do Czech Women Need ‘Gender’?: A Conceptual History of ‘Gender’ in Czechia

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a growing anti-feminist, conservative movement across many parts of the world known as the anti-gender movement. This movement has been especially strong in Central Eastern Europe, where anti-gender actors have framed ‘gender’ as a static, foreign concept imported from ‘the West’ and destructive to ‘traditional’ societies. Utilising a postcolonial feminist approach, I examine the concept of ‘gender’ in Czechia, drawing attention to the role played by Czech academics, activists and policymakers in negotiating the use of the term ‘gender’. This article traces the history of the term from the 1990s when ‘gender’ was first introduced to a Czech academic audience, through public seminars and lectures hosted by the Prague Gender Studies Centre, to the present-day inclusion of gender mainstreaming discourse in Czech policy documents. I reveal that ‘gender’ is not a timeless, clearly defined, fixed term wholly imported from ‘the West’ but rather a concept with a variable and complicated history. Thus, this crucial term, first developed in Anglo-academia, is not uncontested or uncritically accepted, contrary to the claims made by anti-gender actors. The findings presented in this article hold implications critical to transnational feminist dialogue and activism during the current period of growing global anti-feminist sentiment.

Keywords

anti-gender movement Central Eastern Europe conceptual history Czech feminisms gender Istanbul Convention postcolonial feminism

introduction

In 1994, Jiřina Šmejkalová-Strickland published an article titled ‘Do Czech women need feminism?’ (1994), examining the cultural specificity of feminism by looking at the incommensurability between Western feminist theories and the historical experiences of Czechs. Šmejkalová-Strickland’s article was one of many in which gender scholars across former state socialist countries debated the applicability of feminist terms and concepts developed in the West.¹ Today, however, those within the gender equality communities across Central Eastern Europe and other parts of the world are contending with a conservative movement that resists the basic tenets of gender equality and sexual autonomy, known as the anti-gender movement. The anti-gender movement has been described as a transnational movement composed of religious and political conservatives, men’s rights advocates and conservative non-governmental organisations who refute the notion of ‘gender’ as a social construction and oppose gender equality policies, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive freedom and sex education in schools (Kuhar and Paternotte, 2017). In Central Eastern Europe, anti-gender actors resist what they perceive as Europeanisation and neocolonialism by Western European countries and the European Union (EU) (Korolczuk and Graff, 2018). Supported by leaders within the Catholic Church, this movement has taken on a neocolonial and security framework, arguing that ‘gender’ is an imposition of ‘the West’ intended to destroy ‘traditional’ family structures and, by extension, the state (ibid.; Wilkinson, 2021). Elżbieta Korolczuk and Agnieszka Graff (2018, p. 799) state that ‘“Genderism”—a term that sounds ominous and alien in most cultural contexts—has replaced “feminism” in global right-wing rhetoric, strengthening the critique of gender equality movements as powerful and foreign “colonizers”’. In 2016, in Kraków, Poland, as the anti-gender movement was growing in the country, Pope Francis (in Quinlan, 2016) stated, ‘in Europe, America, Latin America, Africa, and in some countries of Asia, there are genuine forms of ideological colonization taking place. And one of these—I will call it clearly by its name—is “gender”’. By referring to gender as an ‘ideology’, anti-gender actors attempt to connect the concept of gender to the history of totalitarian oppression under the Nazi regime and communist regimes in the region, considering it ‘worse than Communism and Nazism combined’ (Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek, in Graff and Korolczuk, 2017).

In Czechia, the anti-gender movement gained prominence in 2015 after the Czech government signed the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and prosecuting violence against women and domestic violence, otherwise known as the Istanbul Convention, promising ratification in the near future. Actors within the anti-gender movement staged opposition to the concept of ‘gender’, which the Convention (Council of Europe, 2019, p. 7) defines as ‘the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for women and men’. The Czech Minister of Education, Petr Piťha, stated that one of the consequences of ratifying the Istanbul Convention would be the creation of ‘concentration camps for parents, who raised their children traditionally—to raise the girls as the girls and boys as the boys’ (Schreiberová, 2019). Thus, anti-gender actors argue that ‘gender ideology’ is a new form of totalitarianism imposed by the West.

‘Gender’, however, has a long and contentious history even amongst gender scholars in the country. Czech scholars, activists and policymakers have long debated the meanings and usefulness of the term within their own context (see Fojtová, 2016). As an English term developed in Anglo-academia, it has been associated with the historical imposition of Western ideas in post-socialist spaces. Today, however, those within Czechia’s gender equality community are resisting on two fronts. They resist a conservative movement that opposes the basic tenets of gender equality and sexual autonomy. At the same time, they work to construct their own version of Czech feminism, free from the imposition of Western concepts and practices.

This article highlights the agency of academics and activists in negotiating feminist concepts in non-Western contexts, specifically within Czechia. In the next section, I situate the conceptual history in postcolonial feminist literature and the literature on gender and feminism in post-socialist spaces. I then trace the negotiations around ‘gender’ in the Czech context by analysing three critical phases. The first phase examines the history of the Czech women’s movement before the term gender emerged into parlance for Czech academics. The second phase begins with the introduction of ‘gender’ to a Czech academic audience in the 1990s, demonstrating how Czech academics negotiated the inclusion and exclusion of ‘gender’ into their scholarship and teaching. The third section discusses developments in the use of ‘gender’ in Czech policy documents beginning with the EU accession process, following through the post-accession period after 2004 and the implementation of gender mainstreaming policies. I show that while feminist activists from North America and Western Europe played a significant role in helping to establish gender studies centres and promoting gender equality policies in Czechia, ‘gender’ was never wholly imported, contrary to the claims of anti-gender actors. Rather, notions of ‘gender’ were debated and negotiated by local academics, activists and policymakers—a debate that is still ongoing today, as those within the gender equality community grapple with the history of the socialist past in an attempt to build a more gender-equal future.

feminism in a contested space: bridging postcolonial and post-socialist literature

Highlighting the agency of women outside Western contexts and complicating Western notions of gender and sexuality has long been the work of postcolonial feminist scholarship. A seminal work in this vein is Saba Mahmood’s (2005) examination of the Women’s Mosque Movement in Egypt, drawing attention to women’s support for and activity in the Islamic Revival. Mahmood counters the dominant false-consciousness narrative, the idea that women who participate in these movements are unaware of their own oppression. Similarly, many Czech gender scholars are critical of how this false-consciousness narrative has also been applied to women in post-socialist states by activists and academics from North America and Western Europe (see Šiklová, 1997). Contrary to understanding post-socialism as a geographic or temporal reality and postcolonialism as a critical academic study, Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery (2009, p. 11) argue that both post-socialism and postcolonialism are critical standpoints in scholarship, with postcoloniality serving as a critical standpoint on the colonial present and post-socialism serving as a critical standpoint for evaluating the socialist past, including the continuing effects of Cold War institutions on power and knowledge, and recent neoliberal transitions. Lived experiences under post-socialism have been pushed to the periphery of knowledge production and much can be gained by bridging post-socialist with postcolonial scholarship (see Chari and Verdery, 2009; Kołodziejczyk and Şandru, 2016). Madina Tlostanova (2012) suggests using the concept of ‘colonially’ within the context of Central Eastern Europe, Eastern Europe and Eurasia to emphasise ‘mind colonisation’ or ‘colonisation of knowledge and being’ rather than colonialism which focuses on direct exportations of land and resources.

Central and East European scholars have historically resisted the colonisation of knowledge through their opposition to Russification under Soviet control, and today they resist the colonisation of knowledge through debates regarding the use of Anglophone terms. Judith Butler comments on this complexity of resistance to the translation of ‘gender’, stating:

the fear of ‘gender’ as a destructive cultural imposition from English (or from the Anglophone world) manifests a resistance to translation that deserves critical attention. As much as the resistance to cultural imperialism is surely warranted, so too is the resistance to forms of linguistic nationalism that seek to purify its language of foreign elements and the disturbance to syntactical ways of organizing the world that they can produce. (Butler, 2021, p. 15)

Rosi Braidotti (2002) shows that these conversations have taken place in many European countries in which academics have debated using their language’s native term for sex and adding ‘social sex’ to denote gender. Crucially, Braidotti (ibid., p. 295) notes that international and European organisations have been crucial in the spread of ‘gender’, such as the platform of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995), which referenced ‘gender’ as an omnipresent concept.

These debates, however, were not confined to the European context. Catherine M. Cole, Takyiwaa Manuh and Stephan F. Miescher (2007) show that discussions at the Women in Africa and Africa Diaspora Conference held in Nigeria in 1992 included a preference for the term ‘gender’ over ‘feminism’ due to the former’s perceived academic neutrality. These discussions were similar to the debates regarding feminism in Central and Eastern Europe at the time.

Moreover, bridging post-socialism with postcolonialism is an academic endeavour and a project of transnational feminist activism. The voices of activists from former state socialist countries have been historically silenced in the realm of transnational feminist activism (see Ghodsee, 2019). Due to the perceived successful transition of former state socialist countries to democracy and market economies, activists from North America and Western Europe assumed that the feminist concepts and practices developed in these countries could be transferred to those in post-communist Europe, thereby silencing the activists and the specific needs of women in previously considered ‘second world’ countries (Suchland, 2011). At the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, activists from former state socialist countries claimed that they had been ‘intentionally shut out’ from global feminist activism (ibid., p. 837). Indeed, Kristen Ghodsee (2018) and Věra Sokolová (2021) have argued that women and sexual minorities resisted dominant patriarchal and heteronormative discourses under state socialism and, in some ways, experienced more autonomy than women, gender and sexual minorities living in the United States and Western Europe during specific time periods. Thus, resistance to gender essentialism and heteronormativity was never wholly imported from the West.

methodological approach to the conceptual history

In examining similar critiques of Western feminism across many postcolonial spaces, Kornelia Slavova (2006) encourages feminist scholars to look at Western feminisms through the eyes of East European and Third World women. Adopting Slavova’s postcolonial sensibility, I trace the term ‘gender’ from the 1990s when it was introduced to a Czech academic audience through public seminars and lectures put on by the Prague Gender Studies Centre to EU accession and the post-accession era with the inclusion of gender mainstreaming in Czech policy documents. I draw on scholarly literature in the field of gender studies to show how Czech terms for sex, including ‘rod’ and ‘pohlaví’, were deployed in the state socialist period. I then trace the negotiations surrounding ‘gender’ as the term was debated within academic circles throughout the 1990s. For the analysis, I utilise course proposals and lecture notes of seminars, lectures, workshops and roundtables hosted during this time, including the lecture series ‘Gender-Culture-Society’ hosted by the Prague Gender Studies Centre at Charles University from 1992 to 1994 and Masaryk University in Brno in 1995. These lectures were intended to educate a broad academic audience about ‘gender’ and gender relations. Furthermore, these lectures often included debates around the appropriateness of the term in Czechia. The original programmes of seminars held between 1992 and 1994 were provided by the Prague Gender Studies Centre.² I also include articles published in the Czech-English bilingual journal Czech Sociological Review’s 1999 special issue on ‘The Position of Czech Women in the Society of the 1990s in the Spectrum of Research’, in which contributors discussed their courses, and the special edition of the journal Jedním Okem (One Eye Open), which highlights the debates around the terms ‘gender’ and ‘feminism’. I then outline the incorporation of ‘gender’ into state-level policies primarily through the projects of gender mainstreaming promoted by the EU. Relying on the country’s Action Plan for the Prevention of Domestic and Gender-Based Violence for 2015–2018 (Office of the Government of the Czech Republic, 2015), Government Strategy for Equality of Women and Men in the Czech Republic for 2014–2020 (Office of the Government of the Czech Republic, 2014) and the first Action Plan of the Czech Republic to Implement Security Council Resolution UN Security Council No. 1325 (2000) on Women, Peace and Security and Related Resolutions for the Years 2017-2020 (Office of the Government of the Czech Republic, 2017), I show that while these documents include the concepts of gender and gender mainstreaming, they diverge from the traditional focus on women. Using this material, I trace the diverse ways that ‘gender’ is used over time and its relationship to other terms such as ‘feminism’, ‘women’ and ‘rights’. Materials selected for this article encompass the myriad ways that ‘gender’ was used in communication with the public (i.e. lectures and national action plans), demonstrating the breadth of the complexity of the term in the Czech context. Importantly, these documents also demonstrate sites where academics were in conversation with each other over the use of the term ‘gender’ (i.e. seminar programmes and published articles) and where government representatives, scholars and activists were in discussion with one another regarding ‘gender’ (i.e. the development of action plan documents).

In the following section, I examine the history of the women’s movement in Czechoslovakia, drawing attention to the myth of joint oppression, gender relations under state socialism and native Czech terms used to denote sex and linguist gender.

pre-concept: the Czechoslovak women’s movement before ‘gender’

In Czechia, formerly part of Czechoslovakia, the women’s movement dates back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the rhetoric surrounding women’s rights was tied to Czech nationalism and promoting an independent Czech state. Women’s involvement in education and political life was seen as essential to the nationalist movement because women played a vital role in keeping Czech culture alive during the Austro-Hungarian empire’s attempts to impose the German language and culture on the Czech people (see Saxonberg, 2003; Jusová, 2016). Moreover, the national myth of joint oppression—that both women and men were oppressed by outside political actors—was born during the period of Austro-Hungarian rule (Nash, 2002).³ After the First World War and the establishment of an independent Czechoslovak state, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first president of an independent Czechoslovakia, demonstrated strong support for women’s rights. During the interwar period, Czechoslovak women obtained the right to vote and hold office. However, Rebecca Nash (ibid.) argues that the discourse of women’s rights was deeply tied to women’s roles as mothers and wives, a narrative that Czech gender scholars later drew on.

gender and sexuality under state socialism

The national myth of joint oppression was also applied to the period under Nazi occupation during the Second World War and subsequent communist rule from 1948 to 1989. During the period of late state socialism, many prominent dissidents persistently repeated the myth of joint oppression, arguing that gender concerns should be put aside for men and women to work together to throw off their joint oppressor—the communist state (Einhorn, 1991; Heitlinger, 1996). Nevertheless, gender stereotypes and gendered labour expectations persisted throughout the communist era. Women were responsible for what has been called the double and triple burdens of labour outside the home, housework, childcare and, at times, eldercare. During the twentieth century, women did not have the right to organise with specific gendered concerns. In the mid-to-late twentieth century, democratisation movements placed a heavy emphasis on human rights. Nash (2002) argues that Czech gender scholars have drawn on this myth of joint oppression and the ‘feminist legacy’ of the interwar period to represent an indigenous Czech feminist tradition, one in which women are not in conflict with the state or their male counterparts; therefore, it is different from Western feminist movements that are historically in opposition to the state and often perceived as ‘anti-male’ within Central Eastern European contexts.

During the period of state socialism, the state’s agenda of egalitarianism addressed some of the same issues that were fundamental to feminist organising in the West, such as women’s participation in the labour market, access to education, access to publicly funded childcare and abortion rights; however, other issues of concern to Western feminists such as gender stereotypes and unequal sexual relations between men and women remained unaddressed under state socialism (Wagnerová, 2016). Moreover, terms fundamental to the development of feminist theory in the West, such as ‘patriarchy’, were not only foreign to the Czech language but the concept was also rejected by Czech gender scholars who argued that the term did not apply in the Czech context (Havelková, 1993; Šiklová, 1998). Hana Havelková (1993, p. 62) argues that feminist concepts developed in the West do not apply to the Czech context because ‘general human problems’ were put above ‘sexed identity’. Jiřina Šiklová (1999, p. 129) predicts that while feminism will spread around the world, feminists must focus on social problems, rather than a struggle between men and women (‘boj muže a ženy’) as Šiklová claims is indicative of Western feminism.

While an equivalent to the term gender was not used explicitly in Czech discourse, Věra Sokolová (2021) finds that Czech sexologists publishing in the mid-twentieth century sometimes acknowledged the difference between biological sex and socially constructed gender roles in their publications. Sokolová states:

official sexological writings also contain unexpected arguments, which show that not all Czechoslovak sexologists shared the binary and biological determined notions of gender and sexuality. For example, in 1976 sexologists Eva Brauerová, Viera Satková, and Antonín Topiař argued that the ‘relative insignificance of the biological differences between the sexes mean[s] that the “male” and “female” are in the end nothing more than erotically conditioned ideals, which are subordinated to historical and individual changes’. (ibid., p. 69)

Nevertheless, the Czech language did not possess a term that conveys a sociological category of analysis or socially constructed gender roles. Prior to the 1990s, not only were few Czechs familiar with the term ‘gender’, but the public’s distaste for egalitarian ideologies made organising around such terms difficult for Czech activists (Šiklová, 1998; Hašková and Uhde, 2016). In contrast, native to the Czech language are two terms, ‘rod’ and ‘pohlaví’. Pohlaví refers to one’s biological sex, while rod refers to gender in the linguistic sense. Beginning in the 1990s when ‘gender’ was introduced to a broad Czech academic audience, Czech gender scholars began to debate the suitability of these native terms in the emerging field of gender studies in the country along with the English term ‘gender’.

the beginnings: introducing ‘gender’ in Czech feminist discourses (1991–1998)

‘Gender’ was introduced to a broad academic audience in 1991 through the Centre for Gender Studies in Prague. The Centre served as a library and coordinating area for academics, activists and artists in the region. It was started with the financial help of the Network of East-West Women, headed by Ann Snitow in the apartment of Jiřina Šiklová on Klimentská Street in Prague. Here, feminist texts were collected in Czech, English and German, and meetings took place amongst different groups of individuals interested in women’s issues and questions of gender and sexuality (see Simerská, 1999). While some Czech academics were familiar with the term ‘gender’ from English texts, particularly those who taught in English departments at Czech universities throughout the communist era, the term was virtually unknown to the general public, and those who had heard the English term associated it with the growing sex industry at the time. Snitow (2019) recounts the experience of attempting to open a bank account with Šiklová in the organisation’s name. The bank teller, confused by the word ‘gender’ in the title, assumed they were attempting to open a brothel. Nevertheless, the term gender was attractive to many Czech scholars because it did not seemingly carry the ideological baggage of the term ‘feminism’ at the time. Rebecca Nash states:

women and men involved in gender studies activities prefer the term ‘gender’ to feminism because they interpret it as more open to negotiation. Yet there is no consensus on how then to formulate the word ‘gender’ in Czech, which often goes untranslated from English, such as in the title of the Prague Gender Studies Centre (Centrum pro Gender Studies v Praze). (Nash, 2002, p. 294)

Hana Hašková (2011, p. 149) notes that those starting the Centre decided to leave the term ‘gender’ untranslated, given that the native term ‘rod’ primarily refers to the grammatical category of gender, the Slavic roots of which also denote kinship and family, thus using ‘rod’ for Gender Studies would have been misleading.

In an effort to expose academics and students to gender analyses and theories, from 1992 to 1994, the Centre for Gender Studies organised a lecture series titled ‘Gender-Culture-Society’ at Charles University in Prague. The lecture cycle was extended to Masaryk University in Brno and Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí and Labem the following year (Simerská, 1999). These lecture series showcase vibrant debates among scholars regarding the nature and future of the Czech feminist movement and the use of ‘gender’ in Czech academia. Revealed through the titles of the lectures and notes associated with this series is the many ways in which ‘gender’ was used. Czech academics used the term to relate specifically to women, they used the term to refer to a sociological category of analysis and they questioned the very applicability of the English term in the Czech context.

While many of the workshops and public lectures utilised the term ‘gender’, such as the workshops ‘Gender and Spirituality’ and ‘Gender Roles in Literature During the 2nd World War’, some scholars decided to use the term ‘women’ in their workshops and seminars, such as in the workshops ‘Women and Religion’ and ‘Women and Crime’ held in 1992. In 1993, the Centre associated with the Philosophical Faculty at Charles University in Prague hosted a public lecture and roundtable discussion with Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Vaclav Belohradsky and Miroslav Petříček entitled ‘Feminism and Postmodernism’. Thus, these lectures covered a variety of topics and led to diverse discussions of women, gender and feminism.⁴

Czech ecofeminist discourses: a gender essentialist approach

In the same year, the Centre hosted a seminar entitled ‘Approaches to Ecofeminism’ taught by Hana Svobodová. Ecofeminism had a large following among Czech academics and feminists in the 1990s, and it represented a gender essentialist form of feminism. In the early 1990s, some Czech intellectuals and feminists practised a form of ecofeminism, emphasising a version of ‘difference feminism’ (Argent, 2008). Czech ecofeminists argued that women were better able to lead the country through the transition process than their male counterparts and serve as democratic leaders due to women’s (perceived) peaceful and conciliatory nature. These feminists wanted the ‘female voice’ to be heard. According to Angela Argent (ibid.), at the time, many Czech feminist intellectuals believed that the system of state socialism was a masculine regime, and its faults were due to its inadequacy to incorporate female knowledge. Argent states:

feminist intellectuals in Prague accepted the claim that was commonly held in central Europe throughout the 1990s, that state socialism was a form of foreign domination by an alien power that was ‘contrary to nature’, in that it treated two entirely different sexes as if they were ‘the same’. Czech feminists, like other feminists in the region, viewed the end of state socialism as a restoration of the natural order, in which ‘women’s values’ and the ‘natural’ role of women as nurturers held a crucial place. However, Czech feminist intellectuals also asserted strong views about the public roles that they claimed women must perform. The problematic definition of sexual difference offered by some Czech feminist intellectuals assumed that ‘strong women’ could chasten a society contaminated by irresponsible men. (ibid., p. 260)

Ecofeminists represent a version of Czech feminism with gender essentialist beliefs, and many opted for the terms ‘women’ and ‘feminism’ over ‘gender’ in their work. Meanwhile, many other Czech scholars also opted for ‘feminism’ over ‘gender’ in their work, arguing that ‘feminism’ was a more inclusive term. The idea of ‘gender’ as a neutral term that obscures the differences between men and women caused some professors to resist incorporating ‘gender’ into their courses, even when these courses dealt with questions of gender relations. For example, Hana Havelková (1999), who taught the course ‘Feminist Theory’ at Charles University, explains the use of the term ‘feminist’ rather than ‘gender’ in the title. Havelková states:

not only were many important works of feminist theory written long before the concept of gender began to be used in the sense it is today, contemporary feminist thought does not accept without reservations the dualist concept of sex-gender. The attempt to create a politically (humanistically) neutral gender studies is not so much a question of rejecting ideology, but rather of rejecting the critiques of ideology. (ibid., p. 260)

Thus, Havelková felt ‘feminism’ was a more general term that provided insight into the social and cultural contexts in which people live. As this section demonstrates, some Czech scholars rejected ‘gender’ which they perceived as a neutral, academic term lacking the social praxis of feminism’s focus on women.

gender as a social construction in Czech feminist discourse

To complicate matters further, some scholars also used ‘gender’ to convey a social construction. This is evidenced by a special edition publication of the journal Jedním Okem (One Eye Open) by Marci Shore, Jacqui True and Eva Vesinova published in 1998. The special issue claims to ‘reintroduce the analytic concept of gender as a lens through which to view events and social transformations of twentieth century Czecho/slovakia’. In the introduction to this special issue, gender is defined as:

the socially-constructed identities of masculinity and femininity that to a large extent, give us our sense of place and temporal order. It is through gender relations between men and women, and within families and communities, for instance, that the reproduction of tradition and group belonging is made possible. (True, 1998, p. iv)

Therefore, the term gender was not only used as a synonym for ‘women’ or ‘women’s issues’; some also used it as a more inclusive term to refer to the socially constructed roles and behaviours assigned to women and men. In this way, the term was used as a sociological concept that applies to all people.

Marie Čermáková, the founder of the Department of Gender and Sociology at the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, also uses ‘gender’ as a sociological concept in the courses ‘Gender and the Labour Market’ and ‘Gender and Sociology’ at Charles University. Čermáková (1999, p. 259) justifies using ‘gender’ by arguing that the courses focus on the ‘way in which gender subjects penetrate sociology and the social sciences’. Čermáková adds that because the term ‘feminism’ is rejected in Czech society, there is no other option but to concentrate on teaching students methods of gender analysis in the social sciences. Nonetheless, Čermáková (ibid.) is clear that the courses’ content focuses on ‘the position of women, particularly Czech women’.

the rejection of ‘gender’ in Czech feminist discourse

Finally, there was discussion about whether the term gender should be used at all. Activists pointed to the lack of a Czech-language equivalent to ‘gender’. In Karen Kapusta-Pofahl’s study of attitudes on Western feminism in Czechia in the late 1990s and early 2000s, one of her interviewees articulates their dislike of the word ‘gender’ in the following way:

we have a big problem with the term gender. [It is used] in the English form, which is problematic. It looks ridiculous when we translate it into the Czech form … Gender Studies at Charles University uses the term rod, which is the Czech word to describe differences in language. We don’t have a perfect translation, that’s the problem … [Nevertheless] Gender seems to be entering the Czech language. We’re beginning to see it used in different grammatical forms, which means it’s entering the language. [Gender] is not a feminist term … It’s a sociological term that doesn’t concern only women but also men. (Kapusta-Pofahl, 2002, p. 65)

For these reasons, while Czech academics gradually began to incorporate the term gender into their research and teaching, many of them opted to use the indigenous Czech term ‘rod’ instead, attempting to redefine ‘rod’ to mean gender not only in the linguistic sense but also as a sociological category. In the spring of 1993, Jiřina Šmejkalová-Strickland proposed a seminar titled ‘Gender-Rod Kultura, Společnost’ (‘Gender-Sex Culture, Society’). In the seminar proposal, Šmejkalová-Strickland states that ‘students will question the genus of men and women [ženského a mužaského rod] and critical theory around feminism [feministického]’. Academics attempted to reappropriate ‘rod’ and use it as a replacement for ‘gender’. Commenting on this negotiation process amongst Czech academics with Western feminist terms, Šiklová (1997, p. 76) later stated: ‘we frequently use the same words, the same terms, yet their content is different because different historical experiences underlie the same concept’.

This section has highlighted the various concerns around the use of ‘gender’ in the Czech context, from translation issues of an English term into the Czech language to the applicability of the term to the Czech experience. However, what occurred in the 1990s is what Simona Fojtová (2016, p. 117) refers to as ‘negotiation rather than a negation of western feminism in Eastern and Central Europe’. This negotiation took place as Czech feminists joined transnational feminist organisations and sought to highlight the specific concerns of women in post-socialist contexts and the Czech experience both at home and internationally. These negotiations were the precursor to the next decades when Czechia joined the EU, and gender-related discourse became ingrained in official policy.

European Union accession and post accession (1998 to present)

In 1998, the Centre for Gender Studies was approved as an independent academic centre within the Department of Social Work at Charles University. The goal of the Centre was to offer a variety of interdisciplinary gender-related courses to students from all departments at the university.⁵ In 2004, the Czech Ministry of Education accredited the Department of Gender Studies at Charles University.⁶ During this time, Czechia also started the process of accession to the EU. During the EU accession process, countries are required to bring their legal codes into line with EU law, and many women’s rights activists saw accession to the EU as an opportunity for gender equality policies to be codified in Czech national law. However, this would also mean transferring the language used by the EU into Czech law and policy documents. In 2004, Czechia completed the accession process. Since then, the country has been required to maintain a government office that promotes and implements gender equality measures, known as the Government Council for Equality Between Women and Men (the Council). These measures primarily revolve around the EU’s promotion of gender mainstreaming. The inclusion of gender mainstreaming has played a role in the shifting notions of ‘gender’ in the Czech context.

gender mainstreaming in the Czech context

Gender mainstreaming is an approach to policymaking that is considered by the Council of Europe to be a ‘long term strategy that goes hand-in hand [sic] with specific policies for the advancement of women’ (Council of Europe, 2018). It requires evaluating public policies for their effect on women specifically and integrating the perspective of gender equality at all levels of policymaking. After the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, the EU announced that it would implement gender mainstreaming as part of EU policymaking. In 1998, the Council of Europe defined gender mainstreaming as ‘the (re)organisation, improvement, development and evaluation of policy processes, so that a gender equality perspective is incorporated in all policies at all levels and at all stages, by the actors normally involved in policymaking’ (ibid.).

With the influence of EU accession and gender-mainstreaming policies, the definition of gender as a social construction has made its way into Czech government documents. However, Czechia’s Government Council for Equality Between Women and Men, which constructs these reports, includes a diverse group of activists and gender scholars, and the ways in which ‘gender’ and ‘gender mainstreaming’ are incorporated into the documents reflect a negotiation of these terms. In the 2015 Action Plan for the Prevention of Domestic and Gender-Based Violence, ‘gender’ refers to:

socially and culturally subjected and construed differences between women and men which are historically and locally changeable. It does not refer to innate and unchanging characteristics of women and men, but it reflects the actual status of social relationships between women and men. As such, gender stands in contrast to biological differences between women and men. (Office of the Government of the Czech Republic, 2015, p. 5)

Furthermore, the Government Strategy for Equality of Women and Men in the Czech Republic for 2014–2020 (Office of the Government of the Czech Republic, 2014) promotes gender equality and gender mainstreaming. The Strategy refers to gender equality as:

The basic principle of democratic society is respect for dignity of all people and respecting their human rights which arise from interstate regulations (in particular constitutional laws), as well as international obligations (in particular legally binding international treaties and other documents). Gender equality is such a human right and it is a pillar of democratic society. It is also a principle ensuring freedom to men and women allowing them to decide in what way they will develop their abilities and in what way they will engage in public and private life. Gender equality is therefore an important factor for ensuring and maintaining consensus and stability through society at social as well as economic level. (ibid., p. 4)

National action plans on gender-based violence and strategies for gender equality are required by the EU. However, these documents have undergone a long process of negations between Czech academics, activists and policymakers. Members of the Council that work to compose these documents include policymakers, long-time members of the gender equality community, managers of prominent women’s organisations and feminist academics from various Czech universities.⁷ In addition, Gender Focal Points (GFPs) were created in the early 2000s as employees at specific ministries responsible for implementing gender mainstreaming. The work of GFPs is reviewed annually by Members of the Council and it is recommended that individuals who serve as GFPs hold degrees in gender studies, law or the social sciences.⁸

gender inequality as a concern for women and men

In 2016, the Czech government produced its first Action Plan of the Czech Republic to Implement Security Council Resolution UN Security Council No. 1325 (2000) on Women, Peace and Security and Related Resolutions for the Years 2017–2020 (Office of the Government of the Czech Republic, 2017). Throughout this document, the phrase ‘gender equality’ appears regularly alongside ‘empowering women’ and the concept of ‘human rights’. Moreover, ‘gender neutral’ and ‘gender sensitivity’ are mentioned in the document within the context of balancing the representation between women and men. The document states that one of the measures that will be taken is ‘the use of gender-sensitive advertising or establishment of gender-balanced selection committees’. (ibid., p. 7). Furthermore, it notes that the police of the Czech Republic are ‘trying to be gender neutral (resp. gender-sensitive) in the context of media campaigns and recruitment events (displaying active police officers on billboards, information leaflets, etc.)’ (ibid., p. 9). Thus, the Czech police state that they try to be gender neutral with respect to the country’s gender-sensitive policies to balance the representation of men and women in the police force.

Rather than conceptualising gender equality and gender mainstreaming as concepts that apply primarily to women, as is common at the European level, within the Czech context gender inequality is articulated as a problem that affects both women and men, albeit in different ways. This is further highlighted in the Government Strategy for Equality of Women and Men in the Czech Republic for 2014–2020 (Office of the Government of the Czech Republic, 2014), which adopts a gender equality approach and includes a discussion of men in the section titled ‘Men and gender equality’. In it, the report states the main goal as ‘increased identification of men with the agenda of gender equality, increasing proportion of men participating in care, opening discussion on so-called men [sic] topics, in particular fatherhood and men’s health’ (ibid., p. 27). Furthermore, the Gender Equality Strategy for 2021–2030 (Office of the Government of the Czech Republic, 2021, p. 14) includes a section entitled ‘The role of men’, in which the authors discuss how men continue to be disadvantaged by gender stereotypes, such as the low levels of Czech men who take parental leave due to gender stereotypes and gendered income discrepancies in the household. The strategy (ibid., p. 15) states in reference to men that ‘pressure to perform can negatively impact their mental and physical health. Similarly, there are other areas where men are disadvantaged. The strategy reflects across all its chapters the negative effects of gender stereotypes on men’. Discussing men’s disadvantages alongside women’s represents a break with the traditional conception of gender mainstreaming as an approach to policymaking that takes into account women’s interests and concerns.

As the above descriptions indicate, international organisations, especially the EU, have played a role in defining ‘gender’ in the Czech context: the Czech government and other Czech organisations adopted the definition of gender as a social construction in line with the EU’s gender mainstreaming platform. However, this concept was not wholly imported or uncritically accepted by those within the gender equality community in Czechia, but rather negotiated and adapted to the Czech context.

Throughout the 2000s, Czech academics continued to publish using the term ‘gender’ in various fields, from the social sciences and humanities to law.⁹ Well into the twenty-first century, the concept of gender mainstreaming continues to play a prominent role in the work of Czech gender equality activists. The Prague Gender Studies Centre continues to maintain a commitment to gender mainstreaming goals (Frýdlová and Jonášová, 2022). Activists have even used the country’s commitment to gender mainstreaming to resist anti-gender discourse. Crucially, in 2021, the director of the Czech Women’s Lobby, Hana Stelzerová, represented the non-governmental sector at the UN National Voluntary Review of Agenda 2030. Stelzerová presented recommendations for the Government Council for Sustainable Development of the Czech Republic, which included supporting gender mainstreaming at all levels and connected the ratification of the Istanbul Convention to the government’s intended promotion of gender mainstreaming.¹⁰

conclusions

‘Gender’ has been a contested term within the Czech context from the early 1990s through to the present day. Before the 1990s, Czechs used two words native to the Czech language, ‘rod’ meaning gender in the linguistic sense and ‘pohlaví’ which refers to biological sex. In the 1990s, when borders opened and English feminist texts were introduced on a large scale, Czech academics debated the meaning of ‘gender’ and how they should apply it within their own historical, social and political context. It was used in myriad ways. Some used it to refer specifically to women while others have used it as a sociological category of analysis. Nevertheless, throughout the 2000s, Czech academics continued to publish using the term ‘gender’. With Czechia’s application to join the EU, the Czech government was required to implement gender equality policies and produce reports addressing gender inequality, centring on the goal of gender mainstreaming. As a result, the use of ‘gender’ to refer to negative stereotypes that apply primarily to women was included in Czechia’s policy documents. However, this was not the sole use of the term; the country’s Government Strategy for Equality of Women and Men in the Czech Republic for 2014–2020 (Office of the Government of the Czech Republic, 2014) and Gender Equality Strategy for 2021–2030 (Office of the Government of the Czech Republic, 2021) reveal that men’s roles and the effects of gender stereotypes on men were also included in discussions of gender equality and gender mainstreaming. The ways in which ‘gender’ and ‘gender mainstreaming’ are incorporated into the documents also reflect a negotiation of these terms.

However, anti-gender actors have ignored this complex history of how ‘gender’ is negotiated in local contexts. The term ‘gender’ has been under assault by conservative actors attempting to delegitimise gender as a social construction and argue that only biological sex exists. ‘Gender’ has been used as an umbrella term to attack women’s rights, gender equality, the rights of gender and sexual minorities, sex education in schools and reproductive freedom. Thus, ‘gender ideology’ has expanded to encompass a whole host of purported evils, and conservatives around the world have attacked ‘gender’ as a foreign import from the ‘West’. However, tracing the concept of ‘gender’ in Czechia highlights that this term was not uncritically imported from Anglo-academia, nor is the meaning of the term as self-evident as these conservative groups purport it to be. Czech academics and activists debated the applicability of the term within their own context and discussed how it might be received and understood by society, and they debated the definition of ‘gender’ and experimented with using native Czech terms in place of the English term.

This article’s argument is not that ‘gender’ is a meaningless term. On the contrary, the term gender has given many feminists and gender equality activists a way to explain, understand and think through the social application of stereotypes, norms and expectations applied to individuals separate from the concept of biological sex. Rather, the findings show that while the term gender may be an English term originating in Anglo-academia, it was not uncritically accepted by feminists outside of this context. On the contrary, it was and continues to be debated and negotiated by Czech academics, activists and policymakers in the gender equality community. In doing so, the term has taken on new meanings and has been examined and redefined within the Czech context.

These findings further draw attention to the agency of academics and activists in negotiating feminist concepts in non-Western contexts. Activists from many parts of the world have often been left out of and silenced in transnational feminist dialogue. With rising authoritarianism and suppression of women’s rights and gender equality across the region and beyond, local feminist activists have defended women’s rights, gender equality, the rights of sexual minorities and democracy. Understanding how feminist concepts are applied, rethought or replaced by local activists to represent their own experiences, culture and history is necessary for working together in global and local struggles and can work to undermine and complicate the claims made by anti-gender and other anti-feminist actors.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the Gender Studies Library in Prague for providing the lecture notes and syllabi of the Gender-Culture-Society lecture series necessary for this project. Thanks to Laura Sjoberg for feedback on an earlier version of this article. Special thanks to Taylor Robertson McDonald for encouraging me to pursue this project and providing valuable feedback throughout the process of writing this article. I am grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers and editors of Feminist Review for their insightful suggestions.

Notes

Author Biography

Alexandria Wilson-McDonald, PhD, is a professorial lecturer in the School of International Service at American University in Washington, DC. Her research focuses on gender and politics in Central Eastern Europe. She can be contacted at awilsonm@american.edu. Her ORCID iD is 0000-0002-5215-6707.

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