Call for papers
Laboratorium. Russian Review of Social Research
Thematic issue: "Gender Relations in the Private Sphere: Post-Communist Transformations of Family, Intimacy, and Sexuality"
Deadline for submissions (in English or Russian): 17 October 2008.
Published in Saint Petersburg (Russia) starting in the fall of 2008, "Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research" is a new international forum for the publication and discussion of empirical social research, with a focus on qualitative methods. The journal wishes to foster interdisciplinary and international debate on the findings of fieldwork-based research. One of the first issues of Laboratorium will be devoted to gender relations in the private sphere in post-communist countries. Unlike such topics as the women's movement, political participation and representation, or discrimination on the labor market, the private dimensions of gender remain understudied. The intense transformations currently underway in both Central Europe and the post-Soviet nation-states not only affect the situation of various social groups; they also have an impact on national and global gender regimes. Current configurations of gender relations in many post-communist countries differ from those that emerged immediately following the disintegration of state socialism, with their characteristic statist and (relatively) egalitarian gender policies. There is an overt struggle between different ideologies, and in many countries we witness a rise of religious fundamentalist and other outlooks that espouse conservative views of male and female gender roles. The collision of competing views on gender policies is currently concentrated in discourses on the private sphere: acceptable and desirable forms of the family, reproductive rights, as well as conceptions of norms and values that guide people's private behavior. These processes stand in need of enquiry, and the current academic discussion on gender needs to be informed by new research into this area. By publishing work based on solid empirical research, we would like to contribute to an understanding of the gendered processes that are actually at work in the private sphere and determine the extent to which they are amenable to political manipulation.
The private sphere includes a wide range of practices and strategies. We take it to encompass the realm of intimacy and of the formation of personal autonomy, a sphere whose logic is not entirely convertible into the logic of market relations. Globalization increases the significance of the private sphere: the private is formed in opposition to the public, under the influence of market consumerism and the individualization and pluralization of lifestyles. While this is true of post-communist countries, the forms in which it happens are affected by the specific development of capitalism, which presupposes the emergence of boundaries around the private, understood as a flight from the threats of the public sphere. New practices are being combined with the heritage of communist-era representations. Analytically, the private cannot be rigidly distinguished from the public: the border between them is permeable and negotiated, and public institutions have an impact on private life.
The editors are especially interested in studying the transformation of gender hierarchies in private life under the influence of state demographic and family policies, the changing ideological context and the challenges of globalization; in identifying traditional and novel agents of gender control and practices of resistance to such control; and in tracking changes in forms of family organization. We welcome papers on topics such as caregiving, domestic labor, sexuality and reproductive behavior in a gendered perspective, contraception and abortion, gender aspects of intergenerational relations in the family, new practices of motherhood and fatherhood, the impact of the dialectics of power in the private sphere on gender identities, new types of family relations, and subcultural differences in sexual practices.
Papers should be based on empirical work; purely theoretical texts and essays, even on the topics outlined above, are strongly discouraged.
This issue is edited by Irina Tartakovskaya at the Institute for Social and Gender Policy (Moscow).
The deadline for submissions is 17 October 2008. All submitted papers are subject to editorial screening and, if eligible, double-blind peer review. Authors should expect to be asked to revise their first drafts, and plan accordingly. All submissions should be e-mailed, in MS Word or RTF format, to Anastasia Tsygankova, managing editor (n.tsygankova [at] mail.ru).
Questions about this issue may be addressed to Irina Tartakovskaya (I_Tartakovskaya [at] mail.ru); questions about the journal as a whole may be sent to Anastasia Tsygankova or the editor-in-chief, Mischa Gabowitsch (mgabowit [at] princeton.edu).
FORMATTING GUIDELINES:
Papers may be submitted in either English or Russian, in MS Word or RTF format, font size 12, 1.5-spaced. They should not exceed 60,000 characters (approx. 7,500 words), excluding notes.
You may use either British or American spelling, but please be consistent in your usage. Style and citations should follow either the Chicago Manual of Style or the Oxford Guide to Style (Hart's Rules).
Please include a cover page stating your name, institutional affiliation and contact details (e-mail, regular mail, phone number). This page will not be sent to reviewers. Before sending the document, please delete information about the author from the document properties.
If you are a publisher and wish to send us relevant books for review, please mail them to Anastasia Tsygankova (Centre for Independent Social Research, 87 Ligovsky prospekt, office 301, Saint Petersburg 191040, Russia), or contact the editors for mailing addresses in other countries.