Резюме: gender; translation; sexuality; heteroglossia

Abstract: The paper discusses the translations of the English analytical category gender in Bulgarian culture, the humanities and social sciences during the last decades. First, it traces the shifting meanings and uses of the term in Western feminist theory and its complicated relations with language, sexuality, subjectivity, and identity to explain how they function as a set of regulatory norms that materialize and fix the body. Then it analyses how these meanings have been re-signified in the Bulgarian context, tracing various translation equivalents of gender such as “rod”, “pol”, “socialen pol”, “rodov pol”, and others until its recent usage in political discourses as an empty referent. The dispersal and co-existence of these multiple translation variants and strategies are analyzed as a process of heteroglossia, which has generated chaos and conceptual confusion but has also demonstrated the need to re-consider and transcend the archaic binary thinking and analytical structures in Bulgarian society.

Abstract: The present article explores the capability as a dimension of inequalities between men and women. In order to achieve this, we test the factors which influence on the traditional norm that women should be prepared to cut down on their paid work for the sake of their family, the importance of work-family balance in the context of job-search and time spent on unpaid housework as a constraint of the freedom to decide how to spend your time and to plan your activities independently. Our study builds upon the capability approach framework and contributes to the studies which have applied it in the sociology with regard to work-life balance from a gender perspective. The results show that the main differences between young men and women are related with three individual-level factors: education, labour market status and having a child in the family. The empirical findings regarding the factors at macro-level contrast previous research which shows that individual’ capabilities for work-life balance are shaped by policies and norms, reflected in the take-up of parental leave, childcare, and part-time work, but reveal that the major differences between young men and women at macro level are due to the amount of family/children benefits received in the country where they live in. Higher share of family benefits decreases the importance of work-family balance when searching for a job. Our study also shows that in contrast to women, the estimated odds of considering the work-family balance as important when choosing a job are higher for men in countries belonging to Conservative, Mediterranean (family-oriented) and Post-Socialist welfare regimes than they are for men in Liberal regimes.

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to present the subjectivities of women under-going procedures of assisted reproduction (ART), and the new forms of individuation and autonomy those entail. The debates about reproductive autonomy for women using in vitro reproductive procedures revolve around the question to what extend ARTs empower and further propel women’s actions and desires to become mothers, and on the other hand to what extent these technologies create barriers and limitations to their reproductive rights and choices. The empirical study we present is based on women’s narratives posted on fertility clinic blogs and internet discussion forums. We explore the themes of: constructing an agentic identity through knowledge, sensitivity to and control of the body and the procedures, relational and shared identities, an agentic self through persistence. The women’s voices which we heard and analyzed confirm the ambivalence of their experiences: on the one hand empowerment and hopefulness through ARTs which lead to the desired child; on the other hand – becoming more dependent on the medicalizing technologies.

Abstract: The article examines the legal regulation of sex in Bulgarian legislation as well as the jurisprudence on the criteria under which sex change is allowed. Among the prerequisites for sex change are analyzed: the establishment of a lasting contradiction between civil and psychological sex/gender, the existence of a serious and unwavering desire for change of the sex/gender and lack of mental illness and abuse. The key decisions in Bulgarian case law since 2000 are presented.

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to present some new forms of masculinities in the contemporary Bulgarian society. It is argued that the process of increasing re-traditionalisation in the last years is closely connected with the popular type of the „traditional Bulgarian masculinity“. This symbolic construction of masculinity is striving to become hegemonic and could be understand as a response of the threatened, subordinated masculinities to the current situation of precarity and anxiety.

Abstract: Nowadays, homosexuality is among the most controversial topics in public debates. In times of rapid globalization and social media, certain new global discourses have emerged. These often approach homosexuality as a homogenous and one-sided phenomenon, not taking into account specific local realities regarding homosexual minorities. Based on a content analysis of social media comments in the period October 2017 – September 2018, this study aims to investigate (1) the main attitudes towards homosexuality based on fears and prejudices; (2) the interchangeable use of the terms „gender“ and „homosexuality“; (3) the notions of LGBTI activism and (4) the deficiency of knowledge in the scientific discourses in Bulgaria. Engaging with the scientific studies of homosexuality, this analysis emphasizes the need of historicization of homosexuality as a tool for a better understanding and overcoming of one-sided interpretations in the scientific and the public discourses.

Abstract: Studying the various forms of women’s political and civic activity during the First World War, the article reveals a different resource of women’s agency (and emancipation), i.e., the affective environment of women’s experience (their pain and their social suffering). Emphasizing the problem of (micro and macro) corruption, a specific social phenomenon that the anger of women made publicly visible, the article also stresses a new process, i.e., “becoming aware of what it means to be a woman” and “what it means to be a man” (beyond the horizon of defined gender roles). The author reveals why it was precisely the anger of women (the poor one’s, in many cases uneducated) that expressed “the horror of their coercive situation showing its face” (M. Duras). Thus, the article is an attempt to rethink the national modern project and certain mechanical and idealistic interpretations (by left-wing and right-wing historians) of the growth of political awareness among new historical subjects: the people, the workers, women. Thus the author emphasizes how the new joint communities of men and women were formed (communities that cut across gender, social and class divisions) in the course of resistance against the threatened ontology – what is in fact just and what isn’t. In this way, the moral boundaries of society were revealed (inasmuch as the fact that those boundaries were being crossed provoked joint resistance against this transgression). Along with this, other boundaries (those between good from evil) became clearly perceptible, and hence, a “new ethical society” became suddenly thinkable (a society in which hunger, bad hygiene and death from social diseases, such as typhus fever, tuberculosis, alcoholism, would no longer be part of the normal order of things). The article attempts to show how it was precisely the emancipation of (ordinary and often uneducated) women from their forced passivity and social unhappiness that contained other views of women about the social world.

Abstract: While Southeastern European (SEE) women’s activism should not be judged against a Western yardstick, it developed in tandem with women’s movements in the West and was influenced by the global context and networks (such as the International Council of Women, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom). The article deals with the entanglements (and tensions) between the Balkan women’s organizations and their leaders within the so-called Little Entente of Women, established in Rome in May 1923 by activists from Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Comparing the agendas and activities of the international, regional (such as the Little Entente of Women) and national organizations would help us reconstruct their “histoire croisée”, and start developing a trans-national perspective which is almost lacking in the women’s and gender history of SEE so far.

Abstract: The fierce political debates around ‘gender’, typically derided as ‘gender ideology’ by opponents, have become a focal point for political alliances between the political mainstream and the far-right. To the extent to which ‘gender’ bothers classical conservatives and liberals, populists and the far-right are able to use the topic to make themselves appear less extremist. For them, gender is a gateway to political respectability and influence. At the same time, nationalist rhetoric paints ‘gender ideology’ as an existential threat to the fabric of modern societies and thus panders to the traditional support base of these movements. In this context, ‘gender ideology’ has a function similar to that of ‘immigration’. It evokes images of eradicated borders and irreparably damaged value systems; of an outside threat to a supposedly pure national and moral identity in dire need of protection. This contribution will look at these developments in the German context, with specific attention to the role of the new far-right party AfD in bringing together religious, nationalist, and conservative voices.

Abstract: In the perspective of “hypochondriac identities”, this article analyzes anti-gender discourses in Bulgaria which emerged in the last year triggered by the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combatting Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (also known as the Istanbul Convention). Treating these discourses as nationalist (and not just conservative), the article traces their intersection with existing anti-refugee discourses. The first section sketches how out of the left-right fragmentation of the post-socialist political terrain a nationalist consensus emerged, which would provide both a social glue for parties’ crumbling legitimacy and political justification for coalitions across the presumably unbridgeable post-1989 divides of “left” and “right”. The follow-up section tackles the opposition to the Istanbul Convention by the main political parties, both “right” and “left”, as well as by professionally organized interest groups. The common denominator of various anti-gender positions is the fear that introducing “gender“ as a legal term would open the door for LGBTI rights. This alarmism has a strong populist appeal due to still dominant homophobia in Bulgarian society. The final section outlines parallels between the anti-gender and anti-refugee discourses as well as the points where they overlap and mutually amplify in the political positions against the Istanbul Convention.

Резюме:

Abstract: On the Gender Studies debate over the meaning of being woman or man psychoanalysis has a lot to contribute. But its message is easily misunderstood if one doesn’t speak its language. Its acquisitions can only be evaluated within the context of clinical listening, which considers what is really produced in the unconscious rather than what is believed or wished for. Within this context sexuality and sexual identity are posed as “lack” and the impasses generated by the function of enjoyment (jouissance) are the only ones operating in the unconscious instead of the illusion of a relation existing between the masculine sexual position and the feminine sexual position. The speaking being (parlкtre) can only “play man” or “play woman” in contrast, for example, with the common transgender narrative of “believing oneself to be a woman” or “believing oneself to be a male”. Masculinity and femininity are not intrinsic characters. Rather they result from how the sexes relate to each other.

Abstract: Summary/Abstract: The article represents a critical and reflexive sociological research on a fundamental social problem, which overturns the specific historical manner of exercise of power in our contemporaneity: there is a general reversal into the central object-target of governing intervention, which technological matrix is no longer constituted upon the concept of “danger”, (“dangerous subject”), but through the notion of “risk”, (“risky profile”). The most important political consequence out of this extraordinary metamorphosis is the comprehensive penetration of “risky factors“ over the endless surface of the social reality, from the basic structures of personatily through everyday live to the collective forms and institutional crystallizations: individual, group, class, community, minority, movement, organization, party, nation, state, ethnos or race, which, with their genuine subsistance, are actual, potential or virtual threat for the social safety. Irreversible integration of the “risky segments“ into the one and all life-spheres of the contemporary complex societies has got as a general effect the dynamization of the social change, the unique constant that reproduces sustainably: this is “a risky society”, in which the global problem of permanent uncertainty within all her dimensions possesses fateful significance for the humanity.

Abstract: Many studies are concerned with what the functions of money are, but not as much with what money actually is. This text will try to advance the knowledge on this matter in several steps. It begins with a brief summary of the history of money and the different forms it has taken throughout certain historical periods. Then it continues by outlining the key moments in the development of the theories of money. By capitalising on the information gained from them, this article will reach a point which will provoke the necessity of alalysing the relationship between the constructive elements of money – “object“ and “property“ – and their relationship with the state. As a result, the theories that have been covered will be advanced in a manner that will bring forward the pivotal moments in the development of the logic behind the nature of money. This will provide analytical tools for a more precise understanding of the process of wealth creation and the potential of its empirical measurement.

Abstract: The global financial and economic crisis accelerated and deepened the crisis in the European Union which causes originated in its political and institutional framework. In the context of the difficulties to the states and the market to resolve increasing inequality, poverty and social isolation, civil society initiatives and organizations in the social economy have become an effective tool against the crisis. In this regard social finance has speeded up its development and dissemination. The paper aims at discussing trends and perspectives to social money in Europe.

Abstract: Ildefonso Cerdà; Chicago School in Urban Sociology