Aspasia

It is a pleasure to present volume 5 of Aspasia, which consists of six articles, nine Forum contributions about regional women’s and gender studies, two review essays, nine book reviews, and an In Memoriam of Richard Stites, the influential historian of women in Russia.

Scholars of religion have increasingly brought secularism within the framework of critical studies of spirituality, analyzing the dialogic relationship between religions and secularisms past and present. This emerging field of “postsecularist” studies examines the multiple meanings and practices that different cultures and societies attach to the concepts of “religion,” “faith,” and “piety.” The articles presented in this special section of Aspasia contribute to these larger academic debates by focusing on the multiethnic and historically pluralistic region of Southeastern Europe, an area too often ignored in larger scholarly discussions that have focused primarily on Western Europe and the so-called Third World. More important, the articles in this volume demonstrate how secularization projects are intricately interwoven with gender relations in any given society. Collectively, the articles urge readers to draw connections between the shifting spiritual cartographies, state formations, and definitions of appropriate masculinity and femininity of particular Southeastern European societies.

This article uses the examples of socialist Bulgaria and Yugoslavia to propose some new directions for rethinking scholarly understandings of “secularism” and the ways in which socialist secularizing projects were intricately intertwined with questions of gender equality. Current scholarly debates on the genealogy of secularism root its origins in the Catholic/Protestant West, and systematically ignore cases from the former communist world. This article takes two cases of Balkan states to explore the theoretical contours of what we call “socialist secularism.” Although Bulgaria and Yugoslavia’s experiences of socialist secularism differed in the degree of their coerciveness, this article examines the similarities in the conceptualization of the secularizing imperative and the rhetoric used to justify it, specifically the rhetoric of communist modernism and women’s liberation from religious backwardness.

This article questions the claim that in Romania, the post-1990 period was one of radically greater freedom in religious matters, as well as greater religiosity on the part of the population. Instead, it suggests that continuity be er encapsulates the development of religiosity—religious beliefs and their embodiment in specific practices— among Orthodox Christians in Romania in the twentieth century. It also makes visible important imbalances, gaps, and faulty assumptions about the importance of institutions in the daily religious practices and beliefs of most Orthodox populations in the historiography on Orthodoxy in Romania. Scholars have failed to see continuities and have embraced analytical frameworks that stress change, especially around the communist takeover period (1945–1949) and the fall of communism (1989–1990). Central to re-evaluating this trajectory are two aspects of Orthodoxy in Romania: (1) most believers live in the countryside; and (2) women have remained central to the development and maintenance of religious practices in ways that cannot be accounted for through any institutional analysis of the Orthodox Church, because of its both implicit and explicit misogyny.

This article is part of a larger research project on the political, cultural, and social implications of interwar Yugoslavia’s remembrance and mourning of its war dead. Es- chewing a focus on state-centered commemorative practices, this article focuses on two types of sources, laments of Serbian women and photographs by Serbian military photographers, as entry points into understanding the private, cultural, and religious arenas of Serbian wartime and interwar remembrances. Drawing on research examining the political uses of lament and grief, the article considers the role Serbian women played in controlling and directing the “passion of grief and anger” within their communities as they remembered the dead. The photographic evidence reveals that traditional death rituals and laments were performed and that these rituals were significant socio-political spaces where women, families, and communities of soldiers advanced claims for recognition of their wartime experiences and memories. However, the photographs themselves are sites of memory and this article examines how military photographers, acting on behalf of the state, sought to control the representation of grief and by doing so politicized and secularized the way grief was expressed. Placing these sources side by side illustrates the intermingling of forms of mourning and remembrance that existed not only in the Balkans, but also in many other communities throughout Europe, especially among its rural inhabitants.

This article explores shifts in patterns of consumption of alcohol and tobacco in Bulgaria, with a focus on public establishments in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. In exploring both the gender dimension of such shifts and its religious implications, the article argues that public consumption of tobacco in particular both reflected and was constitutive of dramatic historical change. At the same time, the increased consumption of such culturally fraught substances provoked an increase in both religious and secular campaigns of “restraint,” in which gender played a key role.

This article discusses the historical value of Ottoman women’s periodicals published in the aftermath of the 1908 Revolution, which marked the beginning of the Constitutional Era (1908–1918). Through specific examples of women’s writings in the press, it illustrates how these periodicals can shed light on the previously unexplored aspects of this period. The article argues that women’s journals allow scholars both to recover the identities and stories of hundreds of women, which would have been lost otherwise, and to challenge the mainstream historiography, which has traditionally presented a one-dimensional portrayal of the Constitutional Era by privileging men’s voices and experiences over women’s. It demonstrates that women’s journals not only reveal a dynamic, flexible, and complex milieu, in which women could and did act as agents of both social and political change, but also signify the multifaceted transformation the Revolution of 1908 caused in Ottoman society in the early twentieth century.

The article explores the artwork of Tanja Ostojić, an interdisciplinary artist from Serbia who uses performance art to examine social and political issues. Ostojić in particu- lar expresses the migrant woman’s perspective when facing today’s world of political and economic inequities. With caustic humor, the artist examines who occupies cen- ter positions and who remains in the margins. Ostojić’s subversive performances blur the boundaries between art and life. Her use of her own body, personal history, and identity reflects a feminist perspective. Placing Ostojić’s work in the longer history of performance art, this article analyzes how this provocative artist pushes the boundar- ies of art and culture by denouncing the power dynamics that rule exclusive systems such as the Western-dominated art world and the European Union.

Women’s Movements and Gender Studies in Bosnia and Herzegovina Gorana Mlinarević and Lamija Kosović

The Beginnings of Gender Studies in Bulgarian Academia Kornelia Slavova

Establishing Gender Studies in Czech Society Hana Hašková

Out of The Room of One’s Own? Gender Studies in Estonia Raili Põldsaar Marling

Gender Studies at Greek Universities Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou

Gender Studies in Latvia: Development and Challenges Irina Novikova

Gender Studies in Lithuania Laima Kreivytė

On the Status of Gender Studies in Macedonia Today Katerina Kolozova

Women’s and Gender Studies in Turkey: From Developmentalist Modernist to Critical Feminist Serpil Sancar and Elif Ekin Akşit

“The City of Gender Studies” in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe: Concluding Remarks Krassimira Daskalova

Milena Kirova, Literaturniat kanon. Predizvikatelstva (The literary canon. Challenges) (Sofia: Sofia University Press, 2009), 287 pp., 15 BGN (hb), ISBN 978-954-07-2811-7.

Milena Kirova, ed., Neslucheniat kanon. Bulgarski pisatelki ot Vuzrazhdaneto do Vtorata svetovna voina (The canon that did not happen. Bulgarian women writers from the Bulgarian national revival period to World War II) (Sofia: Altera, 2009), 430 pp., 18 BGN (pb), ISBN 978-954-975-732-3.

Milena Kirova and Kornelia Slavova, eds., Identichnosti v prehod: rod, medii i populiarna kultura v Bulgaria sled 1989 g. (Gender identities in transition: Media and popular cul- ture in Bulgaria a er 1989) (Sofia: Polis Publishers, 2010), 256 pp., 12 BGN (pb), ISBN 978-954-796-032-9.

Tatyana Stoicheva, Bulgarski identichnosti i evropeiski horizonti, 1870–1912 (Bulgarian identities and European horizons, 1870–1912) (Sofia: Iztok-Zapad, 2007), 377 pp., 14 BGN (pb), ISBN 954321345-3.

Mari A. Firkatian, Diplomats and Dreamers: The Stancioff Family in Bulgarian History (Lanham, MD, UK: University Press of America, 2008), 359 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0-7618-4069-5.

İpek Çalışlar, Latife Hanim (Kalem Literary Agency, 2006; Bulgarian translation: Sofia: IK “Uniskorp,” 2009), 479 pp., 17 BGN (pb), ISBN 978-954-330-222-2.

Marina Blagojević, Knowledge Production at the Semiperiphery: A Gender Perspective (Belgrade: Institut za kriminološka i sociološka istraživanja, 2009), 260 pp., (pb), ISBN 978-86-83287-36-9.

Maria Bucur, Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth- Century Romania (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009), 352 pp., $19.60 (pb), ISBN 978-0-253-22134-6.

Irina R. Chikalova, ed., Zhenshchiny v istorii: vozmozhnost byt uvidennymi (Women in history: The possibility to be visible) (Minsk: BPGU imeni Maksima Tanka, 2001–2004), vol. 1, 320 pp., (pb), ISBN 985-435- 359-1; vol. 2, 320 pp., (pb), ISBN 985-435-359-2; vol. 3, 308 pp, (pb), ISBN 985-435-776-7.

Kristen Ghodsee, Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 270 pp., $24.95 (pb), ISBN 978-0-691-13955-5, $65.00 (hb), ISBN 978-0-691-13954-8.

Katerina Kolozova, The Lived Revolution: Solidarity with the Body in Pain as the New Political Universal (Skopje: Evro-Balkan Press, 2010), 232 pp., €15.00, ISBN 978-9989-136-69-6.

Shana Penn and Jill Massino, eds., Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmil- lan, 2009), 292 pp., $85 (hb), ISBN 978-0-230-61300-3.

Wendy Rosslyn and Alessandra Tosi, eds., Women in Russian Culture and Society, 1700–1825 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 272 pp., £55.00 (hb), ISBN 978-0-23-055323-1.

Marius Turda and Paul J. Weindling, eds., Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007), 476 pp., $25.95 (pb), ISBN 978-963-7326-81-3.

Demetra Tzanaki, Women and Nationalism in the Making of Modern Greece: The Founding of the Kingdom to the Greco-Turkish War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, St Anthony’s Series, 2009), 234 pp., $75 (hb), ISBN 978-0-230-54546.

Richard Stites (2 December 1931–7 March 2010), a pioneer in gender history, took on “unfashionable” themes, researched them diligently, produced imaginative, fascinating monographs, and made his subjects fashionable. He died of cancer in his be- loved Helsinki while on research leave, and is buried near the city’s Russian Orthodox Cathedral.