Scholars of postsocialism often draw from other theoretical frameworks like postcolonialism and focus especially on the evolution of labor relations, gender roles, and ethnic and religious political affiliations.
As an analytical framework, postsocialism emphasizes the importance of the socialist state and provides a critical perspective on the “Western economic and political forms” that arose in its place.
[2] Although the terms postsocialist and postcommunist are mostly interchangeable, postcommunism focuses more on the institutional and formal changes, whereas postsocialism is generally more concerned with culture, subjectivities, and everyday life.
[5] Like postsocialism, postcolonial theory provides a critical perspective on the cultural and social legacies of a hegemonic system, focuses on continuities through periods of structural political change, and critiques mainstream Western scholarship.
[14] The developments under postsocialism, then, involve “compelling women back into the nurturing and care-giving roles ‘natural’ to their sex and restoring to men their ‘natural’ family authority.”[15] The retreat of the state from the public domain—in terms of reproductive rights, guaranteed employment, and social care—also led to a loss of work and engagement in civil society for women, in what Frances Pine similarly calls a “retreat to the domestic.”[16] Scholars of postsocialism have also analyzed the interaction between different visions of feminism.
[17] At the same time, some younger Eastern European feminists have turned to Western institutions and ideas for inspiration, support, or legitimation, adding a generational tension to gender issues in the region.
[19] In emphasising the long-term and ongoing effect of economic changes, Makovicky and others who employ ethnographic approaches draw attention to postsocialism as a specific form of dispossession, remaking of subjecthood, and continuing temporal discontinuity.
[27] Analyzing the 1980s films of director Huang Jianxin, Pickowicz argues for a postsocialist “identity” and “cultural condition” that is shared across China and formerly socialist states in Eastern Europe, consisting mainly of a “negative, dystopian” view of society and a sense of “profound disillusionment,” “hopelessness,” “alienation,” and a lack of a positive vision or hope for change.
[28] Like scholars of Eastern European postsocialism, Pickowicz focuses on the experience of socialism as reflected through culture, but Pickowicz’s postsocialism has an added dimension: because the CCP is still in charge, postsocialist artworks “‘subvert’ … the oppressive traditional socialist system by deconstructing the mythology of Chinese socialism.”[29] Since the emergence of postsocialist studies relating to Eastern Europe, some scholars of China have adapted these studies to China.
[39] Political scientist David Ost, while not criticizing the notion of postsocialism itself (he uses the term “postcommunism” throughout his text), has argued based on his study of unions that “postcommunism is over” and the “global economy is here.”[40] Ost argues that unions under postsocialism were “‘producerists’ par excellence,” interested in protecting the interests of skilled workers, trimming the workforce of unskilled or underused (often female) labor, and believing that the market would value and reward their skilled work.
[45] Third, postsocialism is overly attached to Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and it is limited by not taking into account “a relational, deterritorialized view of space” appropriate to a globalizing world.
[46] Fourth, postsocialism is “Orientalizing,” in that it “reflects specifically Western discourses, approaches, and knowledge claims” and fails to live up to its injunction to listen to “native” scholars and theories.