Rehabilitative Citizenship and Paradoxes of Postsocialist Transformation

Interrogating postsocialism and the concept of “postsocialist transition”, this talk thinks through how such analysis can be enriched by intersectional feminist disability/crip scholarship. Drawing on a forthcoming book project, I address one of the paradoxical dynamics of postsocialism, namely the ways in which the postsocialist transformation was conceived of as an exclusionary moral project of national recovery. While proposing a supposedly rehabilitative and healing politics of belonging for the whole nation, the post-1989 transformation relies heavily on minority subjects doing the rehabilitative labour, yet allows them to belong ever only conditionally. In the talk, I map out some of the very tangible and cruel material effects of the moral scripts of postsocialist citizenship, and argue that under the curative times of postsocialism some bodies and lives—especially those of racialised subjects and communities and people with disabilities—cannot be embraced by the rehabilitative, affirmative, and positive promises of future.

Kateřina Kolářová is a researcher with National Contact Centre for Gender & Science at Institute of Sociology, and teaches Gender studies at Faculty of humanities, Charles University, Prague. Her work engages intersections of disability, crip, queer and race theories. She is also a board member of ATGENDER (The European Association for Gender Research, Education and Documentation). Most recently, her manuscript Rehabilitative Postsocialism: Disability, Race, Gender and Sexuality and the Limits of National Belonging won the 2019 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in Humanities (forthcoming with Michigan University Press). Together with Martina Winkler she also co-edited Re/Imaginations of Disability in State Socialism: Visions, Promises, Frustrations (forthcoming with Campus Verlag in 2021).

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