ABSTRACT
The investigation of the cultural dimension of the re-imagining and re-constructing of Romania after the collapse of socialism, has to be considered as a broader framework in which to discuss citizenship, as it is affected by and as it affects gender regimes. In the following pages I first aim to understand how the official/hegemonic ideology of the socialist regime constructed the relationship between the state and the (female) individual; restructured the boundaries between the private and public; redefined traditional gender roles; and re-enforced patriarchy. I will then outline the current trends of how this relationship has been dealt with, in the context of postsocialist transformations. Finally, I will examine the role that feminism plays within these socialist transformations in an effort to offer a more critical approach, which takes into account the influence of the gender order within the analysis of the old and new authoritarian visions of society. Within this context, I will draw upon the work of Fraser, who stresses the need for the development of an alternative vision under the post-socialist condition. Fraser reconnects the problem of cultural difference with that of social equality and “permits us to link an anti-essentialist cultural politics of recognition with an egalitarian social politics of redistribution” (Fraser 1997, 187).
