ABSTRACT
In the 1990s, feminist scholars committed to bringing gender analytics into historiographies of modern Russia and Central-Eastern Europe saw their mission as decidedly field-transforming. However, contrary to expectations, the gender analytics, as this chapter contends, did not enact a major shift in scholarship devoted to the problem of socialist modernities and their record of women’s emancipation. Rather, scholars drawing on innovative gender analysis happened to integrate it into what some scholars call “Cold War narratives” and empower their inbuilt propensities to prejudge socialism’s emancipatory promise. This chapter interrogates the peculiar behavior of the gender category in scholarship on socialist modernities by asking: how does one explain the ease with which Cold War plots have made themselves at home in gender-informed scholarship on socialism? It also follows the history of gender analysis into the emergent research that decisively ventures beyond Cold War plots. In conclusion, the chapter reflects on the future of gender in histories of socialism. It calls for turning the pioneering scholarship that examines alternative, non-binary, and, yet, heterosexual forms of organization of family, work, self into a new site—a theoretical resource—for the development of gender theory and methodology in the 21st century.
