Vanishing Act: Global Socialist Feminism as the ‘Missing Other’ of Transnational Feminism – a Response to Tlostanova, Thapar-Björkert and Koobak (2019)

As a historian and an ethnographer who have laboured for over a decade to rescue the complex but little-known history of socialist feminist activism in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, we are delighted to see Madina Tlostanova, Suruchi Thapar-Björkert and Redi Koobak’s contribution on ‘The postsocialist “missing other” of transnational feminism?’ (2019) in the pages of Feminist Review. While we wholeheartedly agree that there is a (post)socialist ‘missing other’ from the intellectual spaces occupied by transnational feminism, we do not believe that this is only due to an epistemic exclusion borne of a ‘strict, Western-centric frame that continues to represent itself as universal and delocalised’ (ibid., p. 82). Rather, it is also the result of the deliberate erasure of the history of an earlier internationalist form of women’s activism that once linked the subaltern subjects of the Global South with their comrades in the former state socialist countries of Eastern Europe. It is our view that the continued equation between Western and socialist colonialities—and the assumption of a long-lasting missed encounter between (post)colonial and (post)socialist subjects—silences the existence of past socialist anti-colonial networks.