contributors

Articles by Dominika V. Polanska and Grzegorz Piotrowski

1. The butterfly effect in history-making Conservative subjectivities of women in the anti-communist discourse in Slovakia

   The oral history archive of the non-profit organization Nenápadní hrdinovia (The Inconspicous Heroes) is considered as an example of a wider trend in Slovakia to exploit women’s memories for the purposes of conservative or nationalist interpretations of history, placing women in the traditional roles and discourses of victims, auxiliaries, and self-sacrifice. Using the concrete oral history project as a vehicle and a case study for the argument, the article contributes to the understanding of the current discursive landscape of memory of state socialism and of gender in Slovakia.

2. Female terrorists: political or just mad? Conservative narratives in the historiography of early 20th century female terrorism in Russia

   This article discusses the main narratives employed by conservatives at the beginning of the 20th century to explain the political violence committed by women, and it shows how these narratives have been employed in the scholarly analysis of the topic. The article provides an answer to the question why progovernmental conservative views on the female terrorists and terrorism in prerevolutionary Russia have never been influential in the historiography.

3. Experiences of women at war Servicewomen during WWII and in the Ukrainian armed forces in the conflict in Donbas

   This paper examines women’s contribution to war and the perceptions of that contribution by comparing experiences of women in the Red Army during the Second World War and in the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the conflict in the Donbas region. Here it is argued that in both cases structural gender discrimination was ingrained in the military, which accepted women’s contribution to war in times of need, but treated that contribution as subsidiary, thereby distorting men’s and women’s experiences of warfare and facilitating the instrumentalized militarization of women.

4. Beasts, demons, and cold bitches Memories of communist women in contemporary Poland

   Agnieszka Mrozik analyzes the portrayals of women communists in the Stalinist period in Poland, produced in the framework of nationalist history during the illiberal turn. She argues that biographies of women dignitaries served the broader political function of delivering a cautionary tale against “excessive” liberation of women, so that female communists were often presented as beasts and demons rather than political agents.

5. Between gender blindness and nationalist herstory The history of Polish women in WWII as the site of an anti-modernist revolution

   This paper discusses the current “herstorical turn” in professional and popular historiography and memory of WWII in Poland: a growing interest in women and the distinctiveness of their wartime experiences. Focusing on one dominant strand of this “herstorical turn” – nationalist herstory – the article reflects on the ways in which women’s history has become one of the platforms a broader illiberal political shift that is currently ongoing in Central Europe.

6. Roots of illiberal memory politics. Remembering women in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution

   In 2016, commemorations of the 60th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution brought new conflicts in memory politics. This article analyzes the reasons for women’s absence from the historiography of the 1956 Revolution and discusses how the polypore state is using the populist turn to introduce hegemonic narratives and to include women in the narrative of “national feminism”.

7. In the Russian Imperial Consciousness. Early Photography and Railroad The Poetics of the Chinese Eastern Railroad

   This paper is devoted to the semantics of the visual images of the Chinese-Eastern Railroad (KVGD)1 and the “Oriental Other” in the Russian public consciousness of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Here it is that the construction of the KVGD was intended to be a symbol of the technological progress and spiritual strength of the Russian Empire in the Russian mass consciousness.

8. War and other worries of the people views on Ukraine from Ukraine

   The article describes Ukrainian views on the war in the eastern region of the country and other worries of the people as well as Ukrainian-Russian relations and the views on the EU. The empirical material is from opinion polls carried out by the Kyiv International Institute for Sociology in 2014–2017. The conflict in the east is the main concern of the population.

9. Introduction. Writing women’s history in times of illiberal revisionism

   As the articles in this issue demonstrate, the revisionist strand of nationalist herstory has certainly made some women visible in narratives about historical events, but it is also highly problematic as it often reproduces traditionalist notions of femininity, masculinity and ideas about women’s “proper” place in history and society.

10. ”Is it the swan song of patriarchy, or the beginning of a new ice age?” Interview with Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk

    Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk in an interview about the phenomenon of anti-genderism: a topic they written together on and both try to understand as it is spreading in Poland but also widely elsewhere

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