Politics of resignification
Central and eastern European perspectives on language and gender
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.23885Keywords:
‘gender ideology’, antigenderism, postsocialist societies, Slavic-speaking societiesAbstract
Societies of central and eastern Europe are increasingly described as the hub of broader ‘antigender’ mobilisations, which has made them a locus of interest in political science and gender studies, yet they curiously remain among the least represented in gender and language scholarship to date. Recent developments in the region tap into some urgent foci for the sociolinguistic study of gender and sexuality, encompassing not only growing frames of right-wing nationalism and antigenderism, but also burgeoning forms of feminist and queer resistance, whose intricacies and paradoxes complicate dominant perspectives in the field. Following a brief overview of the region's developments and contributions to the field, the present article uses this backdrop for an outline of several linguistic semiotic processes pertinent for tracing the dynamics of ‘gender ideology’ in discourse. More broadly, based on the complexities observed, the article emphasises the value of insights from postsocialist societies for rethinking the possibilities of true gender equality, within the wider struggles against the exploitation, marginalisation and dehumanisation pervasive in our current social reality.
O drustvima centralne i istocne Evrope cesto se govori kao o zaristu 'antirodnih' mobilizacija, zbog cega privlace sve vise interesovanja u oblasti politickih nauka i rodnih studija, te iznenaduje da ova drustva spadaju medu najslabije zastupljene u oblasti jezika i roda. Skorasnja dogadanja u ovom regionu ukazuju na vazna pitanja za sociolingvisticko izucavanje roda i seksualnosti, unutar danas rasprostranjenih okvira desnicarskog nacionalizma i anti-rodnih pokreta, ali i novih oblika feministickog i kvir otpora, cije nijanse i paradoksi komplikuju neke ustaljene perspektive u ovoj naucnoj oblasti. Nakon kratkog pregleda postojecih tendencija u izucavanjima jezika i roda u regionu, te teorijske diskusije o lingvistickim semiotickim procesima koji su u osnovi dinamika rodnih ideologija u javnom diskursu, u radu se istice znacaj nalaza iz postsocijalistickih drustava za promisljanje mogucnosti stvarne rodne emancipacije u sklopu sirih borbi protiv eksploatacije, marginalizacije i dehumanizacije kakve odlikuju nasu sadasnju drustvenu realnost.
References
Arsenijevic, Boban (2018) The language of Dorian Gray: why the social and cultural treatment of genders cannot be improved by acting on their reflections in language. BELLS 10(1): 283-298. https://doi.org/10.18485/bells.2018.10.13
Bjelakovic, Andrej (2018) Whither variationist sociolinguistics in Serbia? Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies 10(1): 193-227. https://doi.org/10.18485/bells.2018.10.10
Bogetic, Ksenija (2013) Normal straight gays: lexical collocations and ideologies of masculinity in personal ads of Serbian gay teenagers. Gender and Language 7(3): 333-367. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v7i3.333
Borba, Rodrigo (2022) Enregistering 'gender ideology': the emergence and circulation of a transnational anti-gender language. Journal of Language and Sexuality 11(1): 57-79. https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.21003.bor
Borba, Rodrigo, Hall, Kira and Hiramoto, Mie (2020) Feminist refusal meets enmity. Gender and Language 14(1): 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.40883
Bratic, Vesna and Vukovic, Milica (2017) Commodification of women through conceptual metaphors: the metaphor woman as a car in the western Balkans. Gender and Language 11(1): 51-76. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.22009
Cmejrkova, Svetla (1995) Zena v jazyce [The woman in language]. Slovo a slovesnost 56(1): 43-55.
Corredor, Elizabeth (2019) Unpacking 'gender ideology' and the global right's antigender countermovement. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 44(3): 613-638. https://doi.org/10.1086/701171
Cvetincanin Knezevic, Hristina (2018) Zensko lice desnice - studija slucaja Srpskog
pokreta Dveri [A female face of the right - a case study of the Serbian movement Dveri]. Annual Journal of the Faculty of Political Science 20: 145-161.
Darakchi, Shaban (2019) 'The Western feminists want to make us gay': nationalism, heteronormativity, and violence against women in Bulgaria in times of 'anti-gender campaigns'. Sexuality and Culture 23(4): 1208-1229. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-019-09611-9
Devic, Ana (2021) Paradoxes of gender politics: nationalism, patriarchy and the hijacked feminism of the New Right in Serbia. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 27(2): 226-245. https://doi.org/10.1080/13537113.2021.1915015
Gal, Susan (2021) Gender and the discursive authority of far right politics. Gender and Language 15(1): 96-103. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.19526
Ghodsee, Kristen (2004) Feminism-by-design: emerging capitalisms, cultural feminism, and women's nongovernmental organizations in postsocialist Eastern Europe. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29(3): 727-753. https://doi.org/10.1086/380631
Graff, Agnieszka and Korolczuk, Elzbieta (2021) Anti-gender Politics in the Populist Moment. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003133520
Grzebalska, Weronika, Kovats, Eszter and Peto, Andrea (2017) Gender as symbolic glue: how 'gender' became an umbrella term for the rejection of the (neo)liberal order. HAL. Retrieved from https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03232926/document
Gwiazda, Anna (2021) Right-wing populism and feminist politics: the case of Law and Justice in Poland. International Political Science Review 42(5): 580-595. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512120948917
Hausenblas, Karel (1950) Poverenkyne a stachanovka [Trustee and housekeeper]. Nase rec 34(7-8): 159-171.
Hruskova, Zdenka (1970) Hosteska [Hostess]. Nase rec 53(3): 188-190.
Jalusic, Vlasta (2004) Gender and victimization of the nation as pre-and postwar identity discourse. In Ruth Seifert (ed) Gender, Identitat und kriegerischer Konflikt; Das Beispiel des ehemaligen Jugoslawien [Gender, Identity and Conflict: The Example of Former Yugoslavia] 40-67. Munster, Germany: LIT.
Jusova, Iveta and Siklova, Jirina (eds) (2016) Czech Feminisms: Perspectives on Gender in East Central Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt2005w2f
Kolek, Vit and Valdrova, Jana (2020) Czech gender linguistics: topics, attitudes, perspectives. Slovenscina 2.0: empirical, applied and interdisciplinary research 8(1): 35-65. https://doi.org/10.4312/slo2.0.2020.1.35-65
Kovacova, Gabriela Dudekova (2019) The east side story of gender and feminism: the Hungarian and Czech cases. Aspasia 13(1): 182-188. https://doi.org/10.3167/asp.2019.130117
Kowalewski, Maciej (2021) Street protests in times of COVID-19: adjusting tactics and marching 'as usual'. Social Movement Studies 20(6): 758-765. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2020.1843014
Kubisa, Julia and Wojnicka, Katarzyna (2018) Feminist movements in central and eastern Europe. Praktyka Teoretyczna 30(4): 7-14. https://doi.org/10.14746/prt.2018.4.0
Kuhar, Roman and Paternotte, David (eds) (2017) Anti-gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Kurowicka, Anna and Przybylo, Ela (2020) Polish asexualities: Catholic religiosity and asexual online activisms in Poland. In Radzhana Buyantueva and Maryna Shevtsova (eds) LGBTQ+ Activism in Central and Eastern Europe 289-311. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20401-3_12
Kuznetsova, Julia (2015) Are verbs politically correct?: A corpus study of gender in Russian verbs. Gender and Language 9(3): 391-434. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v9i3.16650
Laclau, Ernesto (2005) On Populist Reason. London: Verso.
Larios, Pablo and Sielewicz, Natalia (2020) Artists and art workers challenge Poland's abortion ban. CIMAM. Retrieved from https://cimam.org/news-archive/artists-and-art-workers-challenge-polands-abortion-ban/
Mostov, Julie (1995) 'OUR WOMENS'/'THEIR WOMENS' symbolic boundaries, territorial markers, and violence in the Balkans. Peace and Change 20(4): 515-529. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0130.1995.tb00250.x
Pavlidou, Theodossia-Soula (ed) (2015) Special Issue: Gender and the Greek language. Gender and Language 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v9i1.26938
Pershai, Alexander (2005) Language in woman's place: the gender and language research in post-Soviet countries. In Ozen Odag and Alexander Pershai (eds) Negotiating Space for Gender Studies: Frameworks and Applications 33-46. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Peto, Andrea (forthcoming). Rhetoric of sexism in illiberal Hungary. In Ksenija Bogetic (ed) Gender, Language and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rajilic, Simone (2017) Is Serbian becoming Croatian? Nationalist counter-reactions to feminist linguistics in Serbia. Gender and Language 11(2): 204-226. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.25641
Scheller Boltz, Dennis (2019) Language Policies in the Light of Anti-Discrimination and Political Correctness: Tendencies and Changes in the Slavonic Languages. Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sonderband 84. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. https://doi.org/10.3726/b17926
Shevtsova, Maryna (2020) Fighting 'Gayropa': Europeanization and instrumentalization of LGBTI rights in Ukrainian public debate. Problems of Post-Communism 67(6): 500-510. https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2020.1716807
Vervaet, Stijn (2019) 'Let's work on our Serbian!': Standard language ideology, metaphors, and discourses about Serbian national identity in the newspaper Politika in 2015. In Ljiljana Saric and Mateusz-Milan Stanojevic (eds) Metaphor, Nation and Discourse 101-126. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.82.05ver
Vince, Zlatko (1955) Drugarica direktor, gospoda profesor ili drugarica direktorica, gospoda profesorica? [Comradef director, madam professor, or comrade directorf, madam professorf?] Jezik 2(4): 113-118.
Zottola, Angela and Borba, Rodrigo (2022) 'Gender ideology' and the discursive infrastructure of a transnational conspiracy theory. In Massilimiano Demata, Virginia Zorzi and Angela Zottola (eds) Discourses of and about Conspiracy Theories 465-488. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Zuk, Piotr and Zuk, Pawel (2020) 'Murderers of the unborn' and 'sexual degenerates': analysis of the 'anti-gender' discourse of the Catholic Church and the nationalist right in Poland. Critical Discourse Studies 17(5): 566-588. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2019.1676808
