Description
Book SynopsisUnequal under Socialism examines the formation of racial, gender, and national identities and relations in the socialist state. With a specific focus on Bulgaria, a former socialist country in the Balkans, Miglena S. Todorova traces the intertwined local and global forces driving racialization, socialist state policies, and Eurocentric Marxist and Leninist ideologies, all of which led to valued and devalued categories of women. Roma women, Muslim women, ethnic Bulgarian women, sex workers, and female factory and office workers were among those marked by socialist authorities for prosperity, accommodation, violent reformation, or erasure.
Covering the period from the 1930s to the present and drawing upon original archival sources as well as a constellation of critical theories, Unequal under Socialism focuses on the lives of different women to articulate deep doubt about the capacity of socialism to sustain societies where all women prosper. Such doubt, the boo
Trade Review
“Miglena Todorova's book deserves the attention of both scholars and political activists at a time of extraordinary violence against women's, queer, and racialized bodies in former socialist states and beyond.” -- Raia Apostolova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences * Aspasia *
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Epistemology of Doubt 1. Race, Women, and Nation-Building 2. Socialist Racialism: Desired and Undesired Genres of Women and the Paradoxes of Socialism 3. Women’s Work: Gendered and Racialized Socialist State Governmentality 4. Second-Third World Women: Socialist State Feminisms and Internationalisms 5. Challenging the Modern-Postmodern Duality: Race, Socialist Masculinity, and Global American Culture Conclusion: Postsocialism, Anti-Racism, and Transnational Feminisms Notes Bibliography Index
