Emancipation is More than the Freedom of Choice: Rethinking the Feminist Agenda in Postsocialism

This chapter suggests an analytical and empirically grounded argument about the ways to rethink the feminist agenda in postsocialism. My theoretical speculations are inspired by two independent research projects. The first one is dedicated to women’s informal cross-border activities on the Belarus–Lithuania border. It was conducted in 2010–2012 in a small Belarusian town where I collected 18 in-depth interviews with women involved in cross-border petty trade in the region (Sasunkevich 2014, 2015; Liinason and Sasunkevich 2018). The second project is my current research about feminist and LGBTI+ activism in Russia in the transnational perspective. Although two projects have been conducted independently, with different aims and within two different, though tightly linked, national states, bringing them together I aspire to show how a more nuanced understanding of living conditions, choices, and rationales of different groups of women shed light on potential and limits of dominant feminist ideas in the postsocialist context. My examples of the postsocialist feminist agenda are based on fieldwork and interviews with feminist activists in Russia. Thus, this chapter does not claim broad generalizations since the scope of both projects is limited. However, revealing how petty traders conceptualize their financial independence and personal self-sufficiency (Sasunkevich 2015), I try to explain why they do not find their experience of personal emancipation (the influential feminist idea) particularly appealing and instead consider a man-as-breadwinner model as their ideal. Departing from experience of these women, I suggest an alternative way to formulate the feminist question in the postsocialism to make it more appealing to broader categories of people.