The Decolonial Challenge: Framing Post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe within Transnational Feminist Studies

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Redi Koobak and Raili Marlingwithin transnational feminist studies

The decolonial challenge: Framing post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe

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EJWSThe decolonial challenge: Framing post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe within transnational feminist studies1

Redi KoobakLinköping University, Sweden

Raili MarlingUniversity of Tartu, Estonia

AbstractThe article explores the location of Central and Eastern Europe in transnational feminist studies. Despite the acknowledgement of the situatedness of knowledge, feminist theorising nevertheless seems to continue to be organised around a limited number of central axes and internalised progress narratives. The authors argue that there is a pressing need for theories which can approach the near absence of Central and Eastern European perspectives from transnational feminist theorising, and challenge the limited number of discursive tropes associated with post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe – especially that of a ‘lag’, where difference is translated into a temporal distance. Instead, the authors suggest that a more inclusive vision of transnational feminist studies can be achieved by applying the decolonial framework to the post-socialist context, as explicated in the work of Madina Tlostanova.

KeywordsCentral and Eastern Europe, decolonial approach, postcolonial theory, post-socialism, transnational feminist studies

Introduction

Postcolonial, decolonial, post-structuralist and feminist criticism have emphasised the situatedness of knowledge, challenging the universal claims of ‘Western’ knowledge. Indeed, locatedness has become one of the epistemological foundations of feminist

Corresponding author:Raili Marling, University of Tartu, Ülikooli 18, Tartu, 50090, Estonia. Email: [email protected]

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Koobak and Marling 331

theory in the past few decades. Since its inception, the concept of a ‘politics of location’ (Rich, 1986) has triggered reflection on and responsibility for how feminists know and act within the locations they inhabit, reproduce and transform. Most importantly, it has emerged as a strategy for thinking beyond the construction of simplistic essentialist posi-tions, both in terms of individual and collective feminist subjects.

Ironically, the shift towards differences and the local has not altered the hegemonic position of ‘Western feminist theory’ and along the local–global axis, the specificity of the post-socialist2 condition tends to disappear within the larger European project as well as within transnational feminist studies. It could be argued that the politics of location as a tool of critical intervention is defused in the case of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) because of its purported identification with the West, even if marginal to it. Thus much of feminist research, both by Western and CEE scholars alike, seems to take categories of difference, such as ‘Western’ or ‘Eastern European’ for granted, without attempting a relational reading of how such difference is constructed in the first place, and to what end. Consequently, as is familiar from many postcolonial feminist accounts, ‘the descrip-tive labels that mark different women also often end up naturalising these differences’ (Sarkar, 2004: 321).

Even if we acknowledge that the terms ‘Western’ and ‘Western feminism’ or ‘post-socialist’ and ‘CEE feminism’ are not static and that they function in equally ambiguous, porous and often contradictory ways, we need to use them because we need to make sense of what we are doing using a common language. Despite the many problems with the notion of ‘Western feminism’, it continues to persist in feminist texts because of the lack of a better term. No matter how diverse internally, the category of ‘the West’ func-tions as a name that designates those peoples and regions that appear superior to other peoples and regions either politically or economically (Ang, 2001). These terms, entrenched in the asymmetrical power relations between the West and the rest, will have to function as a means of framing, a process that is at once impossible and necessary. Hence, despite our dissatisfaction with the precision of the term ‘Western feminism’ we will be using it in this article not as a descriptive category but an analytical one that needs to be constantly troubled.

We suggest that the discussion of post-socialism is relevant to feminist studies more widely. After all, ‘post-socialist’ is, in Susan Buck-Morss’s (2006) formulation, an ‘ontology of time’, a shared historical condition that may elicit a variety of responses. The fall of the Soviet Union introduced a new global socioeconomic reality with no viable alternative to capitalism more widely and neoliberalism specifically. The concept of ‘New Europe’ embodies this dramatic shift. Although it has been evoked in the unifi-cation narratives of EU leaders to refer to the whole union, revived by the atonement of past sins (e.g. Forchtner and Kølvraa, 2012), the predominant usage has tended to con-trast ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Europe, the former consisting of the Western European and the latter of the new CEE members of the EU, distinguished from Old Europe by their pro-Americanism and neoliberalism (e.g. Bialasiewicz and Minca, 2005: 366). Indeed, CEE has been at the forefront of the dismantling of welfare regimes, with similar processes replicated all over the EU (cf. Apeldoorn, 2008), a movement with deep implications for feminist politics.3 In a way, we see the emergence of a new post-socialist Europe, as evoked by Susan Buck-Morss, across the whole EU. However, in view of the habitual



332 European Journal of Women’s Studies 21(4)

association of post-socialism with CEE in the European context, we will use the notion below in its traditional, narrow sense.

While previous critics from CEE have addressed the universalisation of Western con-cepts and the failure to see local difference (e.g. Havelkova, 1996; Siklova, 1993), we want to address the discursive construction of the relationship between ‘CEE’ and ‘Western feminism’ in the feminist ‘ideascape’ (Cerwonka, 2008: 828). In particular, we are interested in challenging the latent presence of a modernist progress narrative in the recurring ‘lag’ discourse used to characterise post-socialism within broader Western/neo-liberal hegemony and in seeking out alternative perspectives.

Although we are far from first in pointing out the ‘lag’, it continues to persist in femi-nist writing with regard to CEE in particular and post-socialism more broadly, suggesting that we might need a more sustained discussion of the topic than has occurred thus far. The discussion of marginalised geopolitical locations within transnational feminist dis-cussions has been explained by the dominance of certain directionalities in thinking that privilege the so-called ‘first world’ and ‘third world’ dynamic, neglecting the former ‘second world’ (Suchland, 2011). While the imbalance of power between ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ scholars has been criticised for decades in postcolonial feminism which today has become rather mainstreamed in feminist thought, we can still find other geo-political gaps in transnational feminist studies. By insisting on adding post-socialist CEE into the mix, we are not merely asking for the recognition of yet another ‘difference’, but rather for the diversification of frames of reference.

We argue that there is a pressing need to develop new analytical approaches to under-standing transnational feminisms in the context of persistent hierarchies within and out-side of Europe that require critical reflection, in particular, considering the positionality of post-socialist CEE within these discussions. In the following, we give a brief over-view of previous research on feminism in CEE and its relation with the ‘West’, discuss the possible cross-pollination of postcolonial and post-socialist analyses and finally, sug-gest a possible escape from latent progress narratives in transnational feminist studies through decolonial thought as envisioned by Madina Tlostanova (2010, 2012). By intro-ducing the decolonial option into the discussion of the post-socialist situation we could perhaps evade the West-centric frames of reference with their universalising tendencies and open up new productive perspectives for discussion, including the discussion of a more inclusive ‘new’ European feminism.

Contesting the ‘lag’ discourse: Metageography, transnational feminisms and the post-socialist space

Transnational feminist theorising, with its intersectional approach to gender, race, eth-nicity and economic relations on a global scale, attempts to include diverse geopolitical locations and their intersections within feminist studies. As Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (1994: 17) suggest, transnational feminist practices require ‘comparative work rather than the relativistic linking of “differences” ’. This means that feminists ‘must question the narratives in which they are embedded, including but not limiting ourselves to the master narratives of mainstream feminism’ (Grewal and Kaplan, 1994: 18). Indeed, as Nina Lykke (2010: 55) has argued, a meaningful transnational feminism ‘requires a




self-reflexive stance on global/local locations not only in relation to crude and rather abstract categories such as East–West/North–South as the issue of geopolitical position-ing is sometimes framed’. Thus, she invites an inclusion of transnational economic, political and cultural power differences into the analysis, a perspective relevant to our argument.

Paying closer attention to the role of metageography in shaping feminist discourses is also crucial for understanding why there has been so little recognition of the specificity of CEE in feminist thought. We use the concept ‘metageography’ in line with Jennifer Suchland (2011), who borrows it from Martin W Lewis and Kären E Wigen (1997: ix) to denote ‘the set of spatial structures through which people order their knowledge of the world’. Suchland’s call for a problematisation of the three-worlds metageography that continues to inform understandings about place, power and difference in feminist schol-arship strongly resonates with our thinking about the framing of post-socialist CEE within transnational feminist studies.

While the image of ‘Central and Eastern European Woman’ is not as consistently singular a monolithic subject in Western feminist texts as ‘Third World Woman’, it is certainly possible, in relation to CEE as well, ‘to trace a coherence of effects resulting from the implicit assumption of “the West” (in all its complexities and contradictions) as the primary referent in theory and praxis’ (Mohanty, 1988: 61–62). Slavova (2006) was one of the first to spell out the resonant parallels between CEE and Third World feminists in this ambivalence towards the universalising tendencies of Western feminism. CEE becomes a copy of the West in feminist theoretical frameworks and this in turn produces a ‘lag’ discourse that is framed by (imperialist) progress narratives and mapping post-socialist specificities onto a Western norm (cf. Nixon, 2001: 215).

The most pertinent discourse that helps to naturalise the East–West difference is the persistent trope of post-socialist CEE feminist studies ‘lagging behind’ the West. Spatial and geopolitical differences are projected onto a temporal plane, with Eastern Europe perceived to be ‘catching up’. This stance is, indeed, reproduced by many feminist authors from CEE, because of the dominance of Western feminist paradigms. As Daša Duhaček (2000: 129) puts it, the question is ‘how do we speak of feminism which is other than Western feminism, if not as feminism which is other to it, which would presuppose Western feminism as the parameter?’ As CEE is used to thinking about itself ‘through the concepts which are being imported, and it observes itself through the eyes of others’ (Blagojević, 2009: 57), the phrase ‘catching up’ recurs, perhaps partially subconsciously, in works by CEE scholars (e.g. Blagojević, 2009; Grabowska, 2012).

Another possible reason for the limited attention to CEE in feminist scholarship today is that transnational feminist studies, encouraged by postcolonial theory, have tended to prioritise the dialogue between the so-called first and the third world, thus cementing a binary between the Global North and the Global South. Post-socialist space gets lost because it is ‘largely presumed to be a process of democratization or Europeanization and thus uncritically positioned vis-à-vis the first world’ (Suchland, 2011: 839). A num-ber of feminist scholars have recently argued for the need to ‘bring the second world in’ (Grabowska, 2012) so as to challenge the binary hierarchical frameworks that are con-tinuously being perpetuated by transnational feminist scholarship and arguing for the




importance of the role of the second world in the ongoing formulations of global under-standings of feminism and gender (Blagojević, 2009; Grabowska, 2012; Lukić et al., 2006; Pejić, 2009; Suchland, 2011).

However, we feel that these attempts have often had little effect as it seems impossible to escape the use of hegemonic Western formulae for advocating gender equality and other democratic rights as a yardstick against which the ‘advancement’ of the former second world is measured. In this we side with Clare Hemmings, who has argued that contemporary discourses tend to frame gender equality as ‘Western, capitalist, and dem-ocratic, and the West, capitalism, and democracy themselves as sites that create the pos-sibility of, and reproduce, rather than hinder, gender equality’ (Hemmings, 2011: 9). This framing of gender equality is based on a temporal fantasy of ‘a shared oppressive past, already moved beyond in the West, but culturally present for the South and the East’ (Hemmings, 2011: 149). In such a framing, gender equality and feminism are described as a Western trademark that can be exported globally.

The limited presence of post-socialist space in feminist discussions may be further explained by CEE’s historical immersion in Western culture, although it is not per-ceived as belonging to the ‘West’ yet/any more (an exclusion emphasised also in the concept of ‘New Europe’, with its stress on the recent arrival of the CEE countries). In the context of gender, CEE bears the imprint of the Soviet Union and its formal gender equality ideology, while also saturated with sexualised consumer culture and essentialist gender ideologies. It boasts high employment rates for women, but the women remain wary of gender equality. Yet its difference from the ‘West’ is not dif-ferent enough to be a postcolonial ‘Other’. The grey zone of Europe, as Eastern Europe is sometimes nicknamed, is neither in nor out but somewhere in between (Pachmanová, 2010: 37–38). The end of Soviet dominance was not characterised by a simple replacement of one ideology with another, as the metaphor of transition would imply, but by a multiplicity of coexisting viewpoints and anxieties about loca-tion, globalisation, ideology, nation and, above all, the aspiration to be accepted in the West as West. These paradoxes do not fit into the predominant frames of reference in transnational feminism.

As Suchland (2011: 838) astutely argues, the transnational turn in feminist studies has not altered the position of the post-socialist world because the ‘intellectual pathway to certain locations in the world’ has skipped the former second world. Few CEE European scholars have made an impact in transnational feminist studies, even when the discussion concerns CEE, testifying to the persistently skewed character of knowledge production. This awareness needs to be brought more clearly into transnational feminist studies, and not just as a perfunctory verbal gesture, not least because understanding the complex tensions between gender and post-socialism is relevant to women everywhere: ‘we are all post-Soviet. We are to understand this situation as our own’ (Buck-Morss, 2006: 10). In other words, post-socialist is not just a geographic label, but also an analytical cate-gory (Owczarzak, 2009: 4). Our following discussion seeks to explore one option for diversifying the transnational theoretical frame with a decolonial perspective that, in our opinion, is more attuned to transnational differences than the adoption of a postcolonial framework, in particular when considering the status of CEE within transnational femi-nist discussions.




Finding common ground: Resonances between postcolonial and post-socialist perspectives

Finding ways out of the static position that keeps CEE locked in the ‘lag’ and perpetual ‘catching up’ or ‘transitioning’ frame within the transnational feminist context requires revisiting the long-standing intellectual puzzles concerning the nature and political effects of knowledge production. The ‘catching up’ timeline can be seen as temporal othering, based on a linear conception of temporality that generates a periodisation of chronological sequences and functions as a taxonomy of progress and backwardness, often taken up in postcolonial criticism. Sarkar identifies the Western practice of apply-ing a unitary transhistorical ‘measure of achievement’ on experiences from diverse contexts:

… one consequence of fetishising a particular set of experiences as ‘progress’ is to interpret all difference in terms of ‘distance’ (temporal, as in ‘lagging behind’, and/or substantive, as in ‘different/deviating’) from that ideal and apparently common end, forcing them in the process into a hierarchy, rather than to consider them laterally, in their full measure of complexity and richness. (Sarkar, 2004: 326)

Importantly for our case, Sarkar also demonstrates how such an approach leads to ‘the denial of coevalness’. As a result, difference ‘is understood as points on a vertical scale of inferiority/superiority, presence/lack or advancement/backwardness, rather than on a horizontal field of plurality in which no point has definitional advantage over the others’ (Sarkar, 2004: 326). While the ideal of transnational feminist studies is to provide such plurality, we believe that it is far from being achieved and we continuously need to dis-cuss a variety of imperial/colonial legacies.

Recently, many CEE scholars in various fields have taken up the question of how to find interpretative frameworks that would not be teleologically biased, that would not always necessarily start from setting up Euro-centric or West-centric comparative struc-tures, that would not fix Western arrangements and developments as norms to be fol-lowed by other regions of the world (Annus, 2011; Kulpa and Mizielińska, 2011; Mudure, 2007; Pachmanová, 2010; Pejić, 2009; Tlostanova, 2010). These attempts to uncover the imbalanced power relations between scholars from CEE and scholars in the West, who are seen as producing widely circulating master narratives, bear a close resemblance to the efforts of postcolonial critics to expose and heal ‘the epistemic violence of imperial-ism’ (Emberley, 1993: 5) and to challenge the expectation to subscribe to the unifying intellectual traditions of Euro-America (Sangari, 2002). Postcolonial scholars talk about ‘asymmetric ignorance’ (Chakrabarty, 2000) or ‘sanctioned ignorances’ (Spivak, 1988: 287) to characterise the epistemic relations between centres and peripheries, contesting the power that the former holds over the latter.

Alhough ‘postcolonialism’ is not a parallel term to ‘post-socialism’, the term ‘postco-lonial’ and its rich history as a theoretical paradigm resonates with the analytical poten-tial of the term ‘post-socialist’. As Chari and Verdery (2009: 10) have pointed out ‘ “[p]ostsocialism” began as simply a temporal designation: societies once referred to as con-stituting “actually existing socialism” had ceased to exist as such’. On the other hand,




postcolonial studies emerged, not after the sudden collapse of ‘actually existing colonial-ism’, but several decades later, as a mode of critical reflection, not just on colonialism but also on nationalism, democracy and knowledge. Chari and Verdery believe that post-socialism, too, has gradually come

… to signify a critical standpoint, in several senses: critical of the socialist past and of possible socialist futures; critical of the present as neoliberal verities about transition, markets, and democracy were being imposed upon former socialist spaces; and critical of the possibilities for knowledge as shaped by Cold War institutions. (Chari and Verdery, 2009: 11)

So when we consider the ‘post-socialist’ within the discussion of transnational femi-nist studies we want to do it as a thought experiment and call for a more ethical engage-ment with the specificities of the former ‘second world’ and the implications of neglecting to do so within feminist discussions. CEE subjects and texts move, often appearing as full of contradictions and ambivalences, yet in the discursive field of transnational femi-nism, they tend to become fixed. There is a tendency to glide over the complex ways in which they react to, resist and define their terms of engagement with the new contexts that have arisen with the demise of socialism and the rise of neoliberalism.

Postcolonial theory has indeed evolved a sophisticated theoretical apparatus for the investigation of the power imbalance, economic as well as intellectual, between the West and the rest and it would be a logical theoretical paradigm to turn to in order to illuminate the post-socialist condition. Indeed, postcolonialism and post-socialism are both con-cerned with legacies of imperial power, dependence, resistance and hybridity (cf. Moore, 2001: 112). What makes critical dialogue with postcolonialism especially relevant for CEE is its complex and continuing process of self-colonisation: in rejecting the former coloniser (Soviet Union, Russia), the region has constituted itself as a periphery of the West (cf. Blagojević, 2009: 34). In Moore’s (2001: 118) perceptive words, ‘postcolonial desire from Riga to Almaty fixates not on the fallen master Russia but on the glittering Euramerican MTV-and-Coca-Cola beast that broke in. Central and Eastern Europeans type this desire as a return to Westernness that once was theirs.’ Several authors from Eastern Europe have written about self-colonisation in relation to the geopolitical posi-tioning of the former second world. Most notably, authors like Alexander Kiossev (1999) disclose the technologies of ‘self-colonisation’ in which subjects from the margins, by marginalising themselves, help to create the centre. Furthermore, (self-)colonisation con-tinues in the guise of the transfer of neoliberal economic and social policies, which, among other things, have serious consequences for gendered realities and feminism (e.g. Marling, 2010).

We thus need to be careful with merely applying yet another Western theory to yet another terrain, recreating the old imbalance of the Western theorists and the non-West-ern raw material (Suchland, 2011: 854). In this spirit, Madina Tlostanova (2012: 131) suggests that instead of arguing about how well Western theories of postcolonialism can be applied to the post-socialist context, we need ‘true intersectionality’ for opening up a real dialogue, ‘not a comparative, but … rather an “imparative” – from the Latin impa-rare (to learn in the atmosphere of plurality) – approach’. According to Tlostanova (2012: 132), this would shift the emphasis from using ready-made discourses and




theories that are always based on Western ideals to a mutual learning process, attending to ‘various local histories marked by colonial and imperial differences (or their combina-tion) within modernity/coloniality’. This approach opens up to the complexity of inter-sectional differences between and within CEE countries. In addition, it has the potential to expand the theoretical toolkit of feminism that has thus far been built on the experi-ence of Western gender and political traditions.

Towards a decolonial approach to transnational feminist studies

In order to find new ways of getting at these complex issues, Madina Tlostanova (2012: 132) suggests beginning from ‘the geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge growing out of the local histories, subjectivities and experiences’. Tlostanova’s pursuit is intel-lectually rooted in the decolonial approach (cf. Mignolo and Tlostanova, 2007; Tlostanova, 2010) which she suggests can act ‘as a common ground for postcolonial and postcommunist experiences’ (Tlostanova, 2012: 132). To us, the decolonial option is an important genealogy that, being derived from the South- and Latin-American indigenous traditions and deep awareness of the capitalist world system, bypasses some of the intel-lectual trajectories of Western theorists. As such, it has the potential for carving out a platform for new critical discussions pertaining to the positionality of post-socialist CEE in the landscape of transnational feminist theorising. The decolonial option seeks to offer alternatives to the supposed universality of modernity and as such it suggests critiques of both the Western and Soviet modernities that CEE has been negotiating.

Central to the decolonial approach is the concept of ‘coloniality of power’ coined by Anibal Quijano (2000) and developed by Walter Mignolo, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, María Lugones and other members of the decolonial collective (Mignolo and Escobar, 2009). In brief, the term refers to ‘colonial situations’ in the present in which despite the eradication of colonial administrations from the capitalist world-system, cultural, politi-cal, sexual, economic and epistemic exploitation of subordinate racialised/ethnic groups by dominant groups persists. Importantly, we should talk about global coloniality, which marks today’s ex-third-world, ex-socialist and western subjects alike. Coloniality in the context of gender, as pointed out by María Lugones (2010: 747), enables us to ‘under-stand the oppressive impositions as a complex interaction of economic, racializing, and gendering systems in which every person in the colonial encounter can be found as a live, historical, fully described being’. This vision, in Lugones’ (2010: 746) terms, calls for a feminism ‘from and at the grassroots, and from and at the colonial difference, with a strong emphasis on ground, on a historicized, incarnate subjectivity’. This form of think-ing allows for specificity, sensitivity to context and not seeing difference as a split but rather as a creative space.

Tlostanova has enriched this perspective with sensitivity to the imperial complexities and self-colonisations of post-socialist space, in particular focusing on the Caucasus and Central Asia. Yet, we believe that this perspective would also help to illuminate the expe-rience of post-socialist CEE as a whole as its historical positioning in relation to the West is filtered through the competing presence of Western powers and Russia/Soviet Union and the related colonial narratives. Tlostanova’s (2010: xvii) project is decolonisation:




liberation ‘from the established paradigm and intellectual grounds, human taxonomies, and communication models, imposed by Western modernity and based on the dichotomy of the same and the other, subject and object, thus leading to othering and exclusion’.

Tlostanova stresses that Western and Soviet modernity were inherently similar, albeit with a different ideological agenda. Modernity in general privileged a temporal orienta-tion towards the future, with its faith in progress and development, resulting in the ‘colo-nization of space by time’ (Tlostanova, 2010: 21). This in turn produced a dichotomous view of progress and its invented ‘evil other’, tradition (Tlostanova, 2010: 21). If pro-gress is associated with gender equality, then all forms of tradition are invested with the burden of patriarchy in simplified narratives. It is this view of modernity, with its teleo-logical narratives that are evident also in the feminist writing that we criticise, not in order to celebrate some indigenous tradition but to alert us all to the constraining frames on our thought. We seek to highlight this modern erasure of space by time. This is in line with feminist geographer Doreen Massey’s argument that the processes of globalisation are conventionally conceived in terms of chronology rather than spatialisation: ‘the standard version of the story of modernity – as a narrative emanating from Europe – rep-resents a discursive victory of time over space. That is to say that differences that are truly spatial are interpreted as being differences in temporal development – differences in the stage of progress reached. Spatial differences are reconvened as temporal sequence’ (Massey, 1999: 31).

The complexities of post-Soviet space are reduced either to the lagging behind catch-ers up with the West (CEE members of the EU) or to those who, in Tlostanova’s wording in a recent interview, have fallen out of time and modernity (Tlostanova, 2014). This has led to the return of space, with its colonial implications. Western modernity, after all, according to Enrique Dussel (1995: 65), is ‘constituted in a dialectical relation with a non-European alterity that is its ultimate content. Modernity appears when Europe affirms itself as the “center” of a World History that it inaugurates: the “periphery” that surrounds this center is consequently part of its self-definition.’ Thus the binary pulls of space and time are crucial to the understanding of the post-socialist space in CEE, both from the perspective of the CEE periphery as well as that of the European centre. Borders are in-between spaces, spatially and culturally, and they cannot be translated into tempo-ral models and urged to merge into either modernity or tradition (Tlostanova, 2010: 194). Instead, they should be studied for their specific cultural dialogues and travels between West and non-West, not accused of ‘limping behind the so-called civilized world in the shoes that are chronically rubbing our feet sore’ (Tlostanova, 2010: 205).

According to Tlostanova (2010: 11), the decolonising process should be not just politi-cal but also include processes of knowledge production. Her call for a ‘new pluri-versal (as opposed to uni-versal) theory which would help to establish a dialogue and volatile con-nections between gender discourses of various locales’ underlines the importance of the epistemic level in the decolonial option, relevant for the question of the political effects of the near absence of the positionality of CEE within transnational feminist knowledge pro-duction (Tlostanova, 2010: 5). In the light of recent discussions on the coloniality of power, Tlostanova further suggests that rather than study and analyse existing (post)colonialist phenomena and processes while maintaining the boundary between the studied object and the studying subject (as postcolonial studies have done so far in her reading), the decolonial




approach helps ‘to take any research through the scholar into the world and deal with prob-lems, not with disciplines’ (Tlostanova, 2012: 134). This approach brings in the scholar as a situated corporeal and historical being, but also helps to create new transdisciplinary and transcultural modes of thinking. While such decolonial sensibilities that Tlostanova is talk-ing about are already emerging in the arts (cf. Koobak, 2013), it is equally important to start developing academic, theoretical language that would be capable of understanding and analysing this phenomenon. In this respect, developing ‘decolonial “communities of sense” ’ (Tlostanova, 2012: 138) is only now beginning. It is only then that we can speak about an independent feminism based on a ‘careful differentiating and empathic grasping of particu-lar values and sensibilities born in particular historical and cultural contexts of Eurasian borderlands’ (Tlostanova, 2010: 203).

Greater attention to geopolitical locatedness will contribute to making sense of the limited success transnational feminist theorising has had in escaping the so-called eternal return of universalism. Decolonial readings, rooted in a nuanced understanding of con-tradictory colonising impulses and open to transtemporal and transnational dialogue, can enrich our understanding of non-hegemonic spaces like CEE. As Allaine Cerwonka (2008: 822) has argued, theorisation from CEE can provide a necessary intervention into existing Western feminist thinking, not because of some supposedly authentic gender experience but rather because it might ‘offer analyses of phenomena specific to the region that prompt us to see complications and new dimensions of existing theoretical concepts’. In our understanding then, the decolonial option has the potential to expand feminist frames of reference in the discussion of CEE with its complex negotiation of diverse colonial presences, Soviet legacies and the neoliberal challenges of today.

Conclusion

Not only has the discussion of CEE been limited in transnational feminism, but it has also been operating with a limited number of frames. On the one hand, we have essen-tialised images of politically passive Eastern Europe ‘lagging behind’ the ‘West’ (a pro-cess reified in the metaphor of ‘transition’ favoured in neoliberal discourse). On the other hand, and perhaps even more tellingly, the ‘lag’ discourse is internalised also by CEE scholars in a complex act of self-colonisation.

Thus, CEE continues to pose an intellectual challenge, simultaneously unstable and bounded by the end of the Cold War, which was supposed to have done away with all the divisions between East and West, yet it continues to work to reify these divisions. CEE remains something of a gap in feminist studies, if not entirely a non-place or non-region, where feminist movements and scholarship are still said to be in the process of emergence, often measured against the yardstick of Western histories and genealogies. We invite a more geopolitically aware discussion of silent spaces within hegemonic discourses and a more critical interrogation of hidden normative timelines. This can be a first step towards reconfiguring the discourse of a lag that is prevalent in transnational feminist theorising as a fantasy and a by-product of unidirectional teleological progress.

CEE is not on a different temporal plane, but facing the same challenges from neolib-eral ideologies as transnational feminisms. Our focus should therefore be on co-pres-ences, interactions and interlocking understandings and practices rather than divisive




dichotomies. By thinking decolonially, as we propose, we can achieve a more egalitarian and intersectional dialogue where we learn from plurality and locatedness. This could result in feminist theorising ‘based on a careful differentiating and empathic grasping of particular values and sensibilities born in particular historical and cultural contexts’ (Tlostanova, 2008: 9). It is only then that we can construct something new, something that would create an opening of a truly new Europe that is not a binary of masters and subalterns, but a space for respect for different embedded and embodied knowledges.

Most importantly, as we have underlined throughout this article, creating a heteroge-neous feminist space for comparing notes is crucial and we believe that putting the deco-lonial option at the centre of discussions about the positionality of CEE can be considered as a nodal point in which several different trends in contemporary feminist theorising converge. The decolonial framework could be a useful thinking technology as it may make more visible current feminist commitments to rethinking the politics of location and to the unfolding of innovative kinds of knowledge-producing practices which tran-scend both the teleological progress narratives that problematically focus on the coloni-sation of time over space and in particular, the lag narrative commonly attributed to CEE within transnational feminist discussions. We hope our call for applying a decolonial framework to post-socialist contexts will give an impetus to more explorations of these and other convergences.

Funding

The research for the article was supported by the Estonian Research Council grant PUT192 and Estonian Science Foundation grant ETF8875.

Notes

1. We use the term ‘feminist studies’ as an inclusive shorthand to refer to feminist/gender/wom-en’s studies as a field of enquiry that explores the sociocultural implications of the processes of knowledge production for the construction of subjects and subjectivities, that proposes political spaces of resistance to hegemonic discourses and promotes change (Braidotti, 1994; Buikema et al., 2011; Lykke, 2010). We agree with Nina Lykke that the term ‘feminist stud-ies’ avoids some of the problems linked to both women’s studies and gender studies because it ‘does not fix a “proper” object as the two other names do’ (Lykke, 2010: 12). Like most feminist scholars, we do not wish to offer any final definition of the terms ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’, but work to create openness and facilitate productive links between different ways of ‘doing’ feminism, of feminist theorising and activism.

2. We choose to use the term ‘post-socialist’ for the Central and Eastern European countries in the former Soviet sphere of influence. We prefer it to the Cold War era term ‘Second World’ because of the latter’s latent ideology of a universal modernisation narrative and its eleva-tion of the ‘First World’ (cf. Chari and Verdery, 2009: 18). Like Grabowska, we choose to use the term ‘post-socialist’ rather than ‘post-communist’ to underline that communism was never fully achieved (Grabowska, 2012). We are aware of the important differences between the countries in the region but we need some overarching term to refer to the shared legacy of Soviet presence across the region. At the same time, post-socialist here refers only to the former socialist countries in CEE.

3. Hester Eisenstein (2005, 2010) and Nancy Fraser (2009) have provocatively suggested that mainstream US liberal feminism has also been inadvertently seduced by neoliberal corporate




capitalism and imperialism. Although the argument is based on broad generalisations (for a critique see Funk, 2012), we cannot dismiss the claim offhand. The same process has been observed in the transition period of CEE (Ghodsee, 2004; Nixon, 2001). Transnational femi-nist studies cannot overlook such possible co-optations.

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Documents

The Decolonial Challenge: Framing Post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe within Transnational Feminist Studies