---

Collected Volume on Women's Lives, Gender Relations and State Policy in
Central and Eastern Europe under State Socialism

Deadline: June 15, 2007

Scholars working on gender and socialism in Central and Eastern Europe
are
invited to submit a 500-word abstract of an essay for a collected volume
examining post-89 approaches to the study, research and analysis of
women's
lives and issues of gender under state socialism.

The wealth of human and archival sources that have become available
since
the collapse of communism, combined with the increased use of cultural,
social, gender, and oral history in studies of socialism, have provided
crucial insight into gender in socialist societies -- both as it was
discursively represented and lived on an everyday level. This in turn
has
facilitated a more nuanced and complex understanding of women under
socialism that challenges the bleak and homogenized portraits of women
that
were produced -- in both feminist and non-feminist scholarship--prior to
and
immediately after 1989.

The new scholarship presented in this collected volume will draw on oral
and
written, statistical and archival sources that have become available to
researchers since the dismantling of the Soviet Bloc.  Scholars are
invited
to address thematic issues that have been especially fruitful and
insightful
for understanding gender roles and relations under socialism as well as
broader methodological, theoretical, and historical issues surrounding
gender as an analytical category in investigations of socialism.

TOPICS
We welcome submissions on a diversity of topics, which might include but
are
not limited to the following: the role of socialist women's
organizations
and the socialist media in reformulating gender roles and relations and
in
politicizing women's lives; changing notions of masculinity, femininity,
and
sexuality under socialism; women's roles as workers, mothers, and
consumers;
gender and resistance; feminist discourse in the era of state socialism;
the
interplay between official discourses and subjective experiences in
shaping
gender roles and identities under socialism; revisiting feminist debates
regarding the "evidence of experience" with regard to gender and
socialist
Eastern Europe;  everyday life as a site of resistance, negotiation, or
complicity; the politics of gender and memory in the study of socialist
and
post-socialist societies.

Additionally, we ask contributors to discuss their methodologies in the
context of their departures from pre-1989 scholarship. We also invite
scholars from Eastern Europe to address the institutional barriers to
conducting and disseminating gender research in their respective
countries.
Moreover, we are interested in studies of the process and products of
major
transnational research projects begun in the 1990s, such as the
transnational Women's Memories Project coordinated by the Prague Gender
Studies Center.

HOW TO APPLY
Please email or fax a 500-word abstract and CV by JUNE 15th to:
Jill Massino                                             Shana Penn
Program of  Gender Studies                  Center for Jewish Studies
Bowdoin College                                    Graduate Theological
Union
Brunwick, Maine                                     Berkeley, CA
Email: [log in to unmask]               Email: [log in to unmask]