SUMMARY:

This article by Elena Gapova, which is an introduction to the forum on gender and post-Soviet nations, is focused on the critical link between the ideas and practices of gender, on the one hand, and nationhood, on the other. Nations were first formulated during the Enlightenment as “male fraternity” projects, which relegated women as “non-autonomous” individuals to the private sphere of sexuality and domesticity, thus using gender as a primary way of signifying relationships of power in a new social contract. Nationbuilding as the process of negotiations over inclusion and exclusion, i.e. over who are going to be the legitimate social actors, always reconsiders the meanings of sexual difference and gender arrangements. Post-Soviet Soviet nationalism is a class project serving to legitimate the development of social inequalities into classes by providing emerging elites with a “noble national goal” of, as far as gender is concerned, protecting the women-nation from raping, subjugation, or colonization by the powerful “other.” Gender and nationhood, invoking particular symbolic representations, work through each other and need each other and are intricately tied to the emergence of class and national identity.