Feminist knowledge production through 'gender' equality discourses

The paper will shed light on how feminist knowledge was (re)produced in post-socialist Lithuania through the construction of gender equality discourses. The post-socialist transition of the early 1990s, marked by the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent independence of Lithuania, brought a paradigmatic shift in the conceptualisation of gender regimes. The Soviet-era ‘woman question’ was replaced by discourses on gender equality, gender mainstreaming, and gender gaps. ‘Gender’ became the predominant lens to analyse inequalities, casting aside class-based accounts of emerging socio-economic polarisation among women and men. The paper will examine how the emergence and subsequent adoption of ‘gender’ as the main discursive framework for women’s rights and feminism came about in post-socialist Lithuania with a specific focus on local and international feminist knowledge producers. Furthermore, the paper will explore the notion of gender as a mode of knowledge production, expanding the term’s theoretical and practical scope. Practically, examining ‘gender’ as one of the possible modes of feminist knowledge production both challenges and de-naturalises the mainstream understandings of feminism and invites to seek other frameworks for grasping and resisting historically conditioned inequalities and oppression. From a theoretical standpoint, the paper will contribute to the growing academic literature that interrogates gender as a discourse, marked by particular meanings, advanced in specific institutions, and promulgated by certain actors. This conceptualisation of gender is still relatively uncommon; however, it is particularly apparent in the context of Eastern Europe, where the notion of ‘gender’ equality entered in a specific socio-historical moment, tracing back to the transitionary period from Soviet socialism to neoliberalism after the fall of the Soviet Union. Thinking through the construction of ‘gender’ equality discourses as a socio-historical phenomenon might demystify the often taken-for-granted understanding of its linear development within the confinements of ‘Western progress’. The interrogation of the construction of gender as a knowledge-producing discourse may also open novel ways to examine the framework(s) through which women’s rights and feminism are understood.