Tender solidarities and cracks in existence: Emerging feminist subjectivities in the landscape of postsocialist feminism

Abstract

This article offers an original conceptual intervention into debates on feminist subjectivity under postsocialist conditions of weakness, uneventfulness and persistence in Eastern European contexts. Drawing on Jolanta Brach-Czaina's philosophy of the ‘cracks in existence’ and the everyday bustle, it argues that feminist subjectivity in postsocialist contexts emerges not through rupture, visibility or autonomy but through relational practices of care, endurance, attentiveness and tenderness grounded in everyday life. The article introduces two interrelated concepts – subjectess and tender solidarities – as contributions to transnational feminist theory. Subjectess, a neologism inspired by the Polish podmiotka and its fermentative connotations, names a form of feminist subjectivity that is processual, relational and materially embedded, coming into being through slow, repetitive and often unnoticed practices. Tender solidarities are proposed as the affective and ethical relations that sustain this form of subject formation, complementing postsocialist feminist notions of weak resistance, uneventfulness and the everyday. They describe solidarities based not on identity or strategic action but on care, coexistence and responsiveness to fragility. Methodologically, the article combines hermeneutic reading and postsocialist feminist critique, treating fermentation and bustle as subject-formative metaphors that illuminate non-sovereign modes of agency. By foregrounding weak, uneventful and relational forms of feminist becoming, the article challenges dominant paradigms within transnational feminism and offers a framework for understanding how feminist subjectivities quietly yet persistently emerge within the cracks of everyday existence.