Abstract
This book focuses on the past two decades and aims at revealing changes and continuities in gender concepts, gender roles, and gender relations and their impact on the everyday lives of men and women in post-socialist Central and Southeast European countries. Within these specific sociocultural and political contexts, the articles deal with a wide range of gender-sensitive topics: “role concepts in daily life, division of (domestic) labour; family and parenthood/parenting; demographic developments and population politics; health and care equality in the occupational sector; new poverty/poverty traps; discrimination; representation of femininity and masculinity in politics and society; sexual minorities; marginalisation and identity politics; feminist discourses” (p. 16). Nine articles, of which each centers on an individual country—with Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina dealt with as a larger territorial complex—follow the introduction in alphabetical order. The authors have employed a broad range of source materials and corresponding methods for their enquiry: they analyze demographic and other statistical data, official documents, questionnaires, media and nongovernmental organization (NGO) reports, elections, and advertising, they report on field research, and they also feature interviews with both individuals and groups—including affected persons and experts as well as representatives from both the political sphere and various institutions.
In their summary, the editors highlight three perspectives that filter out the main issues and findings highlighted by the various contributions to their volume. And while the present review is structured along these lines, this should not have the effect of negating the multiple overlaps among the topics covered by the individual articles. First of all, though, emphasis is given to “freedom losses and gains in the context of re-traditionalisation/re-patriarchalisation.” The economic instability and insecurity, high unemployment, and competition for work that accompanied the post-1989 transition reflect just one side of the coin. More generally, this situation also opened up new occupational opportunities—especially for women—and had the potential to result in a decline of male authority. As Marina Blagojević shows in her article on Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, increasing divorce rates in connection with precarious socioeconomic conditions force single-parenting women and men to develop and adopt survival strategies. At the same time, this situation results in a pluralization of parenthood concepts. Viewed from the institutional perspective, however, the category of “single parent” does not exist—implying a lack of adequate social–political measures and programs of support. It is usually a combination of personal networks and wider family and kin that ends up bridging this gap. But the latter tends to confront single-parenting women in particular with traditional gender roles, expectations, and assignments. The Hungarian study conducted by Judit Acsády, Anna Biegelbauer, Veronika Paksi, Boglárka Somogyi, and Ivett Szalma places care patterns at the center of attention. Institutional support is missing here, too, as a result of the retreat of the state. Caregiving responsibilities and services have been taken over mainly by women, with no provision for sufficient and appropriate financial and social compensation. The slight tendency toward a more equal distribution of domestic duties between men and women is on the way to being cancelled out by women’s political underrepresentation and economically disadvantaged situation, as well as by traditional attitudes spread by the media and within the public sphere. The study on Albania by Fatmira Musaj, Fatmira Rama, and Enriketa Pandelejmoni examines gender roles, comparing the situation at different stages between the 1960s and the 1980s with reference to a broad range of social indicators: education, employment, and poverty, as well as political representation and religious affiliations. Although the transition of society created new scopes of action for women in the political, economic, and organizational field, their participation remained limited. Increasing poverty and increasing responsibility for the family as a consequence of the high male labor out-migration strongly affected women’s lives. And ultimately, these factors were joined by reemerging forms of traditional gender roles and values. Tatiana Zhurzhenko’s contribution on Ukraine is entitled “Mothering the Nation.” It outlines phenomena with which post-socialist societies were and still remain deeply concerned: declining birth rates, out-migration, low socioeconomic living standards, the deterioration of health care, and high mortality rates among men, mothers, and infants. Based on this overall framework, the author interlinks demographic state policy with media discourses and speeches by political representatives and experts covering the years of 2005 to 2009. National self-affirmation and anxiety with regard to depopulation are joined by neofamilialism, familialist values, and pronatalist programs that pay hardly any heed to the balance between family and career. Families are painted as a symbol of the nation and, indeed, as its savior. “Middle-class parenthood” is considered the most desirable model: it addresses young, well-educated, career-oriented, and well-paid couples. From Tatiana Zhurzhenko’s perspective, there is a need for “gender-conscious demographic politics, encouraging new models of masculinity and new gender roles in the family” (p. 300).
The second key aspect concerns “representations in politics and the media.” All of the contributions to this book deal with the transformation of gender roles after 1989. And while there was and remains the need for a plurality of role definitions in everyday life, new role models appear but slowly in the public sphere; in fact, media and especially advertising continue depicting gender stereotypes and discriminatory images. In their survey, Milena Kirova and Kornelia Slavova ask questions aimed at revealing the perception of gender roles among young adults in Bulgaria. They also analyze discourses and images in the media (magazines, television, and advertising) and in popular culture (fashion, sports, entertainment, popular music, and film), and they trace concepts of femininity and masculinity as well as changes in these prior and subsequent to 1989. The authors ascertain the presence of a variety of narratives and images: continuities with regard to role concepts propagated by the socialist state, expressions of partnership concepts based on shared responsibilities, stereotypes aligned with power, and the classic role of the male breadwinner as well as sexualized visualizations and interpretations of (successful) women, counternarratives stressing aesthetic and individual social distinctiveness. Zora Bútorová, Jarmila Filadelfiová, and Oľga Gyárfášová, for their part, explore contexts and modes of gender inequality in political and public life in Slovakia that are significantly affected by the continued marginalization of women in the public sphere. Generally, the authors ascertained politicians’ disinterest in addressing gender inequality in the form of a political agenda and emphasized the overriding importance of women’s organizations.
“Social exclusion and cultural marginalization” constitute the third overarching theme of the volume. The problem of how to cope with the lack of statistical data appears as such especially within this thematic context. Lynette Šikić-Mićanović dedicated her contribution to “Gender Experiences of Homelessness in Croatia.” There, she explores a phenomenon “that has been largely ignored by policymakers and social scientists over the last two decades” (p. 98). She pays attention to gender-related differences in paths to homelessness, in living situations and in survival strategies, and focuses especially on women and their specific problems and needs. Slavčo Dimitrov and Katerina Kolozova, on the other hand, examined “sexual minorities” in Macedonia using the media, legal documents, books on art, educational material including textbooks, and interviews as sources. Their analysis links the hegemonic discourse with self-perceptions. All in all, despite the fact that a majority of the populace disapproves of homosexuality, the authors notice gradual processes and changes toward “affirming rights and lending a voice to the marginalised, sexual minority-related cultures and queer identities, in all areas researched” (p. 176). Finally, Alice Iancu, Oana Băluţă, Alina Dragolea, and Bogdan Florian, in their study, relate the social and political exclusion of women (access to the labor market, health care, and social relations) in Romania to the shortcomings of feminism.
This volume is the initial release of the ERSTE Foundation Series; since 2007, the ERSTE Foundation has dealt with gender issues in post-socialist countries by supporting research and exhibition projects. The great merit of this volume lies in the highly differentiated insights and reflections provided by the authors in their analyses of the complex and ambiguous interrelations between the political–institutional transition of the countries in question and the transition of society by addressing fundamental and paradigmatic sociopolitical aspects. Aside from gender, differences such as urban/rural and those related to social position and social status turned out to be crucial. The trend that prevailed during the transition period was for “family” to become a symbol of the nation in connection with an idealization of family-related values in terms of a male-dominated social order. High expectations placed on the family “as the basic provider of security and well-being” (p. 138) are closely associated with gendered stereotypes and gender inequality. But from a gender-historical perspective, it would seem useful to call into question and rethink the concept of “patriarchy” that the authors of this volume quite often adopted in their explanations, since it is strongly related to a one-sided perception of women as mere victims—a view which, clearly, does not match up with the objective of these contributions. Despite the unquestionable specificity of post-socialist realities, it might be an interesting experiment to compare them with pluralization dynamics and reactions to the enormous complexity and diversity in Western Europe, where there also exists (albeit in different form) a conflictive coexistence of traditional and postmodern understandings—if we think, for instance, of the conservative campaigning in France against same-sex marriages, gender studies, and so on, or more generally of several countries’ shifts toward the political right.