Distant Bodies, Distant Lands – Hungarian State Socialist Female Expert Experiences in the Global South 1960s–1980s
Final Report Abstract
Over the past decades, historians have worked to revise the portrayal of the Eastern Bloc as isolated during the Cold War, primarily by uncovering its connections to the West. More recently, however, scholarship has increasingly turned toward examining the entanglements between state socialist Eastern Europe and the Global South. Despite these advances, the role of women in co-producing this increasing global interconnectedness has remained largely underexplored. My project, Distant Bodies, Distant Lands, sought to address this gap by focusing on the experiences of Hungarian women experts who either traveled to the Global South or engaged with it through professional networks from within Hungary. Centering the voices of these women—often marginalized in both contemporary and historiographical accounts—this research specifically examined instances where interactions occurred among women, thereby further highlighting a gendered dimension of global socialist interconnectedness. While the project was grounded in the hypothesis that focusing on women would yield important new insights, the relevance of gender was not taken for granted. Instead, it was continually interrogated throughout the research process. Wherever the source material allowed, I employed an intersectional analytical framework that integrated gender with considerations of race and class. Although references to race were limited, they emerged in select narrative sources and oral history interviews. Class dynamics became accessible through the deliberate broadening of inclusion criteria beyond the archetype of the university-educated expert to also encompass forms of worker mobility. This methodological inclusiveness enabled the recovery of a more nuanced and diverse range of experiences within the socialist internationalist project. The outcomes of this research contribute to the growing body of the literature on globalizing Eastern Europe. In particular, the project highlights how gender shaped socialist engagements in an increasingly globally interconnected world and explores the motivations, emotions, and ideological content and commitments underlying these interactions. It also sheds light on the uneven access to socialist mobility, situating it within a threefold context: opportunities to connect with the West, intra-bloc exchanges within the Eastern Bloc, and engagements with the Global South. By foregrounding women's roles within these processes, Distant Bodies, Distant Lands enriches our understanding of how socialist internationalism was lived, negotiated, and gendered in practice.
Publications
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The Anticolonial Solidarity Campaign of 1962 in the Hungarian Countryside: An Attempt to Make Global Connections, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research
Réka Krizmanics
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Connections to Distant Women through Travelogues. Texts and Contexts from the History of Feminism and Women’s Rights, 307-315. Central European University Press.
Ignácz, Rózsa
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The Farewell was as Painful as a Big Funeral: Mária Nagy’s Recollections of the Hungarian Medical Assistance to North Korea in the 1950s, in: Women’s History Network Blog
Réka Krizmanics
