Gender-Forschung in der Slawistik

(Proquest Information and Learning: … denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)Jurina van Leeuwen-Turnovcova, Karin Wullenweber, Ursula Doleschal, and Franz Schindler, eds. Gender-Forschung in der Slawistik. Beitrage der Konferenz Gender – Sprache – Kommunikation – Kultur. 28. April bis 1. Mai 2001. Institut fur Slawistik, Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena. Vienna: Wiener Slawisticher Almanach, Linguistische Reihe. Sonderband 55, 2002. x, 644 pp. Illustrations. Papers in Russian, German and English. Paper.Are theoretical gender studies on the rise in today’s Central and Eastern Europe? Magdalena Marsza…ek, in her study of Baudouin de Courtenay’s pioneering lectures on language as a filter for the perception and categorization of the world, laments that Poland has long marginalized gender, and with some exceptions, Polish scholars today do not work in this area. Alexander Pershai bemoans the long-standing (post)-Soviet, East Slavic cultural censorship of gender in discourse studies; Ljudmyla Smoliar, writing on the social history of the Ukraine, tells us that gender studies, like the cultural history of the Ukraine itself, are even today considered non-scientific and marginal. Jena’s 2001 Genderkonferenz, in an eloquent and many-voiced response, declares the sophistication and power of the work of the last decade in this weighty, variegated, cleanly edited compilation of forty-five conference presentations by scholars from Germany, Russia, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Hungary and Belarus’, with Holland, Austria, and the USA also represented. Written in Russian (22 papers), German (19), and English (4), each study carries well-proofed and representative documentation as well as an abstract. An appendix provides a catalogue raisonnee of the participants, with the dates of birth and photographs of those wishing to provide these materials, as well as institutional affiliations and e-mail addresses.The papers are organized into four parts, moving from a programmatic opening section “Theorie und Empirie” (8 contributions) to a larger section on linguistics and gender theory, entitled “Angewandte Gender-Forschung: Diskursstrategien, Sprechstile und Sprachsystem” (15), followed by “Gender in kulturwissenschaftlicher und sociohistorischer Perspektive” (14), and concluding with “Gender-Forschung in der historischen Ethnolinguistik” (8). Necessarily brief in a comprehensive proceedings volume such as this, the papers average ten to twelve pages of text, often representing summaries of larger ongoing projects.”Zur Theorie und Empirie der Gender-Forschung” contains six papers on the theory of communicative performance and gender. Freiburg’s Helga Kotthoff’s “Was heisst eigentlich ,doing gender’?”-provided with an excellent bibliographic corpus of the development of gender discourse studies in the last twenty years-declares that the familiar sociological concept of “gender role” might be in error, that in fact gender is a master identity that penetrates, to varying extents, all cultural communicative situations. No, it is true, this plenary paper, at twenty-seven pages the longest in the volume, does not come from a Slavist, nor from an Eastern European scholar, and no, indeed, its focus is not narrowly Slavic; but in its depth of scholarship and sureness of focus it articulates the larger theoretical program for the many contributions to follow. The same could be said for the second paper of the collection, Olga Yokoyama’s “Kognitivnyi status gendernykh razlichii v jazyke i ix pragmaticheskoe modelirovanie,” a brief schematic of Yokoyama’s ongoing theory of transactional models of discourse. The reader really needs to look into her work of the past decade on this and related subjects to see what has been done here. Yokoyama has new conclusions on genderlectal features and their hierarchies in cognitive and referential systems as well as in Russian specifically. The editors have placed these two substantial contributions at the volume’s opening for a good reason: rather than showing gender theory in isolation being practiced in and for itself, they present communicative theory enhanced and strengthened by the natural integration of recent discoveries in gender studies.