This call for papers seeks contributors for the eighth issue of the scientific journal History of Communism in Europe, no. 8/2017: The Other Half of Communism: Women’s Outlook on the gendered histories of European communisms. This issue looks to include the most recent scholarship on women and their intricate relations with the Communist parties in Europe, during the XX century. While including the valuable scholarship on “exceptional” personalities such as Alexandra Kollontai, Inessa Armand or Dolores Ibarruri, this issue aims to explore the voices of women that by political choice or simply historical tournaments found themselves as both objects and subjects of the Communist parties. The political evolution of Europe through the century, the existence of USSR and the national branches affiliated (some of them: outlawed by the authorities) to the Third Communist International, and later of an Eastern Bloc, determined completely different experiences, forms of activism and sociability. This issue of History of Communism in Europe aims to follow the relation between Communism and women before and after the Second World War, on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
Contributions may focus on one country or may have a broader/transnational comparative scope, but all proposals should deal with how women negotiated their relation with the Communist parties, reacted to politics and state interests and understood to challenge these policies, rather than just embracing an allegedly passive attitude, as the Cold War studies used to depict it. We are particularly interested in covering the entire time frame specific to the evolution of Communist parties in Europe and the region under consideration. We strongly encourage contributions that cut across traditional periodization, deconstruct state-centric narratives, and question well established lieux communs, such as the impenetrability of the Iron Curtain, or the strictly decorative role of the Women International Democratic Federation (WIDF) – the international Communist women movement.
We welcome contributions from different fields of research: history, political science, philosophy, sociology, gender studies or any other related areas of interest, addressed from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Topics may address (but are not limited to) the following aspects:
- Communist ideology and women in society – practice and discourse
- Collective and/or individual biographies
- State intrusion and the body politics
- Empowerment and disempowerment
- Women organizations – national and international: programs, attributions, activities, relations between the organizations and/or between the organizations and the states;
- Labor, new jobs, women in industry; women in Academia, women in Politics etc.
- Dissent and/or collaboration in totalitarian regimes of the XX century Europe;
- State feminism
- Socialist feminists
- Women in the opposition movements: partisans and anti-communist resistance
- European Communist women organizations and the Global South
- Women and Eurocommunism
Contributors are kindly asked to write abstracts (English or French) that do not exceed 500 words.
Deadline: 1st of March 2017.
You may submit your proposals at: hce8@iiccmer.ro, dalia.bathory@gmail.com.
Selected authors will be notified by the 10th of March 2017.
The deadline for the final draft of the paper is the 15th of June 2017.
For more information, please visit: https://www.iiccr.ro/history-communism-europe-no-8-2017-half-communism-womens-outlook/