EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

This issue of the magazine is about something that each of us confronts over and over again – censorship. By now we well understand that censorship differs. Ten years ago, when ideological state censorship was abolished, it seemed to be a new era of freedom for expressing opinions and views. But rather quickly we understood that the power of money shapes another kind of dependence, including the self-censorship of authors and editors. Prevailing societal opinions, for their part, also block the expression of alternative positions, and this concerns not only political but also gender issues (who ever said that gender is detached from political discussion?).

Increasingly in recent years, the term, gender censorship, has come to be heard . It came into use after the Beijing world conference of 1995, when at the initiative of “Women’s World,” the international organization of writers and journalists, there was a wide-ranging discussion of the problem, followed by preliminary research on the possibility of women openly declaring the existence of this problem.

It turned out there is no country in which the aspiration of women to speak out has not met resistance. Sometimes it is the resistance of the church and of government, in other instances of archaic traditions and culture, or of the market economy. Everywhere these processes of resistance are profoundly hidden and weakly articulated.

In the former communist bloc countries, gender censorship has its own peculiarities; it is directly linked to women being pushed aside from the redistribution of big property assets and from politics, and it is part of a strengthening of patriarchal tendencies in public discussion and mass consciousness as a whole. It is not easy to talk about this in our countries. It is necessary to do so. It is important not only to name the problem, but to mark out its scope, because censorship affects not only women’ creativity and authorship, it concerns the entire women’s agenda in society

Can one confront this not always obvious, this subtle limitation on women’s freedom? Does there already exist some elaborated mechanism for doing this? What are the possible strategies for the future, in the view of women in these countries with economies in transition?

Such are the questions that our authors in this issue have tried to address.

Nadezhda Azhgikhina