Introduction

Krassimira Daskalova

Every volume of Aspasia includes an 'Aspasia Discussion Forum' in which a particular topic is highlighted or debated. Aspasia dedicates this year's (2010) and next year's (2011) Forums to the field of women's and gender studies in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe (CESEE). The idea came from a round-table on Gender Studies in CESEE organised by Aspasia editor Maria Bucur for the annual conference of the American Assodation for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) in Philadelphia in November 2008. The pieces included here by Agnieszka Graff and Mihaela Miroiu were first presented at that round-table. The other participants wrote their contributions especially for Aspasia. Tire five texts in this Forum are a wonderful beginning of our discussions about the establishment and development of women's and gender studies in CESEE in the last two decades. Next year we will continue with the presentation of the state of the art in this field in other important East European contexts. During the period under consideration, the category of 'gender' appeared as an analytical tool in the realm of historical research in CESEE as well. To follow these developments, the 2012 issue of Aspasia will host a Forum dedicated specifically to the appearance and progress of women's and gender history as a field of study and an academic discipline in the region. (1)

Women's and gender studies have been part of Western higher education for more than thirty years, though their status and degree of implementation remain decidedly uneven, and in some cases programmes and departments have been abolished, or face an uncertain future. (2) From the 1970s, when such programmes first started in the USA, until the 1990s--the decade in which this field came into existence in some East European countries (3)--there were over six hundred programmes, thousands of specialists and tens of thousands of courses in the United States alone. After 1989, Western (American and European) achievements in these new academic fields have had a stimulating impact on the scholarly situation in many CESEE countries where an interest in women and gender started to attract researchers in fields such as history, sociology, political sciences, anthropology and economics.

The main aim of this Forum of Aspasia is to bring together specialists in women's and gender studies from the region in order to explore and discuss their experiences in the establishment of academic research on women and gender. Thinking comparatively, it would be important to know what the goals of the East European gender studies programmes have been over the past two decades, what directions they have taken, who were and are the teachers and students and what has been the impact of women's and gender studies on higher education in specific fields, in policy making and in intellectual life in the various countries and across CESEE in general.

Questions suggested to the Forum contributors were the following: What were the initial philosophies and political goals of women's and gender studies and what are the current ones? Did women's and...