Learning Gender after the Cold War

This book explores the role and place of feminist politics in the transformation of the former socialist world and points out the geopolitical mechanisms involved in the deployment of technocratic norms, expert discourses, activist repertoires and academic knowledge on women’s rights and gender equality in the 1990s-2000s. Based on an interdisciplinary approach and scrutinizing transnational flows of people, resources and ideas, the analysis brings together themes and spaces that have been disconnected in previous scholarship. It sheds light on the integration of feminist resources into contemporary governance through complex entanglements of international aid to democratization, “activism beyond borders” and systemic transformation of higher education.The book will be of interest to researchers and students of sociology, political science, gender studies, and East-European studies.

“This pioneering and sophisticated study traces how the concept of gender ‘travelled’ to former socialist Eastern Europe, explores the role of feminists from the ‘East’ and the ‘West’ in that process, and examines how gender became a powerful tool of governance in the neoliberal order. Highly recommended.” 

—Francisca de Haan, Professor of Gender Studies and History, Central European University, Vienna, Austria

“Cîrstocea’s brilliant and insightful book explores the social and political processes that conflated the concept of gender with liberal Western discourses about democratization in the postsocialist countries.”

—Kristen R. Ghodsee, Professor, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Ioana Cîrstocea is a Sociologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, CNRS, and a member of the European Centre for Sociology and Political Science, CESSP, Paris, France. Her research focuses on intellectual spaces and actors in Eastern Europe and on the production, circulation and usages of feminist knowledge in (post)-Cold War settings.