FICTITIOUS UNITIES

      «Gender,» «East,» and «West»

Joan W. Scott

(Paper presented at the 4^th European Feminist Research Conference, Bologna, Italy, September 29, 2000)

In August, I received a letter from the acting head of the Program on Gender and Culture at the Central European University in Budapest.^[1]  Susan Zimmermann, an Austrian scholar, who did most of her academic work in Linz and Vienna and most of whose books and articles are written in German, was furiously defending herself against criticisms that she had taken the wrong side in a crisis at the university by agreeing to become director of the Gender Studies program.  The crisis began when the Rector of the CEU, Yehuda Elkana, fired two members of the gender program (one of whom was serving as director) in a way that violated the CEU’s own rules of governance.  (The CEU, for those of you who have not heard of it, is the university funded by George Soros’ Open Society Institute in an effort to bring democratic practices of American universities to post-communist Eastern/Central Europe. The CEU is chartered in the state of New York and is now being reviewed for accreditation by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools.)  The Rector’s clumsy handling of the firings, his attempts retroactively to appear to have acted in accord with written procedures, coupled with his evident disdain for those procedures (his vision of a university, he has written, is of a well-ordered hierarchy with himself as «philosopher-king»), led a number of scholars affiliated with the gender program to protest his actions.  The first two resignations from a search committee for distinguished senior scholars (that he had established and then tried to manipulate) were myself and the Slovenia philologist, Svetlana Slapsak.  Many others then wrote long emails to the trustees of the CEU and to Rector Elkana, urging a reconsideration of the firings and the implementation of fair procedures for appointments to the program.  The writers included professors from Western Europe and the United States, who had had some direct association with the program, as well as the heads of many of the gender studies programs in what is often referred to as ‘the region’–the countries of the former Soviet bloc.

The diversity of geographic location among the protestors and letter writers is important to keep in mind when reading Susan Zimmermann’s letter.  In it, she attributes the entire crisis at the CEU not to the «‘heavy-handed’ leadership of the Rector,» («against which,» she writes, «by the way I personally...protested several times»), but to a «power play» by «influential tenured female professors mainly in the US and a few more ‘Western’ countries» against a «young» and vulnerable (eastern) institution.  These actions are designed, she says, to hurt «the unfolding of a Program in Gender Studies.»  (Actually, they are meant to protect a program that has been in existence since 1994.)  What possible interest western feminist scholars could have in aborting a nascent program of this kind is never specified. (The specter of imperialist «globalization» is one possible suggestion; ignorance is another: «They do not know what they are doing to gender studies,» she warns ominously in italics at the end of her letter.)  The other clue she offers to our motives is attributed to our theory: «If there is something like ‘feminist mainstream postmodern essentialism’ disregarding the minimum standards of professional and political ethics, the current campaign represents such world view and action at its best/worst.»

Leaving aside the strange juxtaposition of these four elements (postmodern essentialism?  mainstream postmodernism?), as well as the ethical violations attributed to them (which reveal at best a fundamental ignorance of feminist history and philosophy), it is telling that Zimmermann pursues her attack (and erects her defense) by opposing feminists of the West to those of the East, and postmodernism (the putative theory of the West) to serious, honest (presumably empirically-based) scholarship (which it is her professed goal to establish in the East). (Early in the letter she accuses me of having referred to a document I have not seen and therefore of violating «the minimum level of academic and political correctness.») That she is a westerner, that the protagonists in the struggle–the two fired women and the rector–are ‘easterners,’ that complaints have come from West and East, are irrelevant to her.  In reaching for political terms that will be recognizable to those she wants to rally to her side (the CEU faculty who must legitimize her appointment, the Rector who wants her to legitimize his actions, certain members of the Board of Trustees,  political figures in Hungary, where a nationalist right now dominates the legislature), Zimmermann chooses clichés associated with political/regional nationalism (and also, unfortunately, with Stalinist polemics). 

In addition, she shrewdly refers to an on-going debate among feminists about misunderstandings and misperceptions of the ‘East’ by the ‘West,’ hoping thereby to win support from ‘eastern’ feminists.   Ever since 1990, when the Network of East-West Women was founded by a group of American feminists, there have been contentious encounters and collaborative efforts to explain the resistances the Americans encountered in their attempts to organize and/or work with women’s movements.  Nanette Funk’s conclusion in 1994

well summarizes the experience: «...through my research I have been learning, sometimes in painful ways, that feminism and pro-women activities embody the political, cultural and economic differences of each country.  The challenge of black feminists to the white feminist movement in the Unites States was one of the best preparations for this experience.» ^[2]  Although Funk gestures towards history when she acknowledges the inadequacy of universalist notions of ‘women’ and ‘feminism,’ she retains categorical distinctions (black/white, east/west) and the transparency of the idea of «pro-women» that are, in fact, equally ahistorical and that cover over the more complicated issues at stake in these difficult encounters.   Zimmermann’s attempt to recast the CEU crisis in stark oppositional terms similarly substitutes the simplicity of ascriptive labels for the complexities of politics.

East versus West, like most other oppositional categories, is a reductive way of reading history.  That it has a certain currency in international feminist circles does not enhance its standing; rather it suggests the inadequacy of our conceptual terminology.  Denise Riley puts it incisively when she comments on the limits of thinking about differences among feminists along divides such as East versus West.

Not that there aren’t differences between feminisms, but the fictitious unities of what is ‘western’ or ‘eastern’ obliterate, in the name of reverently acknowledging differences, any true historical differences.  ‘Eastern Europe’ bespeaks a blithe indifference to say, how variants of Stalinism or communism were or were not lived in the USSR or in Poland or East Germany or Albania or Hungary, or to what Titoism variously signified within the countries of the former Yugoslavia.  Next, this cartoon monolith of ‘Eastern Europe’ is credited with a feminism which is itself impossibly unified, exactly as is that puppet of its counterpart, ‘Western feminism.’  Yet once these imaginary entities are traded as coinage–often, dismayingly, in the name of some newly-won grasp of ‘cultural differences’ superseding a supposedly imperialist feminist hegemony–then they ensure stupefying effects of their own.  Their solemnity makes them unassailable, as they bask in their purported sensitivity.^[3]

                    *

Susan Zimmermann’s letter, with its invocations of the reductive categories of ‘East’ and ‘West,’ took no account of the fact that times have changed and that productive exploration of these differences has become increasingly possible.  That was evident at CEU in early March at a weekend workshop on «The State of the Art in Gender Studies» organized by the then-director, Miglena Nikolchina, at the behest of the Rector.  The stated goal of the workshop was to compare notes on activities across the region and to make plans for joint research in the future.  The Rector’s aim also seemed to be to display the weaknesses of CEU’s Gender Studies Program and to discredit its preoccupation with what he kept referring to as «grievances.»  His aim was adroitly redirected to constructive ends by Nikolchina, who invited the leaders of gender studies programs in the region–a group of savvy, politically experienced and theoretically acute scholar/administrators.  Nikolchina’s purpose was to showcase this «eastern» establishment to Elkana and to the «western» scholars he had invited–women (for the most part ) whom he knew personally, or who, like me, were associated with prestigious institutions that conferred high «scientific» status in his eyes.

At the workshop a broad and instructive discussion took place despite the Rector’s interruptions.  (The group listened respectfully to his repeated demands for «researchable problems» and then proceeded to demonstrate what he refused to see: that Gender Studies as practiced by these women was always already serious, rigorous scholarship however diverse its methods and theories and however informed it was by feminist concerns with equality and fairness.)  For me, the most revealing conversation wrestled with the East/West, empiricism/theory divide.  Although several speakers emphasized the international aspects of gender research and the interleaving of theoretical and methodological concerns, discussion kept returning to the question of whether feminist methods were ‘western’ and whether new methods were needed to study ‘eastern’ specificities.  Each exchange, each effort at categorization, exposed the limits of the categories.  Western methods, eastern specificities?  Did this mean that western scholarship was more academic and more universal, while eastern scholarship was more political and particular? Were eastern scholars being asked merely to provide facts to substantiate western theory? Did the cultural specificities of eastern experience require different theories and methods from those being offered by the west? Or was western theory just what was needed?  For example, could the (western) feminist exposure of the ideological nature of science offer a useful alternative to the marxian antithesis between science and ideology that had prevailed in the east?  But was that what was meant by western feminist theory?  Was this theory monolithic, unified, codified?  (For some, it was positivist sociology, the antithesis of eastern structuralist philosophy; for others, it was poststructuralist or psychoanalytic theory, the antithesis of eastern empiricism, for still others–many fewer though–it was an aspect of liberal individualism.)  Did theory operate outside of its historical, political, and cultural contexts? If not, didn’t these kinds of borrowings have to be understood historically? A Czech sociologist pointed to the injustice of the situation: eastern Europeans had to study American history to understand ‘feminist theory,’ but no similar effort was expended West to East. (Indeed the funding priorities of foundations like the OSI favor the translation of English language texts.)  A telling exchange underscored this picture of imbalance.  One of the ‘western’ scholars pointed out that there were indeed theoretical cross- cuttings in feminism as early as the 1970's; English feminists, she said, were well-schooled in Marxist theory. (Her statement made no distinction between the official theory of communist states and the oppositional theory of the British New Left).  No, no, came the reply from an ‘eastern’ philosopher.  It wasn’t marxism that informed our feminism and our resistance to communism, it was structuralism as articulated by the semioticians Mikhail Bakhtin and Iurii Lotman, who insisted on polyphony and the continuity of meaning in opposition to the enforced monotonality of totalitarianism. «We must recover the history of the repressed theoretical knowledges through which we used to think,» she offered (in a barely audible voice, uncertain about the consequences of speaking thus in this meeting: the repressed hesitating on the threshold of return.)

The call for this kind of intellectual history, on the one hand, pointed up the need to learn more about theory and the experience of women in the ‘East,’ but it also unleashed a complex set of testimonials about that history which underscored the inadequacy of the East/West opposition.  One person talked about how he and his colleagues had constituted themselves through the ‘West’ in opposition to the communist regime in their country, only to find themselves split and confused («schizophrenic» was how he put it) after the changes in the early 90's.  Identification with ‘the West’ then became the mark of a certain political and economic conformity, not the sign of resistance it once had been.  Under communism the imagined ‘West’ was clearly a fantasy, enabling the projection of utopian visions of emancipation (expressive, political, sexual, artistic, creative) needed for thinking alternatives to the totalizing ideologies imposed and enforced–differently, it is important to remember–by the institutions of different communist states.  Similarly, ‘Eastern Europe’ functioned in western imaginaries either as a completely closed society, protected by an Iron Curtain from exposure to the world beyond its boundaries, or (for some socialist-feminists) as a world in which women were less oppressed than in the West because they seemed to enjoy greater access to public life (especially paid work) and because there seemed to be (and sometimes was) an enviable degree of socialized childcare, abortion on demand, etc. For others still (children of immigrants from that part of the world) «Eastern Europe» served as a connection to a past they or their parents had lost.  Surely these imaginaries were what, at least in part, propelled «western» feminists–with little knowledge of the political and intellectual histories of the ‘East’-- to rush to the aid of their sisters in 1990, offering them a feminism they were presumed not to have had and would now need, a feminism taken to be universal.  (One of these American feminists explained her interest this way: «My grandparents were East European and Russian Jews who came to America at the beginning of the century.  My grandfather was an authoritarian, absolutist patriarch from Belgrade who cowed and silenced my grandmother and mother.  Thus [she assumes with this ‘thus’ an obvious connection, which I have to admit I don’t see and can only explain by metonymic slippage from patriarchy to communism] when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, I had an especially strong desire to hear the women of post-Communism describe what the transition meant for them.»)^[4] Imaginaries play an important role in the articulation and organization of politics, but they are often neglected in our analyses. In fact, many of the discussions about the historical specificities of Eastern Europe assume that the economy and the state are the only institutions that shape politics, leaving aside entirely the important role of the imaginary (and of fantasy) in the formation of political movements.

If ‘West’ and ‘East’ are imaginary oppositions, phantasmatic projections, the intellectual history of these entities is one of independent articulations and cross-fertilizations.  Take the question of those «repressed theoretical knowledges»–structuralist semiotics and linguistics–referred to in the workshop.  Quite independent of developments in the ‘West’, Iurii Lotman began teaching in Tartu, Estonia in 1950; in the 1960's the work of his Symposium on Signifying Systems was published.  Laura Engelstein characterizes this «insistence on the conventionality of the sign [as] a way of refusing the absolutes of Soviet ideology.»  «The diachronic view of structures as extending through time, « she continues, «permitted a reconnection with cultural traditions occluded by Stalinist dogma.»^[5]  Bakhtin wrote and taught throughout the Soviet period, using formal textual readings (instead of crude sociological categories) to investigate artistic and cultural productions.  Their students carried their work westward: to the United States in the case of historians such as Irina Reyfman, Yuri Tsivian, and Alexander Zholkovsky, who all worked with Lotman.  To France, in the case of Julia Kristeva, often referred to as a ‘French feminist theorist’ but who began her career in Bulgaria as an interpreter of Bakhtin.  Her interventions brought Bakhtin’s notions of polyphony to French structuralist debates in the mid-1960's and she coined the term «intertextuality» to lend (in her words) «dynamism to structuralism.»^[6]  Meanwhile, translations of Foucault and other structuralist and post-structuralist theorists appeared for a while in Soviet journals in the 1970's, according to Engelstein, who has tracked some of these developments. (But French philosophers were often scandalized by the way Foucault, for example, was being incorporated into ‘eastern’ oppositional philosophical discourse and political movements.)^[7] Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek attended Lacan’s seminars in Paris in the 1970's along with other Yugoslav dissidents, shaping his particular versions of Hegel and psychoanalysis in the process.  Zizek was «discovered» for the West by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who published his Sublime Object of Ideology in their Verso series.  Some of Zizek’s colleagues and students have taken up explicitly feminist questions; for example, Renate Salecl’s piece, «Why is a woman a symptom of rights?» has been read widely by western feminists.^[8]  Though they wrestle with what seems a tension between Salecl’s desire to dismantle ideology and her strict adherence to the ahistoricity of the symbolics of sexual difference (which to them seems to support a certain heterosexist ideology), they nonetheless find compelling (and useful) her critique of liberal theories that conceive of rights as individual possessions. The history of these cross-fertilizations grants far greater influence to the «East» than has previously been acknowledged.  And it complicates the story of international feminism and its theories, giving historical depth and political resonance to what has often been depicted as a multiplicity of entirely separate national, regional, or cultural women’s identities. 

In the light of this history, Zimmermann’s attempt to protect ‘eastern’ Gender Studies from a structuralism and post-structuralism that she designates as ‘western,’ actually puts her on the side of ‘feminist mainstream essentialism’–a dominant current in the West that has declared ‘postmodernism’ to be antithetical to feminism--and it pits her against at least one very powerful ‘eastern’ philosophical tradition–the linguistic/structuralist tradition associated with the defeat of many communist regimes in the region.  It is this tradition that, in effect, she accuses of a lack of ethics, and this tradition that I think she means when she says «For me, gender studies is not about any of this...»

                    *

The model of imperialist domination in which feminism is an instrument of western-inspired globalization just doesn’t work either from the point of view of theory or practice.  Neither does the idea that western elements have tainted with «postmodernism» an otherwise usable (because universal) scientific approach to the study of gender.   The story is more complicated than any of these renderings would have it. 

Some of these complications were evident at the CEU workshop in the discussions of ‘gender.’  The term was acknowledged to be a western import; indeed the difficulty of translating it into languages which had no equivalent was often mentioned.  The pressure or lure of U.S.-based foundations (Soros, Ford) had brought many Gender Studies programs into existence; their curricula had a ring of familiarity to veterans of women’s studies at North American universities.  From one perspective, the existence of Gender Studies could be taken as a sign of the ‘modernization’ of the East/Central European academy (with all the condescending ideas about underdevelopment and the need for outside assistance that notion implies).  From another perspective, commitment to the study of gender could indicate a certain global feminist unity. Gender, after all, has become such a foundational word in the feminist lexicon that, like ‘women,’ it no longer seems to need definition.  For example, at the Beijing Conference in 1995, the Vatican’s anxiety about the radical implications of the term led to a special report which–without specifying any definition at all–assured delegates that there was nothing to worry about since ‘gender’ would be employed only in its «generally accepted usage.»^[9] And in the forthcoming Critical Terms for Gender Studies, edited by Catharine Stimpson and Gilbert Herdt, ‘gender’ is, significantly, not one of the critical terms assigned a chapter.  (Chapters include «Body,» «Culture,» «Race and Ethnicity,» «Difference/s,» «Power,» «Sex, Sexuality and Sexual Classification,» and «Work.»)^[10] Coming back to the CEU episode, Susan Zimmermann’s letter appeals to (and so tries to bring into being) a unified community of gender scholars when she denounces ‘postmodernism’ as unprofessional and unethical, beyond the pale of what she takes to be the «generally accepted» practice of Gender Studies. 

At the CEU workshop ‘gender’ was never defined.  I’m not sure whether this was because a common meaning was taken for granted or because we knew how futile, given the differences among us, any attempt at definition would be.  More likely, it was because pinning down a definition would have served no purpose; we understood that meanings and uses of the term vary, even as it signals, broadly, the study of ‘social sex’–the varied and mutable ways in which societies and cultures have defined and organized the differences between the sexes.  But, since many of us also recognized that our differences lay in the way ‘social sex’ is theorized, we saw no purpose in airing those differences at a meeting aimed at defending Gender Studies before a Rector who needed to be convinced of the scientific validity of the field.   The fact that everyone did gender studies created two fictitious unities: a community of scholars joined by a common object–gender.  In fact, we were unified only by our political mission: to demonstrate to this rector that our scholarship was serious, that «researchable problems» informed our work, and that we met high levels of pedagogic and disciplinary accomplishment.

The differences among us were many and so varied that they defeated my attempts (as I listened to the conversations–a wealth of information, a confusing welter of approaches, familiar words with unfamiliar usages, unfamiliar references with familiar implications) to impose some order on the information being presented.  At one point, I tried to substitute theoretical for geographic divides. There was some justification for this since a line could be drawn between those who took gender to be an object of inquiry–‘out there,’ independent of our study of it–and those of us who took gender to be a shorthand for an analytic operation that examines the specificities of various productions of sexual difference. In the first case, sexual difference is the given, the ground on which gender systems are built; in the second case, sexual difference is the effect of historically variable discursive practices of ‘gender.’  The first approach makes much of the sex/gender distinction and focuses on ‘cultural construction,’ leaving aside the question of nature. As Donna Haraway once put it, «the concept of gender has tended to be quarantined from the infections of biological sex.»^[11]  This sharp separation ultimately reinscribes the presumption of a biologically-determined male/female opposition that the concept of gender was meant to dispute.   The second approach rejects the sex/gender, nature/culture opposition, insisting instead on their inseparability.  «If the immutable character of sex is contested,» wrote Judith Butler as she sought to trouble the waters of feminist scholarship, «perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.»^[12]  Whether in Eastern Europe or in the «West,» the research that takes gender as an established object tends to be empirical, descriptive work (histories of exemplary women; recoveries of women writers and artists; statistical demonstrations of occupational and wage discrimination; presentations of the attitudes of doctors, priests, educators and politicians towards women).  In contrast, research that asks how gender becomes an object interrogates the operations of sexual difference (the ways knowledge of sex is produced and institutionalized) usually from a poststructuralist or psychoanalytic perspective. 

But the lines between empiricists and theorists were not so easily drawn at the Gender Workshop.  There were differences on the side of  ‘theory,’ that  had to do not with ‘culture’ or national sensibilities, but with particular political positions.  Broadly characterizing some of these differences I’d say that those looking for ways to counter rightist conservative notions of the natural or God-given fact of sexual difference find themselves drawn to theories that deconstruct binary oppositions and that emphasize the indeterminacy and variety, as well as the mutability, of differences attributed to sex.  In contrast, those contending with leftist conservatisms that have taken equality to mean the obliteration of difference (usually the subsuming of women into the category of ‘man’), seek ways to make sexual difference–and the social inequalities it engenders–a central tenet of their theorizing.   Depending on particular local conditions, feminists in the different countries of eastern Europe face different constellations of these conservatisms; depending on their politics, these feminists look to different theoretical insights (or to different combinations of them) to formulate their strategies.  The result is a startling transmutation or what anthropologist Anna Tsing has referred to as «faithless translation»–a continual negotiation, an irregular, haphazard process in which terms are appropriated from one context to another and then used to do different kinds of work.^[13] 

If ‘theory’ doesn’t form a coherent category, neither does the empiricism with which I was trying to contrast it.  Here my critique of empiricism has been that assuming the already-existing status of gender reifies and so naturalizes sexual difference.  But I began to realize that if I thought about the research being done as strategic, then something different was at stake: gender was being produced as an already-existing object in order to counteract a long history of official rhetoric about both the equality (and so interchangeability) of women and men and the special needs of women as mothers.  Gender designated not just women, but a relational system between the sexes. That object had to exist if policy-makers were to address it, and its existence had to be ‘scientifically’ established not by so-called feminist ideologues (more on that in a minute), but by experts in a field.  Hence the importance of gathering comparative data about women and men in areas of life beyond wage-earning and materniity.  Assuming that gender (defined as ‘social sex’) exists, enables researchers now to document its effects more broadly and to demand change.  Scholars from Hungary to Russia collect data and produce knowledge that NGO’s need when they bring claims on behalf of women to the attention of national governments required to comply with United Nations resolutions about women’s rights.  ‘Gender’ means measuring women’s situations in comparison to men’s and correcting for imbalances and inequities.  Here a kind of practical critical sociology is employed to expose the limits of market economies (women predominate in the ranks of the unemployed) and liberal democracies (the numbers of women in elected positions has dramatically declined), as well as the persistence or reappearance of patriarchy (violence against women has increased, as has prostitution). Many of those carrying out this data collection were trained towards the end of the Soviet regime, in institutes for sociology or demography.  They continue to use their training and the methodologies they were taught, but they put new data to new uses, collecting, analyzing, and disaggregating it outside of–indeed in opposition to–government auspices.  In some countries (the Czech Republic is an example) old networks of state-sponsored women’s organizations have become the source of  information-gathering that aims to put pressure on governments.   It doesn’t seem to matter that the knowledge produced may also reify sexual difference, because the argument is that sexual difference must be acknowledged as a social fact even if natural physical differences ought not to be the ground for social distinctions.  In this context, the main goal is to bring to light the fact of differences long denied in order to insist that social policy take them into account (how and in what ways are matters of debate since there is no single, self-evident ‘pro-woman’ position among women activists and academic feminists.)

The aura of expertise conferred by the rubric ‘gender studies’ legitimizes feminist work and gives it a certain coherence, while removing the stigma of ideology.  From one angle, this is no different from those North American or Western European uses of ‘gender’ to protect academic work from the taint of feminist political polemics.  But in states where ideology meant having all the answers in advance, where women’s organizations served state-sponsored ideologies, and where feminism was equated with bourgeois ideology, the distinction serves a somewhat different purpose.  In these contexts ‘gender’ seems a neutral term and gender studies posits a social object, but no pre-formed conclusions. ‘Gender’ offers a way to articulate the non-ideological, indeed the anti-ideological nature of post-communist feminism.  Rather than foreclosing local options, as the reading of gender as a tool of western globalization would have it, the imported term opens space for the exploration of new possibilities.

In the course of the CEU workshop, I realized concretely what I already knew in theory.  ‘Gender’ has no single meaning and it serves a multitude of purposes, its significance has to be understood historically and contextually, through its uses, not apart from them.  Indeed, like the phenomenon it is designed to analyze–the historically constructed, culturally regulated, subjectively reinterpreted meanings ascribed to genital differences–‘gender’ is variously constituted in practice, in the performance of certain strategic operations. 

                    *

As such gender is best described as a site where understandings of the social relations between the sexes and of the power dynamics that constitute those relations are debated and developed, and refigured.  Perhaps that is why rector Elkana has chosen the CEU Gender Studies program as the place to hold the line for standards at his university.  Perhaps that is also why he has encountered far more resistance then he probably anticipated he would.  Elsewhere in the university, he has simply dismissed professors he considers weak (according to standards he has neither elaborated nor allowed their colleagues to define with him) and a frightened and/or ambitious faculty have fallen into line.  Last March there was a great outpouring of protest when he attempted to «reorganize» the Environmental Studies program.  In the face of that protest he retreated.  And there were all sorts of hidden deals and intrigue-ridden renegotiations after he began to remove many of the heads of departments and/or powerfully situated professors with long experience at the CEU.  But he has held stubbornly to his decision about Gender Studies, despite a lawsuit and an outpouring of international disapproval.  The question is why?

The most obvious answer–and one I think has some validity–has to do with the Rector’s self-representation.  Keeping a bunch of unruly women in line is a sure sign of masculine determination; failing to master them displays unacceptable weakness.  Interestingly, Elkana identified the weakness of the program as a lack of disciplinary rigor, even while avowing his commitment to interdisciplinarity. (The slippage is from interdisciplinary to undisciplined.) And, though he eloquently dismissed (as «bullshit») the idea that there is an antithesis between socially relevant research and serious scholarship, he also kept referring to most gender research (it was clear he had little familiarity with it) as leading only to «a list of grievances.»  (He did acknowledge that he has been convinced by some of these complaints to use the word chairwoman instead of chairman to refer to a female head of a department.)  I took the repeated references to «grievances» to be a code word for feminism and a way of underscoring the dangers to academic life of angry, badly trained women.  (Here is another of the complicated resonances of ‘gender.’  However scientific it has seemed to be, the word carries ineradicable traces of its recent associations with feminism.)  This representation lines up indiscipline and unscholarly motivation with gender studies and women on the one side, and rigor, scholarship and academic integrity with the Rector and his choices on the other.  (For these purposes Susan Zimmermann is coded masculine.)  In a doubly nuanced demonstration of what I’ve been saying about gender as a strategic performance, attacking the gender studies program became for the rector a way of consolidating his power along gendered lines.  (I’ll only mention the actual ways he behaved at the workshop to illustrate this point.  He was alternately seductive and threatening, bullying when charm didn’t work; he assumed the chairmanship as if by right, expected silence and respect when he talked, but brutally interrupted and rarely listened to others.)

I don’t think, though, that the equation of his power with masculinity is all that’s at stake for the Rector.   In fact, much of his behavior seemed to enact the very feminine disturbances he was seeking to curb.  He was arbitrary and inconsistent, relying on flamboyant assertions and terrifying outbursts to get his way.  If one looks at the sequence of events which produced the crisis, it becomes evident that not Gender Studies, but the Rector was the source of the disorder he claimed to be setting straight.  It might be concluded that rather than offering clear contrasts between masculine/feminine, men/women, and administrative power/feminist research, gender instead provides a field on which power can be signified in many flexible forms.

Also at issue, of course, is the critical relationship of feminist knowledge to established bodies of scholarship–the bodies of scholarship this man takes to be his patrimony as a «philosopher-king.»  At its best (that is, at its most critical) gender studies calls that patrimony into question, examining the ways in which disciplinary norms and conceptions of authority influence the dynamics of knowledge production.   At various points in the workshop discussion it was clear that there were different interpretations of the meaning of «the production of new knowledge.»  For the most part, Elkana understood it to be the provision of facts gathered according to standard social science procedures to answer policy-related questions: How have different countries in the region experienced «the changes» since 1989?   What factors affect differential rates of mortality or different wages for women and men?  How have socio-economic conditions influenced the efficacy of medical treatments such as the AIDS cocktail?   Others of us thought new knowledge meant asking different questions, about, say, the terms of inclusion and exclusion in the new post-communist democracies, or the re-gendering of civil society, or the ways in which sexed bodies are constituted through nationalist discourses.  These are not questions easily answered within existing disciplinary paradigms.  Indeed their answers call those paradigms into question and this has often led to the exclusion or marginalization of gender researchers.   In moving to «reorganize» Gender Studies (he never threatened, nor does he intend to abolish the program outright), I think Elkana was seeking to normalize the field, to deny its most radical potential and bring it into conformity with his notions of serious practice.  (Tellingly, and again in contradiction of the ususal gendered expectations, this philosopher of science had no use for philosophical questions, it was the feminists who kept raising them while he kept returning to practical matters.)  Since he could count on the skeptical attitudes towards gender studies of many of his faculty, he would emerge from the struggle as the defender of the highest standards of academic practice (even as he violated the standard rules of academic governance).  The practical measures he sought to implement reinforced this image.  He insisted on the inviolability of a joint appointment rule for all positions in Gender Studies, thereby guaranteeing that control of what was taught and who was hired (and of the resources attached to those positions) rested firmly in disciplinary, departmental hands.

There was yet another reason that Gender Studies became a target for the rector and that had to do with the history of the program itself.  The program was founded in 1994 by Nancy Leys Stepan, the wife of the first rector of the CEU.  Formerly a professor of the history of science at Columbia University (in New York City) and a scholar known for her writings on race and gender, Stepan organized a regional gender studies seminar that was an immediate success.  (My first contact with CEU involved giving a talk at that program.)  It energized gender studies scholarship in the region and drew a new constituency of students to the CEU (most of them women, many of them with histories of activism on behalf of women).  When the Stepans left the CEU, there was some question about whether the program would continue, but the efforts of her (American or American-based) successors managed to keep it afloat.  Still there was lots of residual resentment against the institutionalization of what had been tolerated by some powerful figures in the university only because it was a pet project of the rector’s wife; against the resources it was gaining to support increasing numbers of students; and against what some took to be a western feminist implantation in a central European university.  (Although there were many westerners teaching various business and law courses many of which were surely ‘ideological,’ committed as they were to the principles of the market economy and to liberal philosophies of law,  feminism was considered to present an altogether different kind of ideological problem.)  The appointment of Miglena Nikolchina, a Bulgarian, as director complicated the story enormously, not only because she could not easily be dismissed as a westerner (though she had gone to Canada for her PhD, she had returned to be a professor at the University of Sofia), but also because she had a different style for dealing with autocratic administrative power.  

Rather than accommodate this power, rather than work within and around it, she sought to expose its contradictions and inconsistencies as well as its inner logic, a logic at odds with the university’s professed commitment to democracy.   For Nikolchina, the (mis)application or the invention of rules to thwart faculty initiatives recalled (or perpetuated) the worst aspects of communist bureaucracies.  She expected to be able to deal directly, to criticize (and be criticized) openly, to engage in university politics on an equal footing with her colleagues.  The combination of CEU’s mission statement and the existence of a gender studies program led her to believe that «the changes» of the 1990's had been positively realized in Budapest.  What she found instead was a version of what she had known as a student and young faculty member in Sofia in the 1980's.  (In fact it was worse in some ways because at that time the university had actually been a refuge, its procedures and rules respected by state bureaucrats.)  She then drew on her experience of those years to express her outrage and opposition.  Appealing to the principles of the open society, she sought to rally other faculty to her side; furious at the hypocrisy of the administration and the cowardice of some of her colleagues, she denounced them in those terms.  All the while she worked on the program, refining its curriculum, expanding its teaching faculty and its student body, protecting its budget from threatened cuts.   In her hands, Gender Studies became a more significant presence at CEU and she became a thorn in the administration’s side. But unlike the political situation in the waning days of communist states when public denunciations of the incoherence and irrationality of supposedly rational bureaucracies drew large numbers of vociferous demonstrators, there was no such university-wide mobilization possible, no ready support (apart from some students in the program) for Nikolchina at the CEU in the year 2000.  The fear of losing the program and of retribution from the Open Society Foundation (the key, after all, to the existence of these programs and, more broadly, to all sorts of cultural activities in the region) prevented some students who otherwise might have protested from doing so. There was, of course, international support from other gender studies scholars, but this has turned out so far to have little effect on the internal dynamics of the university.

Isolated, outspoken, branded a trouble-maker by the previous rector, and in the process of strengthening a program that had long seemed problematic to disciplinary conservatives in the university, Nikolchina was the perfect target for Elkana.  He tried to turn all of her protests into issues of personality and quality, explaining that he was cleaning house (a domestic task) not engaging in politics. (The lesson of all this may be that when men such as Elkana clean house, things only get dirtier!)   In appropriating these domestic tasks, too, Elkana was, in effect, definitively ending the marriage that had initiated the Gender Studies Program in the first place.  Although relations between the subsequent rector and the head of the program had been troubled since the departure of the Stepans, no one had before sought a divorce.  Firing Nikolchina was such an action and it introduced a telling confusion into the relationship between Gender Studies and the Rector when, faced with charges that his new choice for director, Susan Zimmermann, was being illegitimately imposed on the faculty, he briefly assumed directorship of the program himself.  By this action, Elkana proclaimed consummate faith in his intellectual and administrative self-sufficiency–there would be no complementarity, no division of labor as in a marriage, in his reign.  He would function both as father and mother, leaving no doubt about which parent possessed the phallus.

What is interesting is the way in which gender studies in this context became the site not only for disputes about what counts as serious knowledge, but also for disputes about what counts as democracy.   In some ways, this is not surprising, given gender’s association with feminism and its demands for equality and the acknowledgment of difference. 

But it also calls for more extended analysis than I have time for in this essay.  It may well be that gender, with its attention to the ways in which relations between the sexes are constructed, is a key to many more forms of power than we have yet used it to analyze.  It may be, too, that at least in some parts of the world, gender studies programs can serve as a locus for critical discussions about politics.  That is why such programs are worth building and protecting–not because they serve as stations for the dissemination of prepackaged western ideas, but because–in specific and local terms--they disturb existing configurations of power and knowledge in the places where they are developed.

                    *

I’ve told the story of CEU Gender Studies at length for a number of reasons.  It seemed a good idea, first of all, to alert an international audience to some disturbing developments in Budapest.  It also seemed a cautionary tale about the ways we use categories to designate our differences.  West/ East (but also North/South and First World/Third World) have at various moments tended to obscure the ways in which history and politics refuse the simplicity of these «fictitious unities.»  Although they were introduced to counter the universalizing (and thus homogenizing) identities of ‘woman’ and ‘feminist,’ these designations have created homogeneities of their own, effacing all kinds of other differences–especially differences of history and politics–among women and feminists within the designated groups. 

In addition, the CEU story lets us reflect on the uses of gender.  At the workshop I’ve been describing in this paper, there were several calls for a more systematic, unified definition of the term.  That seemed to me futile for several reasons.  First, as the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language points out, the distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ (one of the aims of ‘gender’ after all) «is useful in principle, but it is by no means widely observed, and considerable variation in usage occurs at all levels.»14 Language can’t be controlled, even for the purposes of scientific conversation.  Second, a definition that establishes gender as a fixed object  diminishes our ability to improvise its performative functions and to use it as an analytic tool.  We ought to be asking not what gender is, but how it operates and that in two, or perhaps three ways:  The first as a way of bringing sexual difference into existence; the second as a way of defining a field of study; the third as a question (a Foucauldian question) about the relationship between the two.  How does Gender Studies produce its objects of knowledge, to what end, and with what effects?  That the answer is not simple is clear in the story of the CEU.  That the question is nonetheless worth asking is also clear.  Asked in the way I have posed it, the question gives gender and gender studies not a definition, but the possibility of a history.

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