Unpacking Translation in East European Feminist Scholarship

• In Event: Geographies of Post-Socialist Belonging: Law, Race, and Gender

Abstract

With its 5 issues (and the 6th in the making), Feminist Critique: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies has made its name for oppositional feminist scholarship about East Europe. Since its emergence in 2017, it has been a platform for critical interrogations of Eurocentrism, nationalism, racism, heteronormativity and transphobia and the impact of war in East Europe. This paper reads Feminist Critique not only as a site of transnational feminist knowledge production, but also as a site for political and cultural translation and negotiation of feminist hopes and visions of liberation that are anchored in but also exceed “East Europe”. The journal orchestrates intensive dialogues between East European contexts and critical methodologies developed in and for other areas. This paper follows translocal transfers of knowledges archived in the journal and examines complex labor of situating critical approaches in East European settings. It asks: what is transnational feminist liberation anchored in East Europe? What constitutes the work that is required to form a horizon of liberation that exceeds one location or area?

Author

• Vira Sachenko, U of Potsdam (Germany)