November 2024 – Gender and Transformation in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia Workshop

Traveling Dreamwork: Black Feminist Epistemologies and Anticolonial Resistance in the Post-Soviet “Periphery”

Russia’s war against Ukraine has provoked recent, and somewhat contentious, dialogue around the question of race, whiteness, and colonialism in Eastern Europe. As race, gender, and sexuality have been mobilized in media discussions of the war, there has been an absence of nuance regarding the instability of these categories. Frequently taken for granted is the extent to which these identity categories form through political, social, and ideological conditions, reflecting and refracting the contexts through which they emerge. This conversation has become even more contentious given Israel’s brutal attacks on Gaza, wherein many leftist activist spaces have excluded the Ukrainian case from anticolonial resistance movements.

Such conceptualizations of race, gender, and sexuality quickly become monolithized in a Western political imagination, as is often the case with colonialist hegemonies. In my attempt to reckon with these urgent questions, I look to Audre Lorde’s 1976 “Notes from a Trip to Russia” as well as the USSR’s involvement in the “Free Angela Davis” movement (1971-72) as starting points to consider the translational, transmittable, and collaborative possibilities of Black feminist epistemologies and anticolonial and queer feminist movements in the peripheral contexts of the former Soviet Union—in Ukraine specifically, but also Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Georgia.

Dr. Sandra Joy Russell is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Trained in Comparative Literature and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, her work explores the material and cultural expressions of gender, sexuality, and race in Ukraine, with a focus on the biopolitical entanglements of state and nation-building projects, as well as on contemporary queer, feminist, and anticolonial solidarities in the region.

Dr. Russell’s latest chapter, “‘Are These Guys Gay or Merely from Moscow?’: Homonationalism and Martyrology in Post-Soviet Ukrainian Literature” was published in the edited collection Queer Transnationalities in March 2023. Her forthcoming article, “‘She’s Our Fathers’ Daughter’: Angela Davis, Black American Subjectivity, and the Soviet Imaginary,” will be published in American Communist History next year. In addition to her research and teaching, she is also the Associate Editor of Ukraïnica: Ukraine’s Primary Database—an online catalogue of English Translations of Ukrainian Literature and Film supported by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

To register for the workshop and to receive the paper, use this link

In-person: CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York room 5203, Ralph Bunche Institute

Questions? Mara Lazda (mara.lazda@bcc.cuny.edu)

Anti-Gender Politics in Contemporary Poland and Beyond

with Professor Elżbieta Korolczuk

Södertörn University & American Studies Center, Warsaw University

Tuesday, November 19, 2024

11am to 12:15pm

Please join us for a special session of the Gender & Transformation workshop, sponsored by

Brooklyn College, Gender & Women’s Studies Program series, Feminist Futures: Studying Eastern Europe.

On Zoom, Registration Required, Here

In recent years patriarchal gender norms and ideologies have become an integral part of the right-wing populist parties programs. Right-wing leaders, including Jarosław Kaczyński, Victor Orban and Giorgia Melloni have invested in creating their image as defenders of traditional family and the nation against the excesses of what they call “gender ideology.” Such a stance have helped them to gain and sustain public support: in a 2019 opinion poll researchers asked about the biggest threats for Poland in the 21st century, and the majority of young men and older people declared that their biggest fear is the threat of the “gender ideology and LGBT movement.” In the Polish context, ﬁghting against “gender ideology” has become a central objective of the right-wing coalition which came to power in2016. Anti-gender campaigns in the country have involved eﬀorts to impose a total ban on abortion, assaults on LGBTQ rights, the demonization of ethnic minorities, and interventions in education and knowledge production.

Warszawa 15.07.2021 r. Agnieszka Graff i Elzbieta Korolczuk. fot.Krzysztof Zuczkowski

Elżbieta Korolczuk is an Associate professor in sociology, working at Södertörn University in Stockholm and at the American Studies Center, Warsaw University. Her research interests involve social movements, civil society and gender. She is currently engaged in a projectfunded by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies, which focuses on grassroots activism in the context of multiple crises in Central and Eastern Europe and Sweden (SUSTAIN ACTION), and studies feminist responses to anti-gender and anti-democratic forces in Horizon Europe project (CCINDLE). Her most recent publications include a co-authored volume co-edited Women’s Rebellion. Black Protests and Women’s Strikes, published by European Solidarity Centre in 2019 (with Beata Kowalska, Jennifer Ramme and Claudia Snochowska- Gonzalez) and a monograph co-authored with Agnieszka Graﬀ Anti-gender Politics in the Populist Moment (Routledge 2021). Korolczuk is also longtime women’s and human rights activist and a commentator.

Sponsored also by Brooklyn College’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences; Departments of Anthropology, History, Judaic Studies, Modern Languages and Literatures, Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology; and the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities, Brooklyn Phi Beta Kappa Chapter, the Women’s Center, and the LGBTQ+ Resource Center

Sandra Russell (Mt. Holyoke College)

Traveling Dreamwork: Black Feminist Epistemologies and Anticolonial Resistance in the Post-Soviet “Periphery”