Abstract
This project considers the “Lost Generation” of women who lived under the Soviet Union and survived its collapse—only to face new challenges in independent republics like Georgia. It concerns their personal, collective, and national dreams of freedom, and analyzes whether the political and social freedom that was brought about through their tremendous political efforts delivered true liberation. I employ the term “Lost Generation” to refer to women who spent most of their childhood and adulthood in the USSR, and then after its breakup found that their communist education, working experience and other skills and values had become irrelevant. My project offers an alternative feminist interpretation of postsocialism as a mobile force and concept that disrupts the static idea that global neoliberal capitalism is the only realistic outcome of postsocialism. This research project focuses on the lives of those women and the gendered dynamics between the state’s patriarchal dreams of domination (USSR) versus dreams of female empowerment (new democracies such as Georgia and Armenia). I argue that the experiences of post-Soviet women living in Georgia provide a microcosm of a new set of political conditions that they have been forced to contend with since the 1990s. This includes national (democracy) and related to that the emergence of a regional South Caucasus identity (development) and new international (globalization) challenges and processes.
Presenters
Gvantsa GasvianiStudent, PhD student, University of California, Irvine, California, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Vectors of Society and Culture
KEYWORDS
Postsocialisms, Women, Postsocialist Global Condition, Postsocialist Globalization, South Caucasus
