Revisiting the concept of “colonization vice versa”: on the disciplinary struggles of post-Soviet gender linguistics

Abstract

by Alexander Pershai
The essay analyses specificities in post-Soviet Gender Linguistics.
The author revisits the concept of “Colonization Vice Versa”
that he introduced in 2002 to describe the development of Gender
Linguistics in the early 2000s. The article argues that the development
of gender and language research in the former USSR was
related to the disciplinary authority of Linguistics that resisted
Gender Studies which represented “foreign” Western knowledge.
Therefore, gender and language research in post-Soviet states took
a hybrid form: it utilised gender terminology, but reproduced patriarchal
hegemonies in linguistic research. Post-Soviet Gender
Linguistics depoliticized the concept of gender and divorced it
from its potential for social change.