The Politics of Gender after Socialism. . - Reviews - book review

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2002 by Nancy Weiss Hanrahan

The Politics of Gender after Socialism. Susan Gal and Gail Kligman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 169pp. $39.50/cloth $15.95/paperback).

The Politics of Gender after Socialism is a stunning analysis of how the gender relations of the former socialist states are being transformed in the transition to privatization and market economies. Written as an extended introduction to a multidisciplinary research project on gender conducted with colleagues from East Central Europe, the book provides an overview of the central themes that emerged from that research and draws out its theoretical implications. In the process, the authors offer critical new insights into the distinctions between public and private, dependence and autonomy, and coercion and choice--key terms that have structured feminist analysis--that advance scholarship not only with respect to East Central Europe but also in the West.

But why add gender to the literature on the "transition?" How is it relevant to the emergence of market economies and the contraction of the state? First, these social processes have had a differential effect on the lives of men and women with respect to new conditions in the labor market and diminished social welfare services. In addition, different aspects of the transition are being played out through gendered constructions and discourses. For example, the authors suggest that public debates about reproduction are also coded arguments about the morality and political legitimacy of the state. In Romania, for instance, the legalization of abortion was a response to popular sentiment but in reversing the policies of the Ceausescu regime, it also allowed the government to claim a moral legitimacy. In Poland, on the other hand, the restriction of abortion signaled the government's morality in its opposition to communism and its alliance with the Catholic Church (31). It is not merely that the transition is cha nging gender relations, but ideas about gender are shaping the politics and policies of the transition.

As the above example suggests, Gal and Kligman's analysis consistently goes beyond the ideology of socialism or nationalism and is finely tuned to the contingencies and contexts, the practical and political considerations that shape state policy as well as social practice. However, the intricate variations on gendered themes do not prevent the authors from drawing out the theoretical implications of their material. The conceptual vocabulary they develop is a formal one--nesting, balance, recombination, fractals--which elegantly describes the complexity of how different variables play out in social experience, rather than constituting a rigid and binary model of gender relations and politics.

It is through this lens that the analysis of such gendered distinctions as public and private are brilliantly reformulated. In the former socialist states, what was public was not only a state-run economy but an invasive state apparatus; the private was a realm of autonomy from the state which included a secondary economy based on the family. Even within this private sphere however, a distinct public sphere was mapped out for men, a sphere of political authority and imagination, as opposed to the one of responsibility for domestic work. This inscription of public within private is one example of what the authors call the nesting of these distinctions. These arrangements resulted in a different type of male privilege and different gendered roles from those in the West: the feminine as the brave victim, responsible for both official employment and domestic work, yet inadequate; the masculine as the big child, dominant at work yet spoiled at home (53-54).

In the post-socialist world of marketization and privatization, women tend to be employed in the public sector where jobs come with social benefits, men in the new economy of the private sector which is far more lucrative. New forms of masculinity have emerged that favor initiative and aggression and are associated with the capitalist economy. Yet, in another instance of nesting, large numbers of women combine forms of both public and private sector employment. What is more, the labor market is bifurcating in multiple ways; into public and private but also into regular and secure jobs (coded as male) and unstable, part-time and multiple jobs (coded as female) (59-60). Many jobs in the latter category are also within the private sector. Thus, the actual experience of women in both the socialist and the new market economies points out the inadequacy of the conventional public / private distinction for gender analysis. But rather than stop there, Gal and Kligman provide new ways of conceptualizing both the rela tionship between public and private and the gendered constructions of the labor market that should have wide utility in feminist theory and analysis. Their treatments of coercion and choice with respect to labor force participation, and of women's dependence or independence vis-a-vis men, markets and states are equally illuminating.