Can CEE lesbian speak? Towards Central and Eastern European Lesbian Studies-an introduction.

Abstract

For several decades, there have been scholars across the region of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) contributing to the formulation of lesbian thought, yet these seem to rarely have been in conversation with one another, never collectively interrogating questions on what it means to write lesbian histories from the region relationally, enabling a mutual legibility across these disparate contributions. This is not simply to account for similarities or differences of queer womanhoods across the region but to reflect on the complexities of the region itself whose very "regionality" remains contested and volatile. CEE is a region whose common experiences and shared history were also often forcibly imposed, making its unity a gelatinous conceptualisation. This special issue is one of the ways hoped to bring some of these voices together. Focusing on queer women from the region, beginning to speak collectively, we have carefully been able to access different modes of history making, those based on collectivity, feeling, speculation, oral histories, and histories that becomes palpable not primarily through authoritative texts but through the accumulation of affect.