Thinking Political Participation between Feminism and Socialist Emancipation

• In Event: Women's Emancipation in Politics and State Socialism in Central and East Europe

Abstract

Political concepts such as democracy, participation, even politics itself have historically been at the core in the two often not so distinct languages on women’s rights between radical and liberal feminism and socialist women’s emancipation. In my talk, I will focus on the changes in the meaning of the core concepts of democracy, participation, and politics in the writings of women intellectuals between the 1970s and the early 1990s in Hungary, Yugoslavia, and the GDR. In East Central Europe, these three decades provided a constantly shifting political, as well as socio-economic context in which women were looking for possibilities to rethink what politics means for them. I will zoom in onto the ways the concepts of democracy, participation, and politics were entangled, explicitly and implicitly, with the concept and the idea of liberation within and beyond the framework of the Anglo-American feminist revival of the term liberation.

Author

• Zsófia Lóránd, U of Vienna (Austria)