Suchergebnisse

AbstractSexuality has long been central to ethnographic constructions of exotic difference, an index critically demarcating the borders of European Modernity and its negative and positive Others, and underpinning both extra-European colonial domination and modern biopolitical regimes of subjectivity, citizenship, and society. Representations of Eastern European sexuality, however, were also crucial to both Western and Eastern imaginings of modern "European" selves, politics, and societies, and their boundaries of belonging. Yet while recent scholarship has drawn attention to reemerging European orientalisms and sexuality's salience in postsocialist politics, particularly in relation to recent postsocialist homophobias, little scholarly attention has been paid to the significance of these histories of European sexual difference for the biopolitical character of current borders of postsocialist difference. In this article I combine postcolonial theories of sexuality, geographies of European belonging, and postsocialist studies of sexual politics to analyze popular, political, and scholarly discourses surrounding sexual politics and homophobia in Hungary. Melding historical debates about Hungarian belonging, discursive analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that dominant interpretations of these events constitute postsocialist homophobia as a particularly consequential "problem" reinscribing deeply rooted, and profoundly biopolitical, borders between Europe's East and West. These readings not only naturalize an imagined West as a space of proper sexual citizenship and tolerance, masking its persistent heteronormativity; they also render Hungary a time–space of complex, ambiguous sexual-political resistance, essentializing its inhabitants as inevitable sexual others of Western Modernity: for some failures of proper sexual citizenship; for others avatars of alternative, sexually-traditional Europeanness.

The aim of this article is to analyze how social class markers are constructed in the discourse on gated communities in a postsocialist urban context. The case of Poland is used as an example of a post-Communist country where the number of gated communities is increasing rapidly in urban areas. The material of study consists of 50 articles published in the largest national newspaper. This article argues that the discourse on gated communities is constituted by and constitutes class divisions and social class markers prevalent in the country since the fall of Communism. The "new" capitalistic system with its inherent social divisions is described as creating demands for "new" forms of housing where gates function as separators, protectors, and class identifiers. Residential differentiation is a reality in Polish society, and private space has become a symbol of exclusivity and spread throughout the country along with the popularity of gated forms of housing.

IntroductionVaruh meje, Maja Weiss' debut film, dates back to 2002 – when Slovenia was soon to join the European Union (EU), when the state was first taking up its role as EU "border guard," and when Slovenian society was reacting to the first wave of undocumented Asian migrants transiting the country. With elements of postsocialist realism and folk horror, Varuh meje was notable on its release for being the first Slovenian feature film for adults directed by a woman, and for what was then the rare presence of lesbian and bisexual themes on screen in a post-Yugoslav film. Its plot follows the protagonist Alja (Tanja Potočnik), the sexually liberated Žana (Pia Zemljič), and the sexually repressed Simona (Iva Krajnc), three students on holiday from university in Ljubljana who are going rafting near Alja's small riverside hometown. Alja has a boyfriend in Ljubljana, but her family live beside the Kolpa/Kupa River that marks Slovenia's border with Croatia, symbolically the boundary between Europe and the Balkans in Slovenian national identity discourses. The young women are warned not to cross over to the other wild and dangerous side of the border, but still end up there after losing control of their oars. They find instead that danger awaits them at the heart of their own symbolic community, in the shape of a mysterious fisherman and demagogic local politician who preaches a return to traditional values, and of the local men who sympathize with him. This man, the closing credits tell us, is the Guardian of the Frontier.[continues]

How has the field of art developed, evolved, and been sustained in Russia after socialism? This dissertation examines the challenges Russian art-world actors face in building a field of art in a society undergoing rapid and significant economic, political, and social transformation. As a result of this upheaval, Russian art since the end of the Soviet Union has had to develop and negotiate an identity with the simultaneous yet contradictory forces of a socialist history and a neoliberal present. Further, actors in the Russian art world are judged against a teleological notion of artistic progress that stems from a Western-dominated cultural hierarchy. Russia's art world grapples with both its Soviet past and its post-Soviet present in a world of fully developed fields of art. These conditions differ greatly from Bourdieu's account of the genesis of an autonomous field of art in nineteenth-century France, in which he takes for granted the conditions that made the development of an autonomous tradition of art possible, namely a cultural and political legacy particular to France. Russian art, therefore, offers a unique contemporary example of how a field of cultural production must struggle to create itself as autonomous while outside the bounds of Bourdieu's ideal field that bore Euro-American modernism in the West. I demonstrate the impact these differences have had on the development of a Russian field of art, by showing (1) how Russia's tumultuous transition from socialism to capitalism has differently shaped two generations of post-Soviet artists; (2) the difficulty of establishing a strong market and the resultant limited community of collectors; (3) the impact of a powerfully constraining state on the lives and work of artists; and (4) the significance of entering into a world in which there already exists powerful field(s) of arts centered in the West. While the development of the Russian art world has made significant and arguably rapid changes over the past two decades—such as the increase of arts education and institutions—it still faces numerous challenges, from the escalating censorship by the state to the falling number of collectors. Further, when situated within a global context of inequality, it becomes apparent that the Russian field of art remains on the periphery of the international art world, struggling for legitimacy in the eyes of foreign experts and collectors. By attending to the historical trajectory of Russian art throughout the twentieth century—taking seriously the contributions of Soviet culture and the impact of globalization on cultural production and practices on its own terms as opposed to just as "other"—I construct a genealogy of the contemporary field of postsocialist art that illuminates how Russians have come to understand the categories of "art" and "artist." Ultimately, this dissertation argues that the combination of the cultural and economic isolation experienced during the Soviet period, the current government's controlling presence, and Western capitalist economic and cultural hegemony has had detrimental effects on its understanding of itself and thus, the creation of its field of art.

"The primary purpose of this paper is to examine the dynamics of change in the value orientations of political and economic liberalism shown by members of the economic elite in Serbia during the period of postsocialist transformation. The paper's second objective is to identify specific factors determining the potential lines of differentiation in degrees of attachment that members of the elite groups held to these values when the neoliberal form of capitalist regulation moved into crisis. The theoretical-hypothetical framework of the analysis given here draws on the theory of value-normative dissonance, while the methodological approach relies on a comparison of empirical data obtained at three points in time - before the breakdown of the socialist system (1989); during the period of entrenchment of capitalist relations (2003) and at the time when neo-liberal capitalist regulation went into crisis at both global and local levels (2012)." (author's abstract)

Introduction : Karl Polanyi and the transformations of socialism and postsocialism -- Market principle, market place and the transition in Eastern Europe -- From production to property : land tenure and citizenship in rural Hungary -- A new double movement? : anthropological perspectives on property in the age of neoliberalism -- Awkward classes in rural Eurasia -- Society at the grassroots : a reactionary view -- Socialism and King Stephen's right hand -- Ethnicity in the new civil society : Lemko-Ukrainians in Poland -- Postsocialist nationalism : rediscovering the past in southeast Poland -- Polish civil society, the Greek Catholic minority, and fortress Europe -- The Visegrád condition (freedom and slavery in the neoliberal world) -- Conclusion : building social Eurasia

The internationalization of postsocialist countries brought about by the activities of multinational corporations (MNCs) has produced a growing diversity of actors capable of shaping work standards in these countries. The organizational and institutionalist literature on MNCs has concentrated only on the outcomes of such internationalization processes in terms of diffusing MNCs' organizational practices or adapting them to host-country conditions. This paper offers a theoretical and empirical scrutiny of the process through which MNCs establish and reinforce their position in host-country labor markets and societies. In particular, the focus is on how MNCs become legitimate actors in changing work standards in host-country labor markets, and how host-country actors (i.e., workers, trade unions, and the local society) become capable of shaping MNCs' organizational practices in postsocialist subsidiaries. This process is referred to as MNC embedding. Building on a qualitative case study of a Dutch MNC and its subsidiaries in Hungary and Poland, the paper theorizes and empirically documents how embedding occurs and what conditions facilitate it. It is argued that particular interaction dynamics in each MNC subsidiary studied account for the extent to which MNC embedding occurs via unilateral managerial decisions or with the involvement of local actors. Moreover, social interaction between MNCs and host-country actors facilitates institution building from below. This means that through social interaction MNCs become legitimate actors contributing to institution building in environments where broader institutional underpinnings of work practices and traditions of collective bargaining are less extensive than in continental Western Europe.

Between tradition, reform and opposition: feminist criticism in Poland. - Von der kommunistischen Gleichmacherei zur bürgerlichen Sphärentrennung? Nach 1989 wird die Geschlechterordnung in Polen zu einer Gretchenfrage. Die postsozialistische Identitätssuche zwischen Liberalisierung und Konservatismus, zwischen transnationaler Anbindung und erstarkendem Polentum bringt einen von inneren Widersprüchen geprägten feministischen Diskurs hervor. Nina Seiler zeigt anhand detailreicher Textanalysen zu Werken feministischer Polonistik der 1990er Jahre theoretische und soziopolitische Anknüpfungspunkte und Divergenzen auf. Der zunehmenden Spaltung der polnischen Gesellschaft wird mittels Konzepten von Intertextualität, Intonation und Ideologem nachgegangen.