ABSTRACT
The past decade marked a crisis within the global feminist movement, on both the theoretical and practical level. This crisis was largely triggered by a growing awareness among Western feminists that feminism meant radically different things to women on the other side of the former Iron Curtain, as well as those coming from third-world countries in general. Different political and economic frameworks, different discourses of power, had led to a distrust in the possibility of building bridges across the East–West divide. Eastern women – some of whom are only too willing to find shelter in the world of the household and family after decades of enduring the ‘double burden’ – stand accused of ‘buying into sexism’; by the same token, they often see their Western counterparts guilty of cultural imperialism in claiming to represent universal women’s interests. These tensions have become well known through the writing of Slavenka Drakulic (1998), Vlasta Jalusic (1994), Nanette Funk (1993), Jean Bethke Elshtain (1995), Shana Penn (1998) and others. The East–West debate has highlighted the elusiveness of the categories of ‘women’ and ‘women’s issues’ and problematized the possibility of feminist political activity.
