Feminist Interventions:
Due to differing insti-
Central and Eastern
Europe
JUDIT TIMÁR
Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Hungarian
Academy of Sciences, Hungary;
JUDIT TIMÁR
Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary
Feminist perspectives have enriched urban
and regional studies in Central and Eastern
Europe (CEE) in terms of both the focus
and the methodology of research by gener-
ating new discourses and knowledge. They
help understand how gender and urban or
regional construct each other, an issue hardly
addressed in this region before the social
and political changeover in 1989 and 1990.
Although the number of researchers deal-
ing with the above issue is only increasing
very slowly, the impact of their research is
promising as it opens up new possibilities
for CEE urban and regional studies as a
transdisciplinary field to gain ground: it
facilitates cooperation between geography,
sociology, cultural anthropology, and urban
and regional planning, and so on. Further-
more, their activity also leads to a new forum
for international dialogues.
The issue of transition or postsocialism
seems to have held an appeal for a rela-
tively large number of “Western” researchers.
However, what follows is an insight into
knowledge production at institutions in
CEE and the feminist interventions of those
participating in that production rather than
the work carried out by the abovementioned
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies. Edited by Anthony Orum.
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118568446.eurs0097
“Western” researchers.
tutional traditions and practices, despite
shared areas and places of research, Western
studies diverge from their CEE counterparts
in a number of respects. Typically, they adopt
different spatial concepts, social theories,
and methods (Timár and G. Fekete 2010).
Furthermore, discussions organized after
the political changeover suggest that even
feminism is different in CEE and the “West.”
Discourses on feminism also reflect uneven
development, which leads to Western hege-
mony. Partly in connection with this, feminist
urban and regional studies in CEE countries
borrow or adopt mainly Western feminist
theories, a trend also encouraged by joint
international projects. Nevertheless, there are
studies revealing more balanced cooperation.
Therefore, in addition to the research con-
ducted in the region, joint studies have also
been included in the overview below.
Traditional, cultural, and linguistic diver-
sity notwithstanding, only studies in English
and those at least the summary of which is in
English are dealt with in the overview. Net-
works of CEE researchers conducting urban
and regional, as well as gender studies, and
informal social networks helped identify the
publications to be included in the overview;
moreover, they also provided information on
further studies in local languages. Even so,
less than three dozen authors have been iden-
tified with at least one study that forms a link
between gender and urban/regional issues.
They are from seven countries: Poland, the
Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Roma-
nia, Bulgaria, and Estonia. Commonwealth
of Independent States (CIS) countries were
not researched.
2 F E MI N I ST I N T E RVE N T ION S : C E N TRA L AND EA STERN EUROPE
SHARED PAST: STATE SOCIALISM AS A
BARRIER TO THE EVOLVEMENT
OF FEMINIST URBAN AND REGIONAL
STUDIES
A traditional chronological analysis of
feminist intervention in CEE urban and
regional studies could contribute to the
spread of progress narratives and “lagging
behind the West”-type discourses criticized
widely (see Koobak and Marling 2014). Using
a framework like this could make identifying
particular historical and cultural contexts and
values difficult. Despite regional diversity one
shared characteristic should be highlighted
in retrospect. There were no feminist urban
and regional studies in the region in the era
of state socialism.
Of the reasons for the absence of such stud-
ies, three should be highlighted:
First, despite achievements in female employ-
ment, the improvement of women’s chances in
education and the establishment of a childcare
system, one-party systems never fully delivered
on their promise regarding equal rights for
women. Although existing problems including
male and female inequalities posed a real chal-
lenge to feminist social criticism, totalitarian
systems did not tolerate such criticism. …
Second, no feminist movement which would
have been able to inspire research evolved in the
era of the one-party system. The likely underly-
ing reasons include the presence of a totalitarian
regime, a public culture which suppressed
the issue of gender inequality and the lack of
recognition of collective wrongs. … Negative
social attitudes towards feminism as a political
movement only made things worse. … Third,
restrictions on the free movement of persons and
technical literature between the “east” and the
“west” slowed down the “infiltration” of western
social theories, or made it difficult during state
socialism. (Timár and G. Fekete 2010, 777–778)
Naturally, the fall of state socialism could not
bring about immediate changes in social atti-
tudes. The prevailing competition between
individual universities within the same
country hinders the evolvement of networks
of researchers, and the prevailing economic
and geopolitical situation renders the inter-
national flow and availability of knowledge
unequal. Sociospatial polarization, deepened
by the evolvement of market economies,
made the relevance of feminist approaches
to the research of spatial processes unmis-
takable. Democratization, however, made
way for the recognition of various identities
including gender identities, and the uninhib-
ited adoption by researchers of various social
theories.
With most political, social, and ideo-
logical restrictions gone, gender studies
as a discipline has come into existence in
nearly every postsocialist country in Europe,
although at a differing rate and level of
legitimation. However, geographers from
countries where researchers of sociology,
anthropology, ethnography, history, and so
on have impressive track records are not
engaged in conducting gender strudies. Fem-
inist geography seems to be taking a long
time to become widespread in CEE. Such
imbalance may hinder the increasing adop-
tion of feminist perspectives in urban and
regional studies seriously. Geographers play
a dominant role in this type of research; as
a result, the gendering of the field is rather
slow. Furthermore, due, among other things,
to positivism in mainstream geographies,
their rejection of progressive social theories,
and their traditional concepts of space, there
has been no spectacular spatial turn in peer
disciplines. Accordingly, spatializing gender
is only gaining ground in those disciplines at
a slow pace.
MAKING GENDER VISIBLE:
PRESENTING AND UNDERSTANDING
POSTSOCIALIST CHANGES
Mapping gendered space was a typical means
of introducing urban and regional studies
 FE MI N I ST I NT ERVENT ION S: C ENT RAL AND EA STERN EUROPE
with a gender focus in a number of countries.
It was not only women who needed to be
made “visible” in CEE because, in the Stal-
inist era in particular, spatial phenomena
and processes were analyzed fundamen-
tally for the purposes of economy. A few
demographic analyses aside, studies only
mentioned a genderless labor force in pass-
ing, if at all. Against that background, the
processing of statistical data and surveys on
men and women was a breath of fresh air.
Regional differences and inequalities as well
as urban–rural dichotomies were explored by
means of quantitative methods and mainly at
a national scale. Although those analyses only
added gender to mainstream regional studies
and were mostly descriptive in nature, they
supplied important information needed for
investigating the profound socioeconomic
changes witnessed in the 1990s.
Those studies focused on gender inequality
and would use the “losers versus winners”
narratives. Criticism voiced by those cul-
tivating social sciences was leveled against
this kind of preoccupation with dichotomies.
However, it also proved useful in urban and
regional studies. It helped to identify dif-
ferences and inequalities (in terms of class,
education, age, and ethnic identity) between
women and women, and men and men,
from the very beginning of gender research.
Furthermore, it shed light on the importance
of the temporal dimension in addition to
the spatial one. The social status (and, to
a lesser degree, the gender roles) of men
and women was studied through comparing
the two genders both with each other and
against their own past in the era of socialism.
Understanding postsocialist changes was the
most important issue. As this issue is losing in
importance, so mapping gender in urban and
regional context (or mapping urban–rural
and regional differences and inequalities from
a gender perspective) is looking for new direc-
tions to follow. International comparisons
3
have come to the fore, where channeling of
CEE characteristics into European knowledge
has been able to generate novel work only in
part. Developing quantitative methods is an
equally important issue. For instance, Gabiam
and Pitoňák’s (2014) quantitative study on the
distribution patterns of gay businesses and
places in the largest European cities focuses
mainly on a national and macroregional
analytical perspective. Tudora, Banica, and
Istrate (2015) aim at the adjustment of an
indicator for gender disparity in the context
of Balkan countries.
Focusing mainly on women, analyses of
new social roles that evolved in the post-
socialist era were another common type of
“early” research with a gender perspective.
Of these, roles and positions like those of
entrepreneurs, executives, the unemployed,
politically active persons, and public figures
(and the manner in which they were com-
bined with traditional female roles like
motherhood) were given a particularly sharp
focus. Urban areas, including small towns
with a special and transparent community or
regions with a new geopolitical and economic
status along the border, served as a scene for
those studies. More recent research, limited
for the time being mostly to rural space, is
more direct in exploring interconnection
between space/place and gender. As earlier
approaches also took account of spatial con-
texts, researchers conducting studies under
both approaches joined international dis-
courses generated by gender studies which
analyzed the postsocialist characteristics of
CEE as a macroregion successfully. Such
discourses included, for example, discussions
intended to identify why female unemploy-
ment was slightly lower than male unemploy-
ment – an unusual phenomenon experienced
in Hungary for 15 years after the political
changeover. Proposed by sociologists, a ver-
sion of this discussion focused on the role of
postsocialism. They argued that postsocialism
4 F E MI N I ST I N T E RVE N T ION S : C E N TRA L AND EA STERN EUROPE
had either “revalued” certain achievements
of the past (Fodor 1997) or put off the
emergence of gender inequality typical of
capitalism (Glass and Kawachi 2001). Point-
ing out that unemplyoment ratios in cities
and villages of differing sizes departed from
national figures, a regional study fine-tuned
earlier perceptions and proved that the official
conceptualization and definition of “unem-
ployed” showed women’s position as more
favorable than it was in reality (Timár 2002).
The analysis of new social roles added fur-
ther new approaches to urban and regional
studies. Studying the spaces of postsocialism
as they are lived and experienced helped
understand how men and women adjusted
themselves to the structural transformation
of cities, towns, and regions (it was this
adjustment that often led to the reproduction
of traditional gender roles). It also offered
an insight into how they shape the new
CEE reality by means of their decisions and
practices. The qualitative method popular-
ized through research of this type enabled
researchers to monitor the transformation
(i.e., transition from socialism to capitalism)
of a region/city/town over the lifetime of a
single generation.
Another topic adding gender to urban and
regional studies was spatial processes such as
suburbanization and, in part, gentrification
that emerged and gathered momentum con-
currently with postsocialist transformation.
A typical reason why the gender aspect was
adopted in studies with this topic as their
subject matter was that they adopted Western
concepts, with feminist social theories as
an integral part, to understand the spatial
processes that were still new in this region.
As a result, they and some of the studies,
a summary of which was presented above,
offered comparisons with the West, strove to
identify CEE characteristics, and raised the
issue of “otherness.” However, such narra-
tives and approaches met with criticism from
representatives of peer disciplines, who pro-
posed a decolonial framing of understanding
postsocialist CEE as an alternative (Koobak
and Marling 2014).
Research that claims that women’s special
needs must be taken account of in urban and
regional development policy (mainly rural
regional development policy for the time
being) and urban planning sends mainly
local/national messages. More recent inter-
national analyses that compare local welfare
policy-making and its relation to women’s
labor market integration in various cities
of Europe (Kutsar and Kuronen 2015) can
strengthen the interdisciplinary nature of
urban and regional studies.
MAKING GENDER STUDIES VISIBLE:
INTRODUCING FEMINIST AND OTHER
SOCIAL THEORIES
Papers seeking to familiarize the local
research community with Western research
studying interconnections between gender
and space/place have been published since
the early 1990s. Studies providing an outline
of what feminist geography is were the fore-
runners of urban and regional studies with a
feminist approach in a number of countries.
Some present issues of urban research with
significant gender aspects (e.g., suburban-
ization) as potential research topics or case
studies. Nearly all these studies, which are
more like science studies or studies in the
sociology of science, with a broader horizon
than traditional literature reviews, reveal
some self-justification on the authors’ part.
The authors of these studies have to pop-
ularize hitherto unknown new topics and
perspectives and have them accepted by
mainstream geographers, and they often
meet reservations or even outright rejection
because of a negative ring to feminism.
This is a particularly daunting task when
issues deemed taboo in the socialist era in
 FE MI N I ST I NT ERVENT ION S: C ENT RAL AND EA STERN EUROPE
both academic and public discourses are
raised. One such taboo issue in a number of
countries was sexuality. After stringent rules
governing birth control had been repealed
in Romania, for example, Voiculescu (2004,
62−63) raised this issue, claiming that
modern sexuality
cannot and should not be understood outside its
relation to the city. … After showing a sexless
image of women or no female identity at all
for so many years, sexual freedom re-created
Romanian public space, especially in the city as
the locus of modern sexuality.
Researchers, mainly of a younger generation,
have been addressing issues like urban spaces
and representations of the body, homosexu-
ality, heteronormativity, or fear in a number
of countries since the 2000s. Where gender
studies had already been presented in the
form of summaries to the local academic
communities, reference could be made to
them. If not, the results of international fem-
inist research bearing relevance to the topic
at hand had to be presented for both tactical
and scientific reasons.
In addition to reliance on the results of gen-
der studies in a broader sense, the application
of feminist social theories, concepts, or other
social theories mediated by them became
increasingly common. It was sometimes the
case that they were connected with theories
already popular in urban and regional studies.
For instance, some connected post- or dein-
dustrialization with theories of modernity,
others with postmodernity in connection
with the urban social and economic trans-
formation seen in the 1990s, changes in
values, and the interpretation of gender
roles. Political economic and poststructural-
ist approaches and, more recently, queer
theories started to emerge concurrently. It
seems that one of the main ambitions of CEE
researchers is to popularize those theoretical
frameworks at home and present typical CEE
5
issues and perspectives to readers in the West,
utilizing the theories developed there criti-
cally, not simply applying knowledge through
the “optics of the West” (Pitoňák 2014, 197).
Due to the low number of studies reviewed
no generalization can be made. Yet, one
important impact of recent studies with
a feminist perspective on CEE urban and
regional studies is the contribution that these
studies seem to have made to the dissemina-
tion of social constructivist approaches and
understanding the importance of discourses.
One of the future trends seems to be the
gradual phasing out of researchers’ wanting
to “prove themselves.” The number of studies
presenting the gendered nature of space and
society as a matter-of-course phenomenon is
on the rise.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Extracts from Timár and G. Fekete (2010)
reproduced with permission of Taylor &
Francis, www.tandfonline.com.
SEE ALSO: Feminist Interventions:
Anglophone World; Feminist Interventions:
French Connections; Feminist Interventions:
Southern Europe/Mediterranean; Feminist
Interventions: Voices from the South;
Gendered Aspects of the Everyday; Gendered
Space; Postsocialist City; Sexualities; Spatial
Theories/Social Construction of Spaces
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