The Post-Communist Transition and the Representation of Women in Eastern Europe. A Case Study on Tatiana Țîbuleac and Dorota Masłowska

Abstract

Fiction depicting the post-communist transition has been little discussed with the focus on the representation of women. At the same time, there is a lack of comparative studies that analyze these fictions produced in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. The article aims to discuss the representation of the transition in the novels of two contemporary female writers from the Republic of Moldova and Poland respectively. Vara în care mama a avut ochii verzi [The Summer When My Mother’s Eyes Were Green] (2017) by Tatiana Țîbuleac and White and Red (2002) by Dorota Masłowska are analyzed from the perspective of World-Literature theory (Warwick Research Collective) to see how the impact of the transition to neoliberalism produces new representations of women in the novel, questioning traditional gender codes. The women as commodities and the women as entrepreneurs, who adapt to the capitalism of the 90s in Eastern Europe are two symptomatic representations in the two novels, which offer, without an explicit feminist stake, a more complex mapping of the post-communist transition.