Sisterhood put to the test: practicing feminist internationalism in the wake of the Cold War

• Published in: Critique internationale (Paris. 1998) 2015-01, Vol.66 (66), p.85-101
• Main Author: Cirstocea, Ioana
• Format: Article
• Language: fre
• Subjects: Cold War; Communist parties; East and West; Eastern Europe; Females; Feminism; Identification; Ideology; Internationalism; Liberalization; Mobilization; Networks; Post-Cold War; Post-communist societies; Sex
• ISSN: 1290-7839
• DOI: 10.3917/crii.066.0085

The present article draws upon survey interviews and unclassified archives to examine the establishment of the Network of East-West Women in the early 1990s, a transatlantic network that provided the driving force for the emergence of gender expertise in the ex-socialist space. The founders' trajectories are examined in terms of their subjective processes of identification - first, with women's liberation movements in various national frameworks, then with global feminism and, finally, with processes of liberalization in ex-socialist countries. The NEWW's creation and the strategies it adopted reflected a change in the scale of action and a shift in the activist engagement of earlier decades. Even as it made use of transatlantic activities and became involved in new fields of political action, the network contributed to reproducing the binary ideological distinction between 'East' and 'West'. In this way, it offered a resource for collective mobilization, tools for politicization and a context for affirming 'East-European women' as a non-hegemonic actor within international feminism. Reproduced by permission of Bibliothèque de Sciences Po