchies. Conducting a productive dialogue between history and social anthropology, filling numerous gaps in historical memory (regarding traditionally marginalized social groups such as women), feminist studies in the region have produced collections of documents and primary sources, innovative publications, and monographs, all sharing the belief that women have their own history subject to complex analysis.