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Abstract

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Belarus began to develop a national system of education trying to balance the prioritization of Soviet legacy, strong state control, and processes of democratization. The system of education is a powerful translator of dominant ideologies and legitimate concepts, including the concepts of gender and sexuality. The Belarusian education system is an important component of the state machinery, meaning that changes in the education system are often interconnected with certain changes in public policy, and therefore reflect the official position related to various aspects of social life. In the article, I explore the application of gender education in Belarus, as well as the configuration of discourses that inform the concept of gender education in a specific local context. I analyze discourses of state legislation on education and textbooks on gender education. I argue that gender education was co-opted by the state to serve the interests of national security to legitimize one model of social relations and exclude others in favor of the interests of biopolitical governance, nation-building, and neoliberal ideology.

Keywords

Belarus biopolitics gender education heteronormativity nation neoliberalism

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Belarus began to develop a national system of education trying to balance prioritization of the Soviet legacy, strong state control, and processes of democratization. Belarus is often seen and analyzed only through the prism of the authoritarian regime and human rights violations that narrow down the context to the dichotomy of ‘democracy’ versus ‘dictatorship.’ The idea about Belarus as the ‘last dictatorship in Europe’ homogenizes the social and political processes in the country, as well as undervalues the influence of global processes. The official system of education in Belarus is not a direct product of the will of the authoritarian power to preserve the Soviet legacy, but a conglomerate of the Soviet politics, neoliberal ideology, international institutions, authoritarian power, and national ideology. In this case, ‘gender education’ is a good example that allows for considering Belarus beyond the authoritarian regime and in a more transnational perspective.

Gender education appeared in the post-Soviet Belarus under the pressure of international organizations and local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as a part of a process of democratization (United Nations Development Program, 1997). Western liberal discourses, together with the universalized idea about gender equality, traveled across the borders and nations without any awareness of particularities of local contexts and power relations (Arnot and Fennell, 2008: 4). As recent literature on policy mobility argues, the global policy actors such as, for example, international organizations, cannot transfer universally applicable patterns as ‘they emerge from and are responses to particular “local” sets of social and political conditions which are not replicated in the places to which they are transplanted’ (Cochrane and Ward, 2012: 5). Accordingly, although the international organizations and Belarusian democratic NGOs took the role of advocacy actors pushing the government to include gender knowledge in education (Shmidt and Solomatina, 2015: 61–62), liberalization and democratization in education coincided with the maintenance of the Soviet legacy and government’s desire to support the particular socioeconomic model (Leshchenko, 2008; Sidorovitch, 2005).

I argue that gender education was co-opted by the state to serve the interests of national security to legitimize one model of social relations and exclude others in favor of the interests of biopolitical governance, nation-building, and neoliberal ideology. Furthermore, gender education became a useful tool for the government to simulate the processes of democratization and liberalization in front of an international audience. For the Belarusian government, gender education serves as an important political tool to promote a certain model of family and social policy that contributes to the processes of neoliberalization in the country. In the article, I explore the implementation of gender education in Belarus, as well as the configuration of discourses that inform the concept of gender education in a specific local context. I analyze discourses of state legislation on education and textbooks on gender education. All legislative documents and textbooks were in Belarusian or Russian; the translations from Belarusian and Russian throughout this study are mine.

In the first part of the article, I describe the methodological framework of the research, explore the historical context of gender education in Belarus, and delineate the main forces that informed the concept of gender education. In the second part, I critically examine discourses of gender education in Belarus on the basis of an analysis of the textbooks. In the conclusions, I summarize the main results of the research and discuss the potential social ramifications.

Methods

The system of education is a powerful translator of dominant ideologies and legitimate concepts of gender and sexuality. It should be noted that the Belarusian education system is an important component of the state machinery, meaning that changes in the education system are often interconnected with certain changes in public policy, and therefore reflect the official position related to various aspects of social life.

The Belarusian education system preserves the main elements of the Soviet education model (Laurukhin, 2014) and divides the education process into two components: education as an academic learning and vospitaniie as a moral upbringing (Sidorovitch, 2005: 482). The term vospitaniie cannot be translated literally as ‘education’; this term combines connotations of both ‘education’ and ‘upbringing’ and refers to the aspects of moral education. So, if the term ‘education’ relates more to the processes of learning information, vospitaniie focuses on the promotion of certain values and moral stances that are positioned as dominant and common for the cultural context. Vospitaniie is aimed to shape people's ideas about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and influence their behavior based on certain cultural notions about morality, responsibility, and dignity. Therefore, in the article, I explore how gender education is applied and implemented in the post-Soviet Belarusian education system as gender vospitaniie.

Underlying this article is the belief that gender education is an interdisciplinary scholarship in gender and sexuality studies that gives students a basic understanding of the debates and perspectives in the field, as well as subverts and disrupts power relations and gender-based social stratifications interconnected with other social categories, such as race, ethnicity, social class, sexuality, disability, age, etc. I come from a position that gender education should be concerned with issues of how the contemporary power institutions produce new forms of rationality and construct normative subjectivities that are allowed to contribute to the population/ nation. This position provides me with an entry point to analyze gender education in Belarus from a perspective of the critical analysis of the appropriation and utilization of the transformative potential of gender theory with the purpose of maintaining power structures and dichotomies. Consequently, I argue that in Belarus gender education is a form of biopolitics that regulates the populations through sustaining and ordering the concepts of ‘national identity’ and ‘traditional values.’ Foucault (2003: 245) considers biopolitics as a mode of power, which operates through the administration of life, for example, through demographic natalist policy, concerned with fertility, morbidity, illness, life expectancy, and the effects of the environment. Also, biopolitics is based on a certain model of economic rationality. In particular, Foucault (2008: 144) defines biopolitics as a ‘neo-liberal art of governing’ that produces such rational mechanisms as insurance, savings, and safety measures and ‘enable[s] all individuals to achieve a level of income that will allow them the individual insurance, access to private property, and individual or familial capitalization with which to absorb risks.’ Thus, in the article, I explore the contradictions of implementation of gender education as a tool of biopolitical governance in Belarus.

To contribute to the understanding of how gender knowledge ‘travels’ to the local context and the role that gender education plays in the construction of the nation’s borders in post-Soviet Belarus, I critically examine official discourses of gender education, analyzing legislative documents and textbooks. Although discourse on gender education has existed in Belarus since 1991, I focus mainly on the period of 2011–2016, because the government officially legalized gender education in 2011 with the adoption of the new Code on Education. However, for the retrospective analysis, I address some key documents adopted in Belarus since 1991.

So, the main legal documents for the analysis are the Code on Education (2011), the National Action Plan on Gender Equality in the Republic of Belarus (2011–2015), the National Program on Demographic Security (2011–2015), the Program on Education and Youth Policy (2016–2020), and the Concept and Programs of the Continuous Education of Children and Youth (2011–2015; 2016–2020). In addition, I examined eight instructive and methodological letters of the Ministry of Education for the period from 2011 to 2017. Along with legislative documents, I analyzed eight textbooks on gender education recommended by the Ministry of Education. All textbooks were published during the period of 2011–2015 and recommended for teachers and instructors to use at the different levels of education (schools, colleges, and universities).

In this research, I am concerned with the ideological discursive mechanisms of the state legal apparatuses that claim to produce a discourse of ‘truth’ that should regulate all aspects of social life (Foucault, 2003: 24). Thus, discursive practices contribute to the creation and reproduction of the unequal distribution of power between social groups to maintain social order and hierarchies (Fairclough, 1995: 12). Furthermore, Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999) aver that power exercises itself in producing, ordering, and dominating relations between discursive practices in accordance with a certain ideology that determines people’s ability to choose among discursive practices. Therefore, discourse analysis allows for unpacking the concept of gender education as a product of various and contested political relations that include Soviet and post-Soviet politics, Western liberal epistemologies and thinking, neoliberal ideology, and authoritarian power. Consequently, gender education is a conglomerate of discourses that reflects the implementation of the specific liberal framework of gender equality to the context shaped by various forces. Furthermore, gender education is formed on the border of the democratization of education and the introduction of gender policy, which means that the implementation of gender education depends on both the potential of the civil sector organizations (in particular, women’s NGOs and feminist initiatives) and on the possibilities of transformation of the official system of education.

Institutionalization of gender education in Belarus

Gender education appeared in Belarus as a result of a combination of several controversial factors. First of all, international organizations and Belarusian NGOs promoted ideas of gender equality as a part of the democratization of society and education and pushed the government to take actions in adjusting national legislation in accordance with international norms. Women’s NGOs and Centers for Gender Studies published the first gender studies books and introduced the first courses and programs on gender education. At the same time, the development of the civil society sector coincided both with the government’s will to support communication with the international community and with the strengthening of the government’s interests in demographic policy. Further, I explore the historical context of legitimization of gender education in Belarus, taking into account the forces, the combination of which results in a very specific configuration of gender education’s directions and content.

After the collapse of the USSR, Belarus as a proclaimed new democratic nation-state formed its domestic policy, which coincided with the fast development of various NGOs, intergovernmental organizations, and new transnational reconfigurations, such as the European Union. Some domestic legislative norms were determined by international treaties, such as United Nations (UN) Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the Additional Protocol to CEDAW (2004), and the Beijing Declaration at the Fourth World Conference on Women (1995). Seyla Benhabib states that in this new environment:

Human rights declarations and treaties enable new actors – such as, women and ethnic, linguistic, and religious minorities – to enter the public sphere, to develop new vocabularies of public claim-making, and to anticipate new forms of justice to come in process of cascading democratic iterations. (Benhabib, 2011: 15).

The introduction of the concept of gender equality followed the democratization of education, the state’s desire to be included in the Bologna process, the appearance of alternative institutions, and growth of the NGOs, including women’s organizations (Gapova, 2010; Shmidt and Solomatina, 2015: 103–136). During the first four years of independence (1990–1994), the non-state higher education sector grew rapidly: 30 private universities were opened during this period (Laurukhin, 2014: 73). In 1992, the European Humanities University was founded with the focus on integration into the European educational space, ‘critically rethinking the Soviet higher education model and bringing attention to the question of westernizing the higher education system onto the Belarusian agenda’ (Laurukhin, 2014: 74–75). By the end of the 1990s, three centers for gender studies were operating in Minsk and they mobilized forces of both academia and activism to promote gender knowledge in education (Shchurko, 2015; Shmidt and Solomatina, 2015: 81–93). The Center for Gender Studies at the European Humanities University launched the Master’s Program in Gender Studies in 2000.

Up until the beginning of the 2000s, gender education remained the primary focus of solely the civil society sector. In 2000, official institutions for the first time included gender education or, in particular, gender vospitaniie, in the normative document – the Project of the Concept of Continuous Education of Children and Youth – that was finally adopted only in 2006. Gender vospitaniie is being applied predominantly only at the level of secondary education and is defined as a formation of understanding of women’s and men’s missions and roles in a society. Therefore, gender vospitaniie appears only in the normative documents about secondary education, such as the National Action Plan on the Improvement of the Situation of Children and Protection of their Rights (2004–2010, 2012–2016), National Plans on Gender Equality (2001–2005, 2008–2010, 2011–2015), the Law ‘On General Principles of State Youth Policy in Belarus’ (1992), The Concept of Continuous Education of Children and Youth (2006, 2015), the Programs of Continuous Education of Children and Youth (2006–2010, 2011–2015, 2016–2020), and the Code of the Republic of Belarus ‘On Education’ (2011). At the level of higher, graduate, or post-graduate education, the interest in gender studies remains a question of individual initiative both in the case of a research scholarship or a teaching practice. Gender researchers in official academia using their connections with activism and a symbolic capital in academia sometimes can initiate gender elective courses. However, these possibilities still depend on the private initiative and will of the institution. For the period from 1991 to 2014, only 57 PhD and Doctorate dissertations were defended in the area of gender studies and only two of them were about pedagogy and education (Shmidt and Solomatina, 2015: 63).

Official legitimization of gender education in 2011 occurs after a period of a strong state pressure on the civil sector when the number of NGOs was reduced significantly and governmental institutions have proved themselves as the only actors in gender policy (Burova and Yanchuk, 2014; Shchurko, 2015). Education institutions came through a huge backlash toward a didactic form of pedagogy, the ideological underpinning of the curriculum, and the reduction of social and humanitarian programs (Laurukhin, 2014: 77; Petroukovitch, 2000). Moreover, Belarus did not uphold the principles and values of the Bologna Process, such as academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and students’ participation in managing higher education (Laurukhin, 2014: 84–90; Polglase, 2013: 114). In 2004, the European Humanities University was closed and moved in exile to Vilnius, Lithuania, as well as the Center for Gender Studies, together with the Master’s Program in Gender Studies. One after another other centers for gender studies became inactive (Shmidt and Solomatina, 2015: 81–93).

Having ratified the international documents and norms, the government, at the same time, preserved norms and institutions rooted in the Soviet legacy toward education in general and ‘women’s issues’ in particular. Soviet gender order combined politics that declared equality (for example, labor and education equality) and, at the same time, corroborated biological determinism, ideas about ‘true’ womanhood, and ‘compulsory motherhood’ (Gradskova, 2007; Temkina and Zdravomyslova, 2005). Soviet education was centralized and under tight state control. The task of such aspects of education as vospitaniie was to produce ‘good’ Soviet citizens for the good of the state and to teach skills that are necessary for the economy (Sidorovitch, 2005: 484–485). Consequently, education was sterile in regards to any gender knowledge or sexuality education (Temkina, 2009). Post-Soviet Belarus preserved some legislation and politics about gender equality (women are guaranteed equal rights to vote, political participation, education, and employment) following both the Soviet legacy and the new liberal framework on gender equality transferred through the international treaties, as well as ideas about ‘true’ womanhood and ‘compulsory motherhood.’ At the beginning of the 2000s, the demographic policy became one of the main priorities of the state’s policy, with specific focus on women’s bodies and their reproductive capacities (Chikalova, 2009; Solomatina, 2011). The internal processes of post-Soviet nation-building pay special attention to the growth of the population and marking of the nation’s borders through absolutization and idealization of the family’s role and motherhood as the highest values (Chernova, 2012; Solomatina, 2014; Zhurzhenko, 2008). As recent feminist literature states, national identity and full citizenship are deeply intertwined with the racialized heteronormative familial ideals (Brandzel, 2005; McNeill, 2013). Heteronormativity is a political institute that legitimizes one kind of social relation and marginalizes and pathologizes the others: ‘Heteronormativity promotes the norm of social life as not only heterosexual but also married, monogamous, white, and upper-middle class’ (Brandzel, 2005: 190).

Elena Gapova (2005) states that the main features of the post-Soviet period in Belarus are the ‘lifting’ of masculinity and the ‘redefinition’ of a woman through concepts of motherhood and care that led to the intensification of the debates around abortions and reproduction, sexualization, and objectification of the female body. Women are still engaged by the state both as a labor and a reproductive force that results in special healthcare protection, the promotion of the ideology of motherhood as the main mission of a woman, and the ‘double burden’ of paid employment, child bearing, and domestic labor. A woman’s civil status is linked to her role as a mother, promoting the tendency of pushing women into more traditional social roles (Shchurko, 2012). Also, the state still proclaims special social protection for women (paid maternal leave, protection/ restriction from certain kinds of jobs, free healthcare, and child care services) that, at the same time, de facto is reduced significantly due to the increasing neoliberal trends manifested in the privatization and commercialization of social services and the diminution of social spending (Solomatina, 2014). In addition, the participation of women in the labor market, the emancipation and stirring up of the women’s/feminist movement caused the necessity to find new forms of control and support for ‘traditional gender order’ that resulted in a shift of the public focus on a woman’s body and the unfolding of ‘moral panics’ and political manipulations around sexuality and reproduction (Pagulich, 2012; Rivkin-Fish, 2006).

Thus, for example, the National Plan on Gender Equality (2011–2015) includes tasks to ensure equal representation of men and women on all levels and in all spheres of social life, but, at the same time, the National Plan aims to strengthen the institute of ‘traditional’ family and to promote family values. This contradiction is reflected in gender education’s aim – to inform students’ knowledge about women’s and men’s roles and mission in life (Code of the Republic of Belarus On Education, 2011: Article 18). The Program of Continuous Education of Children and Youth (2016–2020) literally melds gender and family vospitaniie together: ‘family and gender vospitaniie focuses on the formation of a responsible attitude toward family, marriage, child-rearing, and lucid perceptions of the role and purpose of men’s and women’s lives in today's society.’ In the next section, I explore how textbooks on gender vospitaniie reflect the official politics and ideologies.

Teaching gender in Belarus

The textbooks demonstrate that the content of gender education is constructed along with the discourses on gender equality, demography, and ‘traditional family values.’ Also, the textbooks use the term ‘gender vospitaniie’ instead of gender education. Official discourse uses gender vospitaniie as a tool to legitimize normative subjects that are prescribed with characteristics of heterosexuality, fertility, health, prosperity, and domesticity, based on traditional family values. I argue that this model of gender order serves the aims of particular socioeconomic inclinations and contributes to the social stratification of the population.

Lisa Duggan (2003: 15–16) denotes that neoliberal regulation of the population uses some cultural norms and identity politics to support particular power redistribution and to sustain certain social order. Duggan (2003: 42) states that neoliberal politics manifests itself in the privatization of social services and focuses on personal responsibility as the state’s functions and support are reduced, budgetary wage costs are cut, and more social costs are absorbed by the civil society and family. The dominant idea that the main childcare activity should stay within family obligations together with the general trend of diminishing state social support contribute to the significant reduction of public childcare services. For example, one of the priorities of the National Program of Social and Economic Development of the Republic of Belarus (2011–2015) is the development of human potential, which includes the following:

The main priorities in social policy are the increase of the birth rates with a simultaneous increase in life expectancy, large and strong families, perspective youth full of opportunities, active labor work that brings prosperity, financially secured and decent life in the old age.

In this quote, it is possible to see that the official policy uses the combination of cultural norms, market relations, and state regulation. In particular, it means that the official policy supports normative identities, such as, for example, many-children families, and marginalizes and attacks mono-parent families, poor families, and childfree people. These ideas are also represented in the textbooks on gender vospitaniie. In this part, I unpack the basic principles that are utilized in the construction of a certain model of gender vospitaniie.

Gender vospitaniie grounds on rigid gender dichotomy, heteropatriarchy, and gender stratification of social reality. Official discourse outlines a core aim of gender vospitaniie – the necessity to preserve gender binaries and borders of gender identities. Gender vospitaniie is based on the theoretical framework that differentiates between sex and gender, where sex is biologically determined and unchangeable, and gender is socially constructed but nevertheless rooted in the biological differences. Although gender is a social construct, the textbooks determine gender dichotomy as inevitable and natural: ‘As there is no strength without weakness, south without north, a day without a night, so women cannot exist without men, and men - without women’ (Bogdanovich, 2013: 42). Therefore, gender vospitaniie is determined as a form of education that creates conditions for children to realize their gender identity and acquire knowledge about and skills for appropriate gender-based behavior.

Heteronormativity is seen as the only principle of human development. Non-conforming gender identities are portrayed as ‘threats’ to the existence of society. Although Belarus decriminalized homosexuality in 1994 and depathologized it in 2002 with the adoption of the revised International Classification of Diseases-10, the textbooks still utilize pathologizing rhetoric in relation to any ‘suspicious’ behavior or gender non-conforming representations or identities. For example, in one of the textbooks, the author states:

The current stage of the development of the society is characterized by a situation when the boundaries between the sexes became more blurred. On the one hand (together with the competent psycho-pedagogical support of gender socialization), this indicates the expansion of opportunities and manifestations of personality. On the other hand, situations when the gender identification occurs spontaneously, are a serious threat because of the increased amount of sexual deviances in society and violations of the family institution's foundations. (Alekhnovich, 2013: 4)

In the other textbook, ‘Gender and Media,’ the authors characterize transgender people as the ‘dead end of evolution’ (Sidorskaya and Radu, 2014: 11). The ‘deviances’ are portrayed as a result of the intense transformations of the society and liberalization:

With the return of a woman into the sphere of production the process of the emancipation of women and democratization of gender relations begins and carries both positive and negative moments. Having achieved equal rights with men to participate in public life, women took over men’s roles and with them, unfortunately, corresponding forms of behavior: aggression, authoritativeness, dictatorship, and forcing tactics in resolving conflicts. Gender alienation is typical for the modern man too; he often is devoid of inner freedom and self-confidence; he has a streak of apathy, passivity, avoidance of difficulties, fault-finding, and protervity in his character. The massive weakening of femininity and masculinity – a great psychological disaster for the family life and culture of love in general. (Astapovich, 2011: 3–4)

New economic and social challenges contribute to the production of moral panics around the fear of ‘erasure of national traditions and cultural values.’ Gender identities serve as markers of national and cultural belonging. Consequently, the textbooks position the traditional gender model not only as biologically determined and natural, but also as a necessary part of ‘Slavic culture’: ‘High school students should comprehend the system of traditional Slavic cultural beliefs and convictions, such as ‘men and women should perform different roles in the family,’ ‘man is a family bastion, a source of family prosperity and a protector, the one who solves problems,’ ‘the main sphere of woman's activity in the family is domestic work and child rearing,’ ‘a woman should be patient, compliant and ready for self-sacrifice,’ ‘parents must take care of the children's education,’ ‘children should respect their parents,’ and most importantly ‘the husband and wife must be faithful to each other, must love each other and support each other in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in old age’ (Erokhovets, 2014: 12). Thus, gender norms also serve as one of the foundations of reinforcement of ‘white’ Slavic ethnicity. Consequently, the borders of the nation are attached to the certain ethnical background where any kinship or familial formation that falls out of this gender order might be considered as non-Slavic. The quote from the textbook bolsters thinking about the construction of the nation and, consequently, about the markers of inclusion and exclusion. The statement that ‘High school students should comprehend the system of traditional Slavic cultural beliefs and convictions’ (Erokhovets, 2014: 12) discursively determines the post-Soviet Belarus as ethnically homogeneous and erases other ethnical or cultural backgrounds from the concepts of citizenship and nationality. Thus, for example, Roma and Tatar people that have lived on the territory of Belarus for centuries are completely excluded from this idea of national belonging and national culture, being interpreted as an ‘ethnical minority’ (Bartosh, 2009; Zakharov et al., 2017). Fatima El-Tayeb, analyzing principles of racialization in Europe states:

Among the most striking and symptomatic certainly is the situation of the continent’s Roma and Sinti populations, which, having been part of Europe for half a millennium, are the European minority par excellence. Nonetheless, they remain nearly invisible in discourses on Europeanness. (2011: xxvii)

Similarly, the statement that ‘High school students should comprehend the system of traditional Slavic cultural beliefs and convictions’ (Erokhovets, 2014: 12) defines Belarus as untouched by race matters and ethnic diversity, despite the existence of various native populations. This controversy in gender education’s application is rooted in the controversial ‘nature’ of the very concept of gender equality. Mieke Verloo and Emanuela Lombardo, based on the large amount of feminist scholarship, state that ‘gender equality is a contested notion’ that frequently appears as …

… a harmonious and a-conflictual concept, either due to a tendency to homogenize diversity under a dominant norm (for instance, that of the European Union) or due to an explicit, ‘strategic framing’ of the concept to make it enter more easily into the policy agenda as a common and accepted goal. (2007: 22)

Researchers denote that because of the lack of consensus among politicians, activists, and academics on what gender equality means, the concept serves as ‘an empty signifier that takes as many meanings as the variety of visions and debate on the issue allows it to take’ (Verloo and Lombardo, 2007: 22). Consequently, ‘different national political contexts may, in fact, affect the framing of gender in/equality due to the influence of specific cultural and political histories and ideologies’ (Verloo and Lombardo, 2007: 30). Analyzing the gender education in Belarus, I argue that Belarusian state utilizes the Western liberal framework of gender equality to combine it with dominant ideas about social order and primordial understanding of the nation. Thus, for example, analyzing the ideological regime of the Belarusian President Lukashenko, Natalia Leshchenko (2008) denotes that claims for national uniqueness constitute one of the pillars of ideological justification of the Belarusian national ideology. Examining Lukashenko’s speeches and public statements, Leshchenko (2008: 1422) infers that the Belarusian nation is constructed as the ‘purest’ of the Slavic nations that ‘preserved [its] pedigree qualities by defying external influences and deriving [its] developmental priorities from within [itself] rather than externally.’ Leshchenko (2008: 1425) argues that national uniqueness was a ground for Lukashenko to opt out of the European developmental framework. Consequently, in regards to the gender education, the following questions arouse: What does ‘gender equality’ mean in terms of national identity? What is the relationship between gender equality and the construction of the ‘nation’? How does gender vospitaniie preserve certain borders of ethnic belonging? The answers to these questions need further profound exploration. In my paper I am not going to follow this route, as my aim is to articulate these controversial questions to demonstrate contradictions in gender education’s implementation.

Moreover, gender vospitaniie includes mechanisms and tools to control and support the ‘right’ process of gender socialization. The textbooks provide information about various psychological tests that can help observe and check the gender identity of a child. For example, the following tests are presented in the textbooks: the Freiburg Personality Inventory (FPI), which has scale to define masculine–feminine personality traits, the method ‘Femininity,’ the questionnaire ‘Masculinity, femininity and the gender type of personality’ (the Russian analogue of the Bem Sex Role Inventory), the questionnaire of the gender ideals for primary school children, the method to study gender attitudes, ‘Picture of a man and a woman,’ etc. These tests focus on the aim to preserve gender divisions in behavior, roles, responsibilities, etc. Rigid gender division contributes to the gender segregation of the social spheres. For example, the textbook Gender and Family Education offers two different kinds of classes for girls and boys: ‘Girls are future mothers’ and ‘Boys are future men’ (Erokhovets, 2014: 104–105). The textbooks emphasize this primary role of a mother for a woman:

Motherhood is a gift, the greatest happiness that a woman can experience. Motherhood is a sacred duty of every woman. Nature has many mysteries, one of them – the birth of a human. The poets, sculptors, composers, and artists of all times praised the beauty and grandeur of a woman-mother. Sooner or later, a girl becomes a mother and she should start preparing for that in advance. (Bogdanovich, 2013: 92)

Rosanna Hertz (2006) analyzes what it means to be a mother in contemporary Western society and uses the notion of a ‘hegemony of the nuclear, heterosexual family.’ Hertz states that idea of ‘normative motherhood’ is based at least on two points: (1) biological motherhood is the dominant and desirable way becoming a mother and (2) a two-parent family is the best condition to provide a network of support and contribute to cultural reproduction. Susan Gal and Gail Kligman (2000: 89) apply similar ideas to the post-socialist context and argue that as state social spending on healthcare and education are reduced and social services deteriorate, social protection and services become the responsibility of families. In this case, a traditional family with a man as a breadwinner and a woman as a housewife is the ideal model to cover the lack of social services. Accordingly, the state reduces its responsibility for social insurance and services. For example, the textbook Forming the Gender Culture of Pupils denotes:

Nature determined the male and female roles as completely different. They differ by physiology, mentality, behavior, worldview, and perception of the world. Nature created a woman as a housekeeper and inscribed her with such features as accurateness, prudence, cautiousness, wisdom, artfulness, patience, affectionateness, and tenderness. A man is the head of the family. He is strong, agile, decisive, brave, courageous, reliable, responsible [...] Unfortunately, in the modern families, the roles of men and women are not always fulfilled to the full extent. Often, a woman takes the role of the head of the family; she governs and wants to subjugate the entire family. This leads to the passive behavior of a man in a family. A man perceives himself as a master, but when in reality this perception is not confirmed, he feels humiliated and inferior. Later he may start drinking and leave a house. (Bogdanovich, 2013: 46–47)

The rhetoric about gender division of roles serves the aims of demographic policy that is positioned in the legal documents as a part of national security and has become dominant over the last 15 years. According to the Concept of the National Security of the Republic of Belarus № 575 (2010), the main elements of national security are the demographic security, strengthening of the institution of the family, and health of the population/ nation. Thus, among the threats to the national security, the following phenomena are mentioned: ‘depopulation,’ ‘the aging of the nation,’ ‘reduction of the birth rates,’ and ‘the deterioration of the other key indicators of demography and health of the nation.’ All the textbooks on gender vospitaniie in their rationale address demographic problems, such as birth rate decline and the ‘degradation of a family institution’:

Contemporary demographic situation indicates that a sufficiently large number of families is unable to perform one of its basic functions, i.e. the birth, provision, and upbringing of children. There is not only an increase in the number of divorces and a destruction of the family structure due to the increase of single-parent families but also the decrease of the child population, as well as the supplantation of children from the family and turning them into social orphans. In addition, in recent years the so-called ‘civil marriages’ - cohabitation without marriage, - became wide spread. The causes of these transformations are rooted not only in the material and housing difficulties but also in the lack of young people's knowledge and skills that inform conscious attitude toward marriage and readiness to solve everyday household problems. (Ponomarenko, 2015: 2).

Consequently, the traditional gender order and family structure are attributed with notions of ‘traditional national values,’ ‘morality,’ ‘spiritual grounds of the nation,’ etc. The normative model of the family is constructed as a heterosexual many-children family as a self-sustainable system, where a woman performs everything related to reproductive labor and a man provides all necessary resources by involvement in productive labor:

The natural essence of a woman – to give birth and raise children. Hence her main role – to be a mother and a housekeeper, i.e. to take care of a birth of healthy offspring, to create home comfort and an atmosphere of emotional comfort, harmony, and order. To fulfill her destination, a woman should be first of all physically healthy, patient, sympathetic and compassionate, kind-hearted, courageous, and arrogant. The duty of a man is to create conditions for a woman to perform her high mission. Hence, the main role of a man – the role of a builder, breadwinner, protector, over and above he must be noble, smart, and masculine. (Astapovich, 2011: 3)

At the same time, mono-parental and ‘infertile’ families are seen as ‘threats’ to the demographic security.

Discourse on gender equality is also included in the textbooks through several tropes. Firstly, there is an accentuation that gender equality creates possibilities to broaden the repertoire of gender roles:

The main focus of gender education today is not a strict regulation of the behavior of girls and boys in relation to their gender, but the focus on personal self-realization of children while maintaining their sustainable acceptance of gender and positive attitude towards it. (Alekhnovich, 2013: 7)

Consequently, people can cope with their various responsibilities more successfully. In this sense, the concept of gender equality contributes to the legitimation of woman’s participation in the labor market, while, at the same time, preserving her functions as a mother and a housekeeper. The contract of a ‘working mother’ can be traced to the Soviet period when the development of a new socialist country demanded everyone’s active participation in the labor market; now it is maintained through the discourse on gender equality. Utilizing the ideas of gender equality, gender vospitaniie contributes to the widening of the repertoire of gender roles, but does not dismantle gender dichotomy and prescribed roles:

Gender vospitaniie includes the formation of respectful relations between genders, the propaganda of partner relations between spouses in child-rearing and housekeeping, the formation of the positive attitude of modern young women to motherhood, prevention of all forms of violence and human trafficking. (Bogdanovich, 2013: 5)

Secondly, gender equality is mainly applied to the concept of prevention of gender-based violence. The problem of gender-based violence is the dominant topic among other gender issues. Gender-based violence is discussed publicly both by the civil society sector and government. Therefore, gender vospitaniie addresses this issue, emphasizing the necessity to expand the repertoire of gender roles:

Of course, we should not strive for absolute gender equality. In certain situations, it is worth to leave the privilege for men to be strong and courageous and women to be gentle, weak, and feminine. It is necessary to reduce only the negative effects imposed upon us by our gender roles; and it is possible only if opting for gender equality to some degree. (Ponomarenko, 2015: 27)

Thus, the construction of masculinity is supposed to go through some transformations toward empathy and tenderness:

Formation of gender identity of boys often suffers from imposing rigid stereotypes of male behavior: ‘Men do not cry,’ ‘You're not a girl, do not be capricious!’ etc. Such restrictions do not allow a boy to develop the emotional responsiveness and ability to feel empathy. (Alekhnovich, 2013: 16)

Gender vospitaniie also contains the idea of necessity to create the atmosphere of mutual respect between genders and respect to peculiarities of both genders: ‘The art of gender vospitaniie is to understand and accept our boys and girls as they are, different and beautiful in its own way, the way nature created them’ (Bogdanovich, 2013: 1). Thus, the idea of gender equality is applied to the conservative framework of traditional gender roles that, at the same time, are seen as a part of national belonging. In the case of gender vospitaniie, the potential of gender theory to subvert and disrupt power hierarchies is used conversely to promote and support binaries, differences, and power systems.

Conclusions

This article examines the application and implementation of gender knowledge through the concept of gender vospitaniie in the post-Soviet context of Belarus. I explored legislative documents and the textbooks as the operation of biopolitics, which both governs the population and excludes marginalized groups, identities, and models of family formations, kinship, or life styles. Gender vospitaniie is aimed to promote certain dominant models of social relations, legitimizing one type of subjects/ bodies (heterosexual, monogamous, marital, middle class, and white) through assigning heteronormativity and rigid boundaries of gender roles with the positive characteristics. Education politics and curricular reproduce racialized and gendered norms about what forms of desire and kinship are appropriate, legitimate, and ‘healthy’ for Belarusians. Gender vospitaniie is a political discourse and mechanism that reflects and structures the configuration of social order, the concept of national identity, and statehood in the post-Soviet Belarus. Consequently, official discourse on gender vospitaniie prescribes the moral responsibility to be compliant with the particular social values of the Belarusian nation. The authoritarian state regulation, originated from the Soviet legacy, coincides with global processes and neoliberalization, producing new ways and forms of social stratification based on gender and sexuality.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Tatsiana Shchurko is a researcher and feminist activist from Belarus. She graduated from Belarusian State University (Minsk, Belarus) with a degree in psychology in 2006 and from the master's program in gender studies at the European Humanities University (Vilnius, Lithuania) in 2008. Since 2008, Tatsiana has been working as an independent researcher, lecturer and analytic writer, feminist art curator, and activist in Minsk (Belarus). In 2011, she completed an informal post-graduate program at the European Humanities University in Vilnius, Lithuania. From 2011 till 2014 she had been a participant of the project “Gender, Sexuality, and Power” in the program on Higher Education Support Regional Seminars for Excellence in Teaching (ReSET HESP). In 2016, Tatsiana became a PhD student at the department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Ohio State University. Her research interests include politics of reproduction, gender and nation, queer studies, postcolonial and decolonial theories, critical race studies, soviet and post-soviet studies.

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