Suchergebnisse

Drawn from various disciplines and a broad spectrum of research interests, these essays reflect on the challenging issues confronting women in Ukraine today. The contributors are an interdisciplinary, transnational group of scholars from gender studies, feminist theory, history, anthropology, sociology, women's studies, and literature. Among the issues they address are: the impact of migration, education, early socialization of gender roles, the role of the media in perpetuating and shaping negative stereotypes, the gendered nature of language, women and the media, literature by women, and loc

Drawn from various disciplines and a broad spectrum of research interests, these essays reflect on the challenging issues confronting women in Ukraine today. The contributors are an interdisciplinary, transnational group of scholars from gender studies, feminist theory, history, anthropology, sociology, women's studies, and literature. Among the issues they address are: the impact of migration, education, early socialization of gender roles, the role of the media in perpetuating and shaping negative stereotypes, the gendered nature of language, women and the media, literature by women, and loc

In 1991, Ukrainian independence opened an important theoretical channel for debating the status of its women. The people's collective memory of an ancient matriarchy generated a neo-matriarchal mythology which has been transformed into a delusional ideology that legitimizes female subordination, in the name of her alleged empowerment. Fieldwork in Ukraine – annual visits, including travel from one end of the country to another in official capacities, and many extended stays in Ukraine, as a scholar, researcher, educator and participant in key events, provided opportunities for exchanging views with countless people from many walks of life throughout the country. Participation in a host of programs – television 'specials' on gender, seminars, retreats, workshops and conferences, designed to raise the consciousness of women and men alike – provided an array of opportunities to observe at first hand the way that today's women construct individual identity. Extensive research in the press (many runs of daily newspapers, including Den', in Kyiv, and Vysoky Zamok in Lviv, and women's journals such as the widely read Zhinka, among others) added further insights. Television viewing, popular publications collected habitually during my numerous visits to Ukraine, copies of documents contributed by my Ukrainian friends and colleagues, outdoor advertising, posters and intimate gatherings at the homes of likeminded women, all played a part in the formation of my impressions of Ukrainian women's inferior status. In this paper I use my findings to explore the conflicting discourses on women's alleged empowerment, and the essentialist constraints on their self-realization, together with measures adopted to date on changing gender stereotypes and promoting equal rights and opportunities.

The above epigram insists on the existence of two halves of a single identity—a timeless, unalterable Lithuanian self and its complementary American half; it appeared in an editorial written in 1951 by a Lithuanian born in America. When a reader criticized this self-definition as "un-American," the author of the editorial replied: "You found it difficult to understand how I, who was born and raised in this glorious land of ours, can call myself a Lithuanian. There are many reasons.... First and foremost is the simple reason that God made me a Lithuanian." Almost 40 years later, Antanas J. Van Reenan refers to Lithuanian "universal first principles," the concept according to which Lithuania, like every other nation, is culturally distinctive and in harmony with the proposition that "God created nations as part of his divine plan" (12). This idea, inspired by German national ideologists like Herder, is the essence of an ideology of Lithuanianness that was fully consolidated in Lithuania during the first decade of the twentieth century and provided the conceptual underpinnings for what was to become by the middle of the century—as Van Reenan puts it—a Lithuanian "diaspora mentality" (xv). The term refers to the mind-frame of a people with a powerful sense of the Lithuanianness of their own and future generations, who set out to resist assimilation into mainstream America.

Having been spared the constraints imposed on intellectual discourse by the totalitarian regime of the past, young Ukrainian scholars now engage with many Western ideological theories and practices in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom and uncensored scholarship. Displacing the Soviet legacy of prescribed thought and practices, this volume's female contributors have infused their work with Western elements, although vestiges of Soviet-style ideas, research methodology, and writing linger. The result is the articulation of a "New Imaginaries" — neither Soviet nor Western — that offers a unique approach to the study of gender by presenting a portrait of Ukrainian society as seen through the eyes of a new generation of feminist scholars