ABSTRACT
Exploration of the limits to mutual understanding, such as those that have become increasingly apparent in the dialogue between Western feminists and women in post-Communist Europe, offers the prospect of a better knowledge, not only of one’s interlocutor, but also of oneself. In this vein, the present essay seeks to establish what is at issue in the “rejection” of feminism by women in post-Communist countries, and the surprise this reaction has occasioned in the West. Enikö Bollobás, an American studies specialist and from 1990 an official of the Hungarian Embassy in Washington, has written, for example, that she has “found more gaps between Western and Eastern views on women than exist on most other issues, such as democratic institution building, economic transformation, or environmental protection.” 1 Nanette Funk has written, too, of how West German feminists perceive East German women as “backward” with respect to Western feminism, and as having “failed to appreciate” their new freedom, while East German women have resented West Germans theorizing about them, instead of reflecting on blind spots in their own thinking. 2 What lies behind this non-meeting of minds? I argue that it is the specifically political difference of women: an aspect of self-identification presupposed by Western feminists, yet by and large still repudiated by women in the East. The essay pursues this incongruence of collective identity by asking what the specific experience of competitive democracy, or of Communism, means subjectively for women, given that in objective terms, so much of that experience is shared. In seeking to address this question, I am thus also trying to define a comparative framework in which East and West can be seen as both relatively discontinuous (at least until 1989) and essentially indivisible (i.e., mutually constitutive and often materially similar) social formations. The idea of relative discontinuity is important if one wants to grasp the way in which Communism and competitive democracy provide separate and distinct fields of reference within which social phenomena that are essentially continuous over the East-West divide (for example, the sexual division of labor, the subordination of women, indeed the term women itself) gain political-regime-specific meaning. One way of characterizing these different fields of reference, of grasping the quite different principles of collective/individual identity formation involved in each case, is by reconsidering the implications for women of Western civil society as opposed to the society that takes shape in the context of the prerogative state of Communism—contrasting concrete (nonabstract) political and civil citizenship on each side. This approach will, I think, make clear the extent to which a “transition to democracy” or a “reconstruction of civil society” in Eastern Europe—its approximation to “European civilization”—itself involves the politicization of difference, which is a prerequisite for feminism as identity politics. As I shall argue below, such a conclusion is something quite distinct from what is implied by the current use of “civil society” in the recent feminist literature on transition in post-Communism, where the assumption is that civil society offers freedom for the natural expression of unquestioned preexisting political differences (of which gender is only one example), which Communism has simply suppressed.
