The Geopolitics of Nordic and Russian Gender Research 1975-2005

In the tradition of Sara Ahmed and Robyn Wiegman, the authors of this exemplary volume conceive of feminist knowledge as a 'living thing', formed through contests over borders, languages and institutions. The book [...] provides an important intervention into transnational feminist epistemology and historiography in its own right. But rather than seeking to tell a singular story, the three authors conceive of their different but linked locations as sites of struggle, travel and translation; importantly too, this work of teasing out institutional and geopolitical meaning is never done, but is the very work of the field. The authors grapple particularly well with the vexed questions of why feminist epistemology matters and to whom, charting the insides and outsides of these multiple fields and the stories told about them.

Clare Hemmings, Professor of Feminist Theory, London School of Economics, United Kingdom

With its cutting edge insights and compelling analysis, this book fills a gap in the study of specific Nordic and Russian communities of women's and gender studies [...] and it takes the reader to an unconventional discussion of gender studies in a highly contested geographical arena conceptualizing gender studies as a point of departure in knowledge production and as a field of power relations.

Andrea Pet, Professor of Gender Studies at Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

The taken-for-grantedness of 'the Nordic' and the 'East/West-Divide' is critically questioned [...]. The authors examine how this blind spot has made academic feminism contribute to a re/production of exclusionary, homogenous and hegemonic understandings of these geopolitical positionings, while, paradoxically, attending carefully to other epistemological questions about situatedness and politics of location.

Nina Lykke, Professor of Gender Studies at Linkping University, Sweden

Ulrika Dahl is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor of Gender
Studies at Sdertrn University, Sweden, where she currently leads the
Baltic Sea funded research project Queer(y)ing Kinship in the Baltic Region.
She is senior editor of lambda nordica - Nordic journal of LGBTQ studies
and associate editor of European Journal of Women's Studies. Marianne Liljestrm is Professor of Gender Studies at the University of
Turku, Finland. She has published articles on Nordic and Russian/Soviet
gender history, edited and written parts of several textbooks in Finnish on
feminist theory and methodology. She is advisory board member for the
journals European Journal of Women's Studies and lambda nordica, and
member of the editorial board of NORA, Nordic Journal of Feminist and
Gender Research. Ulla Manns is Professor of Gender Studies at Sdertrn University and was
leading this research project, funded by the Baltic Sea Foundation. 2010-
2015 she was in the steering committee for Time, Memory and Representation:
A Multidisciplinary Program on Transformations of Historical Consciousness
(Riksbankens jubileumsfond). Within that program she's completing
a study on memory politics in Western 19th century feminism.

Foreword
7

ULRIKA DAHL, MARIANNE LILJESTRM & ULLA MANNS
Introduction
9

The context: Studying women's and gender research
18

On location: Previous research and the idea of studying women's and gender research
22

Authors and readers
26

A geopolitical grammar
28

Organisation of the book
30

ULLA MANNS
Re-Mapping the "1980s": Feminist Nordic Space
33

On sources and method
38

The taken-for-granted Norden
41

A feminist stance: Research and women's liberation
43

Nordic mobilisation, gender equality, and research policy
48

Nordic familiarity
52

Lesbian studies and the translation of gender
59

Conclusion: Nordicness, feminist space, and belonging
63

ULRIKA DAHL
Between Familiar Differences and American Tunes: The Geopolitical Grammar
of Nordic Gender Studies in an Age of Europeanisation
67

An anthropological approach to feminist story-telling
70

Between American tunes and European difference: (Re)defining the Nordic
75

Nordic family resemblances and the "arrival" of difference
90

Feminist research conferences: The Nordic in/and the European
104

Origins: Arriving in a changing Europe
105

NORA: Making journals, making place
111

Conclusion: Geopolitics inside out
126

MARIANNE LILJESTRM
Constructing the West/Nordic: The Rise of Gender Studies in Russia
133

The emergence of Russian gender studies
137

Gender studies teaching and training
139

The disciplinary prominence of sociology within gender studies
141

Nuances of success
142

Implementation of gender studies and Russian higher education
144

Aid from the West
146

Gender research of our own: Russian specificity
147

Evaluating the success of post-Soviet gender studies
148

Travelling and borrowing concepts: The question of the "foreign"
150

Russian feminism: Western waves or "totalitarian feminism"?
155

The global-local binary...
159

...and deconstruction of the East/West bloc-thinking
164

Conclusion: Re-thinking communication and the politics of location
168

Epilogue
175

References
181

Index
203

Authors
203