ABSTRACT
When thinking about postsocialism today, we cannot avoid the complexities that arise from this term, and the risk of falling into generalization and homogenization of the (post)socialist experience. Locating historical and present feminist struggles there complicates the analysis further. This chapter considers the need to address the specificities of local contexts and their differences within the geopolitical space labelled former Eastern Europe and contextualizes the decolonial and transfeminist politics of positioning, its challenges as well as radical potentialities within the connections between the postcolonial and the postsocialist. Drawing on Somerville (2000) and Puar (2007), this chapter adopts the methodology of “reading sideways” to question postsocialism and to challenge the colonial epistemology of the gender binary (Lugones 2008). Thereby the chapter searches for ways to begin to unleash the binds that produce the modern/colonial terms of recognition and to resist the regulation of bodies, labour and space that the sex-gender dissident pre/post/socialist subjects face.
