Narrating feminisms: what do we talk about when we talk about feminism in Estonia?

Abstract

Drawing on interviews with women who identify as feminists in Estonia, this article explores how the stories we tell about feminism and its past influence the kind of theoretical and political work we are able to do. Zooming in on the story of the emergence of feminisms in postsocialist Estonia which has not been thoroughly researched yet, this article calls upon feminists in Estonia to reflect critically on how they conceptualize feminisms, while at the same time building a framework to think about local feminism within transnational feminist context. Starting from stories of how women became feminists in Estonia since the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, I reflect on the gaps, chance encounters and tensions that my fieldwork revealed to narrate feminism differently, to bring forth new aspects of feminism in this context. In particular, I focus on two moments: the common imaginary of 'real' feminism as Western mass movement and the tensions between the local context and 'Western feminism' . I complicate the narrative in the article through including interludes in between the main text to highlight how the incidents that happened outside and around the interviews shape my story of feminism in Estonia.

Claims to Fame

“…43 Similarly, in her study of feminist art histories, Michelle Meagher defines a related, if not artificial, divide that 'between an essentialist first generation and a poststructuralist second generation', which support the generational and linear advancement and disidentification. 44 Along the same lines, analysing the narratives of feminism in Estonia, Redi Koobak observes that the story of Eastern European feminism has been imagined in a time lag concerning 'the West's great progress narrative of sexual modernization', 45 as a result of a similar way of thinking. To oppose this, Koobak convincingly argues for articulating the story of local contexts that are distinctly different 'from the Western hegemonic feminist frameworks'.…”

How to tell your story as the story of my feminism: Notes towards solidarity

“…In my work on carving out space for postsocialist feminism within transnational feminist discourses (Koobak, 2013, 2018), I have been set on telling ‘my story as the story of my feminism’ (Rooney, 1996: 18), arguably the strongest narrative in feminist politics. I have been very focused on claiming difference, claiming a voice for feminisms in postsocialist Eastern Europe that would not be subsumed under Western feminism.…”