CALL FOR PAPERS

<Gender Relations in the Private Sphere: Post-Communist Transformations
of Family, Intimacy, and Sexuality>

Deadline for submissions (in English or Russian): 17 October 2008

Published in Saint Petersburg (Russia) starting in the fall of 2008,
Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research is a new international
forum for the publication and discussion of empirical social research,
with a focus on qualitative methods. The journal wishes to foster
interdisciplinary and international debate on the findings of
fieldwork-based research. (See http://www.cisr.ru/laboratorium.en.html
for more detail on the journal, and below for submission guidelines.)
One of the first issues of Laboratorium will be devoted to gender
relations in the private sphere in post-communist countries. Unlike such
topics as the women's movement, political participation and
representation, or discrimination on the labor market, the private
dimensions of gender remain understudied.

The intense transformations currently underway in both Central Europe
and the post-Soviet nation-states not only affect the situation of
various social groups; they also have an impact on national and global
gender regimes. Current configurations of gender relations in many
post-communist countries differ from those that emerged immediately
following the disintegration of state socialism, with their
characteristic statist and (relatively) egalitarian gender policies.
There is an overt struggle between different ideologies, and in many
countries we witness a rise of religious fundamentalist and other
outlooks that espouse conservative views of male and female gender
roles.

The collision of competing views on gender policies is currently
concentrated in discourses on the private sphere: acceptable and
desirable forms of the family, reproductive rights, as well as
conceptions of norms and values that guide people's private behavior.
These processes stand in need of enquiry, and the current academic
discussion on gender needs to be informed by new research into this
area. By publishing work based on solid empirical research, we would
like to contribute to an understanding of the gendered processes that
are actually at work in the private sphere and determine the extent to
which they are amenable to political manipulation.

The private sphere includes a wide range of practices and strategies. We
take it to encompass the realm of intimacy and of the formation of
personal autonomy, a sphere whose logic is not entirely convertible into
the logic of market relations. Globalization increases the significance
of the private sphere: the private is formed in opposition to the
public, under the influence of market consumerism and the
individualization and pluralization of lifestyles. While this is true of
post-communist countries, the forms in which it happens are affected by
the specific development of capitalism, which presupposes the emergence
of boundaries around the private, understood as a flight from the
threats of the public sphere. New practices are being combined with the
heritage of communist-era representations. Analytically, the private
cannot be rigidly distinguished from the public: the border between them
is permeable and negotiated, and public institutions have an impact on
private life.

The editors are especially interested in studying the transformation of
gender hierarchies in private life under the influence of state
demographic and family policies, the changing ideological context and
the challenges of globalization; in identifying traditional and novel
agents of gender control and practices of resistance to such control;
and in tracking changes in forms of family organization. We welcome
papers on topics such as caregiving, domestic labor, sexuality and
reproductive behavior in a gendered perspective, contraception and
abortion, gender aspects of intergenerational relations in the family,
new practices of motherhood and fatherhood, the impact of the dialectics
of power in the private sphere on gender identities, new types of family
relations, and subcultural differences in sexual pratices.

Papers should be based on empirical work; purely theoretical texts and
essays, even on the topics outlined above, are strongly discouraged.

This issue is edited by Irina Tartakovskaya at the Institute for Social
and Gender Policy in Moscow.

The deadline for submissions is 17 October 2008. All submitted papers
are subject to editorial screening and, if eligible, double-blind peer
review. Authors should expect to be asked to revise their first drafts,
and plan accordingly. All submissions should be e-mailed, in MS Word or
RTF format, to Anastasia Tsygankova, managing editor, at
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Questions about this issue may be addressed to Irina Tartakovskaya
(I_Tartakovskaya [at] mail.ru); questions about the journal as a whole
may be sent to Anastasia Tsygankova or the editor-in-chief, Mischa
Gabowitsch (mgabowit [at] princeton.edu).

FORMATTING GUIDELINES:

Papers may be submitted in either English or Russian, in MS Word or RTF
format, font size 12, 1.5-spaced. They should not exceed 60,000
characters (approx. 7,500 words), excluding notes.
You may use either British or American spelling, but please be
consistent in your usage. Style and citations should follow either the
Chicago Manual of Style or the Oxford Guide to Style (Hart's Rules).
Please include a cover page stating your name, institutional affiliation
and contact details (e-mail, regular mail, phone number). This page will
not be sent to reviewers. Before sending the document, please delete
information about the author from the document properties.

If you are a publisher and wish to send us relevant books for review,
please mail them to Anastasia Tsygankova, Center for Independent Social
Research, 87 Ligovsky prospekt, office 301, Saint Petersburg 191040,
Russia, or contact the editors for mailing addresses in other countries.


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