Abstract
This paper draws on East Central European experience with the aim of understanding the nature of Anglo-American hegemony in feminist geography and of voicing subtle criticism of that hegemony. It identifies changes that are necessary to counter this situation and suggests means of bringing them about. Towards this end, it considers two issues. First it examines the forms of hegemony that are experienced by East-Central European feminist geographers and their implications for the development of gender studies/feminist geography in the region. Second it looks at the characteristics of feminist geography in the post-socialist region. With respect to the latter, it focuses on the social and institutional root causes of the time lag in/lack of its emergence. Although the paper mainly presents the differences in the production of knowledge in feminist geography, the author considers it equally important to face inequalities if shared strategies are to be formulated and political actions are to be taken.
Highlights
Gender studies in the gender-blind post-socialist geographies of EastCentral Europe in changing it
From an East Central European perspective, I find that two aspects are of key importance :
It manifests itself in geopolitical relations that vary in space and time
Summary
The differences (most acutely felt and clashing on a daily basis in the unified Germany) between Eastern and Western feminisms alone need not necessarily imply inequalities The fact that they do is because the East has been incorporated into the West. Funk (1993) in New York highlights power imbalances at the level of discourse and the hegemony of a Western feminist discourse, acknowledging the fact that this hegemony overrides postcommunist women’s concerns that Westerners often raise inappropriate issues for Easterners to address (for example, editors assign authors to deal with particular issues) Discourses from both sides are full of stereotypes “of American and Western feminists as ‘man-haters’ or of post-communist women as having bought into sexism and having subordinated themselves to the family” A good example of a dialogue on an equal footing is “From dictatorship to democracy : women in the Mediterranean, Central and Eastern Europe”, a conference held in Barcelona in 1993
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