HUMSS - Janet Elise Johnson

After the Wall Came Down: Gendered Transitions in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia

When East and West Germans pulled down the wall in 1989, it marked the beginning of marked shifts, though not necessarily the ones we expected, in the lives of millions of people in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia. I am going to make two arguments based on an in-progress book, The Routledge International Handbook to Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia, which I am co-editing with Katalin Fábián and Mara Lazda. 

First, these transitions were profoundly gendered in their mechanisms and in their outcomes because of their ideological and historical roots. Second, theorizing these transitions has helped re-shape gender studies, by challenging the discipline to think more about historically constituted political regimes and by fostering epistemological and methodological debates about the possibilities of gender equality within socialism and neoliberal democracy. 

In this book, we deepen intersectional and postcolonial considerations to further these insights.