ROUND-TABLE DISCUSSION: NEW THEMES FOR DISSERTATIONS

From a "Round Table" discussion of the fate of gender studies and gender education in Russia.Participants:
Maria Kotovskaia, Ph.D. in History and research in the Ethno-gender Research division of the Institute of Ethnography and Anthropology of the Russian Academic of Sciences
Tatiana Osipovich, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature, Lewis and Clark College, Oregon, USA
Svetlana Kolesnik, Dean of the Journalism Department at Moscow
State University
Helen Goscilo, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature, Pittsburgh University, USA
Olga Voronina, Ph.D. in Philosophy, Assistant Director of the Moscow Center for Gender Studies, of the Laboratory of Gender Studies of Gender Studies of the Institute of Socio-Economic Problems of the Population of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Irina Kostikova, Ph.D. in Philosophy, Director of the Gender Studies Laboratory at Moscow State University
Discussion Leader: Nadezhda Azhgikhina, co-editor of We/Myi. N. Azhgikhina: Thank you, everyone. We've gathered to discuss the problems of gender education in Russian universities. Why are new courses imperative for our new curricula? What practices are already in existence, and what difficulties are arising along the way? What is the outlook for this new discipline, and what can we borrow from the rich Western experience in this area? I hope our representative gathering can sort out these questions.
M. Kotovskaia: I've been thinking about this for a long time. I am a professional ethnographer and began to study such problems in the early 1990s. Let's begin with the experience in the schools. Our research group from the Ethno-gender Research Division of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology conducted a research project called "Ethnicity and Violence among Tenth and Eleventh Grade Adolescents." We used focus groups and specialized questionnaires. The thing that struck me was this: The kids are given a huge quantity of knowledge in physics, mathematics, chemistry, and of course this knowledge is
necessary. But they need not only particular dates and formulas which are forgotten in three days, but fundamental world-vision knowledge. It seems to me that our schools won't be producing huge number of physicists and chemists and the majority of school graduates will become fathers, mothers, wives and husbands. And in my opinion we need a discipline which would teach dialogue between people of opposite sexes, and dialogue in all life areas -- in the family, in industrial production, in business. As an ethnologist leading sex research projects, I see that right now in our country we are undergoing the slow process of moving
away from old traditional norms of relationships between people, and undergoing a transfer to new norms of modern society. But, the majority of people, even in the cities, are not ready for this. Therefore we are experiencing a breakdown of value orientations. And this in turn leads to high divorce rates. This does not in itself mean that people don't want to live in families. The majority of both men and women want to build families, they just do not know how. Thus, our task lies in introducing gender themes and general educational courses at all levels, beginning with grade and high schools, and of course in pedagogical departments, in all universities and institutes irrespective of the institution's gender distribution. This question could be beneficial to all society. Unless we resolve the problems of interrelationships between the two fundamental parts of our society, what kind of democracy can we be discussing? You cannot have a democratic society wherein there is no democracy at the very deepest level of people's consciousness. We need to talk about the ethics of people's interrelationships independently of sex, not only at work but at home, in the family; about how each person should respect others. We are different, men and women, and we need to teach that fact too. There should be a special discipline which would incorporate sociological problems and cultural problems and ethnological, philosophical and psychological problems. We need to begin this in the schools, and these should be required subjects and post-secondary institutions. Right now they study the history of Russia in all post-secondary institutions; it seems to me that one part of this course should be about family problems, relationships between men and women, etc., and such courses should be mandatory. My experience working at the radio station "Nadezhda" -- I worked on a program called "The School of Women's Leadership" of live broadcasts every Friday -- tells me that both men and women are interested in these questions. In any event the phone calls we got came from both. And in our country, where there is such a high divorce rate, this is especially important. My experience working at the radio station "Nadezhda" (I participated in work on a program called "Women's Leadership School" over the course of a
year, live broadcasts every Friday) tells me that men and women are interested in these questions. In any event our calls came from both men and women.
S. Kolesnik: I grew up as an anti-feminist, considering it a four-letter word, and denied myself the opportunity of any conversation with some understanding of gender. I began paying attention to the problem from the beginning of perestroika, when our mass media energetically started "pushing women aside" from active social life back to the kitchen. Granted we were already oppressed by both kitchen and work, but now, overall, they were forbidding us all functions except childbearing and ornamentation, as if we are called on only to ornament a man's life, his house and way of life. Do you remember the speeches of our leaders in which they called for the return of women to the family with bolshevik fervor? I took this as an attempt to eliminate a portion of the population from active life. Mass media began actively exploiting this theme, which I disliked as both a person and a researcher. At this same time I discovered yet another side to the question. I study advertisements, which did not exist in our country but existed in the USA in great quantity. When our enterprises began restructuring, Russian advertisements began to appear, and they also very actively began exploiting this idea of woman as housewife or as sexual object. I remember many times being shown videoclips where there was an assortment of secretaries as furniture. This mentality is pervasive, even in our academic environment: when you present at some sort of meeting, they listen to you and then say, thanks, now we'll adopt the male decision. It's against precisely these male decisions that I've directed my energies. One of my female graduate students, after several battles, is beginning her work on the usage of sexual images in advertising, not just western advertisements but in those in the Russian market. The practice of advertising, something that was once far removed from us, is now our own and relies on century-old traditions and myths, creating a context in which women do not feel very comfortable. This is the problem of unemployment, another burden for women. Similarly, middle-aged and older people are being thrown out. It's no secret that all companies including foreign ones advertise that they want to hire women under 35 years of age (and sometimes under 25), and sometimes they ask for "women with an European appearance." I doubt that this is allowed in the US, where there are limits and norms that prohibit such advertising practices. This is yet another problem: how to enter the world community not like some kind of animal preserve with wild norms and standards, but like a country, where generally accepted norms are enforced, where open discrimination is not allowed. All the problems that they had in America and began to eliminate in the 1960s -- discrimination on the basis of age or sex -- this is what we now have here. Advertising reinforces these stereotypes. And one other thing: Although in big cities there are many advertisements and different points of view can be represented, the situation in the provinces is something else entirely. The print media -- which at least allow you to re-read the same material and think it over, as opposed to TV which flies in your face -- are in dire poverty. Print media is barely represented in the Russian regions. St. Petersburg has more than one hundred newspapers per 1000 residents, but in Primorye on the Pacific coast of our country there is a region where for every 1000 residents there is only one newspaper. By these indicators we are at the level of the most underdeveloped countries of Africa. With TV and it's aggressive politics of mass culture -- the fundamental carrier of which is advertising -- we will not be able to move to an understanding of different cultures, from which a person might choose. TV operates, as before, with a single mass audience forming one general culture instead of working with different audiences. Under these circumstances the work of researching these images and stereotypes of women presented by advertisements is extremely important. Many advertisers and advertising producers will back off from the most extreme images upon learning of audience dissatisfaction with such images and stereotypes (such as discrimination against women). For example, the infamous publication Moskovskii Komsomolets Boulevard underwent profound changes exactly because it became clear that advertisers don't want to receive such a publication and to insert into it ads with images wherein women are represented only as sexual objects. The task for researchers is not just to convey audience discontent to ad makers. The real problem lies in the fact that the viewers' interests in general are insufficiently represented in the mass media. We need regulation of this interaction, attempts to solve multifaceted problems in conjunction with the cooperation of audiences and the media and the recognition of the recently founded National TV and Radio Research Center. I hope that among the priorities of this new center will be gender expertise regarding TV and radio production.
O. Voronina: I'd like first of all to clarify some terms. In my opinion there is a difference between women's studies and gender studies -- although academic courses should include both topics. So, what is the difference? Women's studies (or the study of women) developed in American universities in the 1970s, when it became apparent that while social sciences and the humanities appeared to be studying humanity overall, homo sapiens, in essence they were studying men and there was hardly any attention to women's life experiences and world views, which got little cultural reflection. Women's studies were thus oriented toward the study of that cultural viewpoint. They used a variety of methods: exposes, group discussions, deep interviews (the Betty Friedan book "The Feminine Mystique" was based on analysis of three hundred interviews), and secondary analysis of ethnographic research materials. The analysis of this huge literature led to the imperative to divide the understanding of biological sex into a combination of anatomical-biological characteristics and social sex (in English, gender) as a sociocultural construct, in which society builds on the physiological reality. The understanding of gender signifies the essence of a complex sociocultural process: the production by society of differences in male and female roles, behaviors, mental and emotional characteristics, and the final result is the social construct of gender. The construction of gender differences extends, through a well-defined system of socialization (meaning boys and girls are raised to have different experiences and psychological characteristics), to the division of labor between women and men and accepted societal role norms and stereotypes. Because of this, gender roles and norms do not have universal support and differ significantly between different societies.
From this understanding, being a man or a women can mean different things and does not carry with it defined natural characteristics, but means rather to fulfill a gender role prewritten for you by society, and cooperate with these specific standards (for example, wearing particular
clothing items as your national costume -- in Scotland, kilts for men, and in Uzbekistan, pants women). Sociological and ethnological analysis has shown that, although men's and women's roles may be different across societies, in all of these societies one rule is consistent: that which is considered masculine is valued by society as of high priority and dominant, and that which is considered feminine is considered secondary and submissive. Thus it was revealed that one characteristic of gender roles and relations is that they constitute (and reinforce) in society the domination of the masculine and the suppression of the feminine. In this way gender comprises one of the basic principles of social stratification. Other such principles include ethnicity (nationality), age, and social class. The combination of these stratifying principles reinforces the strength of each (today, for example, limitations on hiring include such biological characteristics as female types of behaviors, age, "European appearance," etc.) Expectations are also connected with gender status. People themselves reproduce gender divisions, and simultaneously are ruled by that same control structure. The fundamental methodology of gender studies is not just description of the differences in status, roles, and other aspects of men's and women's lives, but analysis of power and domination reinforced in society through
gender roles and relations. Gender roles define relations of men and women through the relationship of domination and power. Gender studies examines which roles, norms, values, personal characteristics in society --through systems of socialization, division of labor, cultural values and symbols -- inform and control men and women, in order to deconstruct
the traditional (patriarchal) hierarchy of power. And when problems of democracy and human rights arise, certainly problems of gender arise also.
At this point I cannot refrain from providing one very revealing example from life. Nowadays in our mass media and in political circles they talk a lot about how Russia must have democracy and observation of human rights. I personally agree completely with this; however, we don't know what the average person thinks about this. To find that out, the Moscow Center for Gender Studies, with the support of The John D. and Katherine T. MacArthur Foundation, conducted a sociological study on "Women's Rights in Public Opinion" in one of Russia's typical
medium-sized cities. Using VTsIOM methods, we chose the town of Rybinsk in the Yaroslavl region where 900 people were surveyed, both women and men of different ages, education levels, social status, and nationality. One of the questions asked the respondents to choose, from a provided list of constitutional rights the five most important rights for women, in their opinion, and five for men. To begin with, the typical "set of rights" for men and for women was significantly different. But most importantly, not a single person among those nine hundred surveyed named the right to equality as important for women! And this in the current situation, where women comprise 70% of the unemployed, when women's incomes are dropping catastrophically and the feminization of poverty is growing, when education increasingly costs money and the possibilities of women finding work are shrinking which in effect makes it impossible for women to get an higher education! How will women defend their constitutional rights, when the ideas of equality and rights do not even enter their heads? This is why gender studies and gender education are absolutely necessary now -- and this involves civic education. We talk a lot about culture, and consciousness, and civil society, and humanity in general. But we really have no citizenry; that very word is associated with fictional situations of arrest and interrogation, and the idea of human rights is associated with the Statue of Liberty, which is far away from our daily lives. I suggest that what we need to cultivate in people is civic consciousness and self-awareness, so that we can all finally grasp that from birth every person has certain inviolable rights and freedoms. Everyone has these, and not just the one who sits in the Kremlin or has a gun, and rights and personal dignity are the foundations of a normal life, rather than a dog's life. That being free while oppressing another person is impossible.
Educational programs on women's and gender studies are therefore imperative not just for our students but even for our college instructors, so that they might discuss and analyze real human problems which touch every one of us: personality and its relationship to the
world, rights, freedom, civil rights, divisions between people (on the principle of equal rights irrespective of divisions), marriage, family, spousal relations and children, values, and so forth. In other words, this is an educational program purposefully seeking the development of human social responsibility. In western universities academic programs in gender and women's studies are conducted untraditionally: the instructor rarely gives lectures, but more often her or she provides a list of recommended readings on the themes and leads discussions, encouraging the students to think and analyze. This is a truly reformed approach to education, when the process of learning is not just prepared by the specialist but cultivates freedom and personal social responsibility. This is why we need educational programs in women's and gender studies.
M.K.: I am convinced that we need to start with the primary and secondary schools. We gave lectures for schoolteachers in Moscow, and it became apparent that they very much want such information and are prepared to use it in their teaching. The teachers are ready -- as soon as they understand what this is all about. We need to help them also. And in our culture and in our system of child-raising there are many, many talented girls who lag behind and do poorly in the last years at post-secondary institutions, under the pressure of public opinion which says they have to choose which will suffer -- personal life or career.
S.K.: They've put us in such circumstances. I remember well how out of all the works of Andre Maurois they translated "Letter to a Strange Woman," and we all, young girls, read it and were surprised. They told us, look at this as an example of how to love, with self-sacrifice. It was like a prescription for living.
O.V: Somehow self-sacrificing love turned out to be a requirement only for women.
N.A.: Nevertheless, these new courses -- I'd call it a new type of education -- have become a reality in contemporary Russia and are more and more actively rooting themselves in our national universities. Let's talk concretely about practices. I propose we begin with our most
important university, MGU.
I. Kostikova: Our university's experience in this realm began with the founding of a research group on feminology in the humanities education division. At first it was a small group. Now it has grown to a research laboratory of gender education, which receives support from the larger Research Council and personally from the rector of MGU, Sadovnichii, who at first had refused our activities. But Ekaterina Lakhova, the deputy from the State Duma, supported us, as did the Union of Women of MGU. We held a round table to attract any interested researchers from different departments. We went to the directors of departments. One vice-deacon, a serious scholar, was surprised: "Do we really think so differently? My wife is a professor too." I answered, "Do you, as scholars, think alike?" He says, "No." So it wouldn't be a bad idea to organize some time for a campaign against illiteracy for professors' illiteracy. The goal of the laboratory is to unite all interested people and work out a concrete program of courses. Right now 30 people at MGU teach courses, in different disciplines, in which they include gender aspects. Twice we've held Lomonosov Lectures led by our group. After that many projects started heating up. For example, in the history department Professor Silunskii, a specialist on Russian diaspora in the 1920s and 30s, teaches a course now on female emigration; and six graduate students are writing on women abroad. So, the work is progressing. In addition, we've developed a special 32-hour course that includes both lectures and practicum activities. This program has already been taught (at the department's request) in the mathematics and cybernetics departments, and in chemistry. It turns out that the students responded to it almost immediately; their minds were wide open to new information. Of course it's important that both girls and boys attend the class.
S.K.: They know that they need not giggle but study the problem.
I.K.: The most important problem is financing. Under present circumstances it is difficult enough to convince teachers to work, and it is difficult to get hours in the academic schedule. For example, it was decided [at our institution] to found a pedagogical department -- but so far there is only one full time person in that department.
H. Goscilo: I'm interested that no one is mentioning the Fullbright program. It's a very reputable program which allows American professors to teach in other countries and different universities, and the university does not need to pay for these courses. In the US there is a sufficient number of professors who speak Russian, and moreover I would think that part of lectures could be given in English and it would be useful for the students.
I.K.: We want to train our own professors for this. I think that our courses don't exactly resemble western courses, we have our own history and our own traditions. And different practices.
N.A.: The teaching of gender studies and feminology begin in Moscow at a new university -- the Russian State Humanities University (RGGU), where the idea arose in the early 1990s to develop "advanced women's studies" to keep up with the demands of contemporary society.
They basically founded a new department. One of the professors involved was Olga Voronina.
O.V.: My experience was one of the first and it was a mixed experience.. I taught a kind of gender studies in Advanced Women's Studies courses at RGGU. The students and I, we did not entirely understand each other. Obviously they needed something more traditional, and I began with radical feminist fervor. They fell into two interest groups -- psychology and fashion modelling, and both wanted to start their own businesses. After the first lecture many interesting
things became clear. First of all (this was in 1993) the very word feminism invoked aggression. Secondly, the shock of this brought about an informal type of communication -- I came down from the podium, western style, and proposed that we sit in a circle, and came to class in jeans
and a sweater. We are distinct as a discipline of higher education. Here, for example, there has been some talk about how we need to make our courses mandatory for all. On the one hand this is a good idea. On the other hand, by nature gender education cannot be traditional. It's built on the actualization of one's own experience, and it is possible to understand many gender problems only through the personal. We ourselves all came to the understanding of the imperative nature of teaching this discipline through our own personal experiences - I also. I was once in Baku at some extravagant conference, everything was just lovely. I stayed in room number one, and on the table in the room there was a bowl of fruit. And suddenly I noticed that each time I was choosing the least attractive piece of fruit. It was reflexes at work -- at home I
always take the worst thing, because the best pieces should go for my child. At that very moment I thought, in my personal life I am a very traditional woman. I do everything first for my family, and then go off to write my articles -- it's easier for me that way, it's too late to change. No one consciously taught me to be this way but I've always seen how my mother and my grandmother sacrificed themselves and their interests for the sake of their families. Now this hasn't always been necessary, but in Russia it's just accepted that way. And this is just not normal. People, especially in their families, should of course help one another, and even sacrifice things for one another, if it's necessary. But when a women in "the prime of her life," with an attractive appearance and an education in philosophy discovers that she is habitually and constantly limiting herself for no reason -- this is terrible. With full awareness of her own experiences, she is beginning to change those attitudes. Today I understand that teaching this course can be done only through experience, and then I began trying to teach the students about other things -- the UN, UNESCO, things that will be more familiar to them. This got a negative reaction. One girl asked, do we really have to fight for all of this? Another said, if we are going to have more rights, there will be fewer rights for men, and for that they will stop loving us. The administration of the university was also not very supportive of all this. One woman, an American professor, told me that the beginning of such a course is always a big
stress. But I was probably not quite ready for that, and I was alone.
M.K.: I also taught that course at RGGU. I was lucky. I had a group of both Russian and American female students, and they studied together often. We had really no problems with the Americans, gender studies has been taught there for a long time and it's considered more or less traditional. We began with the fundamentals, and with concrete things such as discussions about men's and women's roles in traditional and contemporary cultures. After that we moved on to more difficult philosophical concepts.
N.A.: It seems to me also that this route, beginning with the simplest concepts and moving to the more complicated, is most productive. During one of our special courses on "Women and Journalism" at the journalism department at MGU (this has been going on already a year and a half) we also tried to begin with an understanding of all the things that young journalists bring to work, what assignments they get from editors, how television and magazines present female images, in what words, and with what kind of footage. Then we gradually begin to talk about
feminism and its theory and practice. We've gotten a lot of help at that point from our Russian and foreign colleagues -- I'm happy to say that Olga Voronina, Maria Kostikova and Helen Goscilo have all given guest presentations for our students. I know that after this many students went independently to Kotovskaia at the institute. I've noticed that in any event what is important is not just competency, but the strong personality of the instructor and readiness for live contact with the students, and in this regard I am in complete agreement with Olga Voronina. It's a bit early to talk about the results of our work at the journalism department, but I'm glad to say that several of our former students now work in television and at newspapers. They regularly call for advice, and most importantly they try in their work to expand gender roles, although this is, of course, difficult.
O.V: We really need to know more about each other. We need to exchange our early experiences in this field, we cannot look just to the West.
N.A.: What do our American colleagues have to say about this?
H.G.: Everything you've been saying reminds me of what went on in America 30 years ago, when gender studies and women's studies first appeared. At my university in Pittsburgh they've had courses in this area for 25 years. At the beginning it was also difficult. The administration did not want to understand it, or provide money. The leader of our new program also taught English (almost all specialists in women's studies are professors of either English literature or history) and was a very assertive woman. In the end she managed to find a common language with the administration and they allowed the formation of the program. But, unlike a department of division they had no budget and courses were taught by volunteers from different departments. The program was small. If a professor is to teach 6 courses a year and also do one more for free -- this is a problem. They taught women's studies courses in anthropology, history, and covered gender topics in different disciplines. It's all very much like what you are talking about.
N.A.: What kind of situation is there in the realm of American Slavists?
H.G.: Slavists in this area pretty much repeat the experiences of Russian academics. Among Slavists there are very few feminists. When I began studying the question of women's fine arts in Russia 12 years ago many looked at me as if I was crazy, just waved me off, as if "she's smoked that pipe one time and now she's decided to study this!" Many people were surprised: why do you need that, you are an excellent Lermontov specialists? Mary Zirin and I consider ourselves the grandmothers of Russian feminism in America. I wanted to tell a little more about what happened further at our university. The director of the program proceeded very simply: she went from department to department and begged for people to teach these free courses. They began teaching courses anywhere she found more than one person interested in taking such a course. Now they do have financing, although the budget is small. In some universities the budgets are bigger, like at Duke or some universities in California (mainly at places where they pay a lot of attention to theory). And there are more conservative universities than mine, and money there for women's programs is really small. Money is not really the problem. The problem is that at our university there is no actual program, and the subject is not taken seriously. We've been waiting on this for 25 years.
T. Osipovich: Our university in Oregon is small, about 2000 students. We've had gender studies there now for over 15 years. The program is interdisciplinary. The program itself has two half-time faculty members. Courses are taught by 15-20 professors from different departments -- history, philosophy, sociology. So students can cover material and requirements in both the women's studies program and in the philosophy or sociology programs. I myself am planning to teach a course on "Women in Russian Culture" in which there will be students from
the Russian language and literature department and also students from Gender Studies.
H.G.: There did not used to be anything like that.
M.K.: Here in Russia we would not get a single dean to support such a thing.
T.O: You need to teach such a course untraditionally. If you deliver lectures elevated above the students, you'll get no result from the course. I teach gender (and other subjects as well) sitting next to the students. If we are talking about equality among people, then we shouldn't be teaching from some elevated position above the students. I'm from the Arkhangelsk Pedagogical Institute and now I live in America -- by the way, in America I studied in graduate school under Helen Goscilo. I came to my beliefs in this area no so much from literature as from my personal experiences as a provincial Russian woman in America. In any event the stimulus came from life experience.
N.A.: There's one other problem: literature and study materials. We're all stuck with the problem that in the Russian language there is almost nothing to recommend to students, except pieced-together and often difficult to find articles in specialized periodicals, or monographs that have come out with in tiny print runs. English or French materials (and the original texts are of course in these languages) are way above the students' abilities to read fluently.
O.V: Actually now quite a bit has been published in Russian. You can find it in the laboratory. I brought some of it to my courses. There are some edited collections of articles (for example, one out of Kharkov). It is possible to find translations of many American books such as Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique," and "Our Bodies, Ourselves." Simone de Bouvoir's "The Second Sex" has just come out. But we need a well-structured text, written simply. This would help not only students but many instructors. We also need several anthologies. There is extensive literature on this theme, but we are able only to use 20-year old books because not everyone can read in foreign languages, especially English. We certainly need to translate contemporary texts.
N.A.: On that note we will end our discussion. It will certainly be continued. Today we have touched on, or more accurately identified, only a small portion of the problems connected with this new type of education in Russia. In future publications we hope to tell more about the experiences of other cities and institutions. Experience in teaching feminism, gender studies and advanced women's studies -- the discipline is called different things at different institutions -- exists in many regions. We also planning publications for gender education in high school and for special courses. Perhaps we'll hear about new aspects of this theme in letters from our readers.
PS: When this material was already in publication it was announced that the Association of Political Scientists of the Russian Federation has given it's agreement to found a special division on gender studies. It would be nice to think that researchers of all countries would give such research not just moral support, but practical support.