Revenge of the tampon: Gender and materialisms (new and old) in the 20th century Central and Eastern Europe

I wrote this talk specifically for this conference and so my ideas are still raw. I am also not an historian, although my ethnographic research is deeply inflected with the oral historical narratives of my subjects. This is an exploratory text, still very much in progress, and I hope you will forgive the tentative nature of my reflections. This full text was first delivered as a keynote address on October 1, 2021, to the “Gender and materiality in Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th century conference” at Sciences Po in Paris. A shorter version of the text was published in a Festschrift for the Bulgarian historian, Maria Todorova (see Ghodsee 2023, 235-246), with the support of the Leibniz Institute of Eastern and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg, Germany.