scholarly journals Editor's Introduction

Aspasia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. vii-ix
Author(s):  
Sharon A. Kowalsky

This volume of Aspasia is dedicated to Ann Snitow, scholar, feminist, and activist, who passed away in August 2019. Although Snitow was not trained as a scholar of our region, she devoted much of her career and her activism to fostering transnational connections and providing tools for empowering women within the former socialist bloc. After helping to found the Network of East-West Women (NEWW) in 1990, Snitow worked tirelessly to facilitate the exchange of ideas and information among feminist scholars in the East and the West, supporting and encouraging an entire generation in their academic and activist pursuits. It is fitting, therefore, that Aspasia is able to honor Ann Snitow’s legacy with this volume. As a yearbook of women’s and gender history of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, Aspasia’s mission is to make more accessible the scholarship being conducted within and about the region. By fostering transnational connections, Aspasia, like Snitow herself, encourages intellectual exchanges across boundaries, provides opportunities for academic engagement, and expands access to scholarship from regions where such access might be limited by language and other barriers.

Aspasia ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Enriketa Papa-Pandelejmoni ◽  
Gentiana Kera ◽  
Krassimira Daskalova ◽  
Biljana Kašić ◽  
Sandra Prlenda ◽  
...  

Aspasia ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Krassimira Daskalova ◽  
Maria Bucur ◽  
Ivana Pantelić ◽  
Biljana Dojčinović ◽  
Gabriela Dudeková ◽  
...  

Aspasia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. vi-viii
Author(s):  
Sharon A Kowalsky

When Peter Hallama approached the Aspasia editorial board about publishing the proceedings of a conference he was organizing on Socialist Masculinities, we jumped at the opportunity. It seemed that Aspasia, as a journal of women’s and gender history, would be the perfect venue to showcase the innovative and important historical scholarship being conducted on masculinities in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. Although the COVID-19 pandemic delayed his plans and necessitated holding a virtual conference, the results that make up the contents of this volume do not disappoint. As Hallama mentions in his Introduction to the Special Forum articles, and as Marko Dumančić highlights in his concluding Comments, the works included here reflect a deep engagement with the lived experiences of men, assessed through memoirs, diaries, photographs, newspapers, and internal party documents. These articles explore some of the many and shifting masculinities constructed throughout the region during the socialist period, showing that individuals and the state constantly engaged in their negotiation and renegotiation.


The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History boldly interprets the history of diverse women and how ideas about gender shaped their access to political and cultural power in North America over six centuries. In twenty-nine chapters, the Handbook showcases women’s and gender history as an integrated field with its own interpretation of the past, focused on how gender influenced people’s lives as they participated in migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, and community building. Organized chronologically and thematically, the Handbook’s six sections allow readers to consider historical continuities of gendered power as well as individual innovations and ruptures in gender systems. Theoretically cutting edge, each chapter bursts with fascinating historical characters, from young Chicanas transforming urban culture, to free women of color forging abolitionist doctrines, to Asian migrant women defending the legitimacy of their marriages, to working-class activists mobilizing international movements, to transwomen fleeing incarceration. Together, their lives constitute the history of a continent. Leading scholars from multiple generations demonstrate the power of innovative research to excavate a history hidden in plain sight. Scrutinizing silences in the historical record, from the inattention to enslaved women’s opinions to the suppression of Indian women’s involvement in border diplomacy, the authors challenge the nature of historical evidence and remap what counts in our interpretation of the past. They demonstrate a way to extend this more capacious vision of history forward, setting an intellectual agenda informed by intersectionality and transnationalism, and new understandings of sexuality.


2010 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 685-700
Author(s):  
Jitka Malečková

Gender is a good place from which to start reflections on European history: gender history deliberately transcends borders and, at the same time, demonstrates the difficulties of writing European, or transnational, history. Focusing on recent syntheses of modern European history, both general works and those specifically devoted to gender, the article asks what kind of Europe emerges from the encounter between gender and history. It suggests that the writing of European history includes either Eastern Europe (and, sometimes, the Ottoman Empire) or a gender perspective, but seldom both. Thus, the projects of integrating a European dimension into gender history and gender into European history remain unfinished. The result is a history of a rather ‘small Europe’.


Aspasia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-36
Author(s):  
Julie Hemment ◽  
Valentina Uspenskaya

In this forum, we reflect on the genesis and history of the Tver’ Center for Women’s History and Gender Studies—its inspiration and the qualities that have enabled it to flourish and survive the political changes of the last twenty years, as well as the unique project of women educating women it represents. Inspired by historical feminist forebears, it remains a hub of intergenerational connection, inspiring young women via exposure to lost histories of women’s struggle for emancipation during the prerevolutionary and socialist periods, as well as the recent postsocialist past. Using an ethnographic account of the center’s twentieth anniversary conference as a starting point, we discuss some of its most salient and distinguishing features, as well as the unique educational project it represents and undertakes: the center’s origins in exchange and mutual feminist enlightenment; its historical orientation (women educating [wo]men in emancipation history); and its commitment to the postsocialist feminist “East-West” exchange.


2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Canning

Thereis perhaps no more fitting way to honor Vernon Lidtke than to demonstrate, in the form of this essay, that the questions he posed to his students years ago continue to provide a grid for contemplating and analyzing historical subjects, both familiar and new. One such question involved the impact of one concept's transformation upon another: would class persist as a crucial historical category once it had confronted the differences of gender? This question preoccupied me in previous work and I return to it here, taking stock of that which has changed since I first contemplated this question, in the fields of both German and European gender history. Another question that remains an object of debate is the longer-term trajectory of the history of women and gender: how might we define the point at which its work of subversion or revision is complete? What directions might this field take once “mainstream” histories have successfully incorporated its findings? This essay aims to compare the ways in which the keywords class, citizenship, and welfare state have been redefined, expanded, or circumscribed through the turn to culture, language, and gender. This comparative exercise allows me to expand Vernon's original questions to include citizenship, the critical concept in my more recent scholarship, and to review the potentials and promises of main-streaming across the so-called Atlantic divide.


2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

AbstractTransnational history and the history of gender and sexuality have both been concerned with the issue of borders and their crossing, but the two fields themselves have not intersected much in the past. This is beginning to change, and this article surveys recent scholarship that draws on both fields, highlighting work in six areas: movements for women’s and gay rights; diverse understandings of sexuality and gender; colonialism and imperialism; intermarriage; national identity and citizenship; and migration. This new research suggests ways in which the subject matter, theory, and methodology in transnational history and the history of gender and sexuality can interconnect: in the two fields’ mutual emphasis on intertwinings, relationships, movement, and hybridity; their interdisciplinarity and stress on multiple perspectives; and their calls for destabilization of binaries.


Aspasia ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Krassimira Daskalova ◽  
Mihaela Miroiu ◽  
Agnieszka Graff ◽  
Tatiana Zhurzhenko ◽  
Marina Blagojevic ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 22-33
Author(s):  
Maria V. Vasekha ◽  
Elena F. Fursova

Purpose. The article presents a brief overview of the 30-year period of the development of Russian gender studies and reviews the state of gender studies in Siberia in the last decade. Results. The authors came to the conclusion that the gender approach in Russia was very successful in the field of historical disciplines, especially in historical feminology and women’s studies. The authors analyze the emergence of various areas within this issue, the key topics and approaches that have been developed in the Russian humanities. The main directions were reflected in the anniversary collection digest on gender history and anthropology “Gender in the focus of anthropology, family ethnography and the social history of everyday life” (2019). Conclusion. The authors describe the current position of Siberian gender studies and conclude that gender issues in Siberia are less active in comparison with the European part of Russia. In recent years, Siberian researchers have increasingly replaced the category of “gender” with neutral categories of “family research”, “female”, “male”, and so on. More often researchers choose “classical” historical problems raised in historical science before the “humanitarian renaissance”, which began in the 1990s in Russia. In modern gender studies in the Siberian region, the capabilities of critical feminist optics and gender methodology are rarely used, and queer-issues are not developed.


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