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Bug Inspectors and Beauty Queens: The Problems of Translating Feminism into Russian
A few years ago, when the Russian writer and lecturer-provocateur Tat'iana Tolstaia was endorsing the "truth" of Francine du Plessix Gray's book on Soviet women, she penned this grim portrait of Western feminists rapping on the collective door of Soviet women and grilling them in the "cold, rigid manner" of bug inspectors: "How do your men oppress you? Why don't they wash the dishes? Why don't they prepare the meals? Why don't they allow women into politics? Why don't women rebel against the phallocracy?"(1) As comforting as it might be to dismiss this image as typical Tolstoyan reductionism, a less extreme version of it recurs in the commentary of Ol'ga Lipovskaia, the editor/publisher of the journal Zhenskoe chtenie (Women's reading). Lipovskaia remarks on Western feminists' bewildered, sometimes alienating contacts with Soviet women -- the "real confusion of purposes and activities" manifest in various official meetings between the two groups, Western women's one-track insistence on the value of their own agendas, the problem with effectively translating the most basic Western terms like "feminism," "emancipation," and "gender" for a slogan-weary Soviet audience.(2)
Impressions from the other side of the border record similar misconnections and sometimes vent a counter-dismay. Reporting in a January 1993 issue of the Nation, Andrew Kopkind notes the lack of a Russian feminist movement and Russian adoption "in the space of a few months" of "some of the West's most reactionary gender roles and sexual stereotypes."(3) As he selectively interviews self-avowed Russian feminists like Lipovskaia and Anastasiia Posadskaia (the director of Moscow's Center for Gender Studies), Kopkind relays stories and statistics sure to upset a Western feminist readership -- for example, Russian women's seeming acquiescence to a new, markedly Western brand of sexploitation (55) or the polls showing the rising number of Russian women who yearn to be full-time homemakers or aspire no further than the very often prone position of "secretary to a biznesman who earns hard currency" (50). In an article of 11 February 1993 for the Los Angeles Times, Elizabeth Shogren simply frames her survey of Russian women in Western terms, stating that these women "[b]y their own choice and because of mounting new social pressures...are less liberated,...