This issue of Eszmélet focuses on ‘gender studies'. Articles address how gender policy and gender studies acquired their institutions in East Europe and examine why this process is not linked with little potential for social criticism. On the other hand, articles prove that it is possible to master gender studies with critical thinking on our society – addressing questions in past and present day Hungary. Illustrations of the current issue show women movement and women emancipation fights in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

Other articles not matching the main gender topic include a comprehensive study on the contemporary Hungarian films, explaining the anti-art feature of the (neo)capitalism in Hungary through the film culture after the system change. The recent death of excellent football player Ferenc Puskás inspired an article on the lethal intertwining of football with politics and business.

Table of contents

1. Claudia von Braunmühl : Gender mainstreaming: Reconstruction of a trip around the world
2. Susan Zimmermann : The institutionalization of women’s and gender studies in higher education in Central Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space. Asymmetric policies and the local-global constellation
3. Loutfi Anna : Hungarian family law and the struggle for “gender order”, 1848-1913
4. Hock Bea : Mrs. Bridgeman who herself builds no bridges. Women and/in Hungarian cinema (industry) in the past sixty years
5. Varga Anna : Films: one hundred years of solitude. The hostile policy of Hungarian
6. Bartha Eszter, Konok Péter, Székely Gábor : “Childhood disease … in communism?” Leftist radicalism in the 20th Century
7. Krausz Tamás : Futball = politics and business? To the death of Ferenc Puskás
8. Zsigmond Anna : Miscarriage of Justice
9. Domány András : Poland 1981. Remarks on the article of Miklós Mitrovits
10. Mitrovits Miklós : Answer to András Domány

Gender mainstreaming made its debut on the stage of women politics in the European Union as late as in the 1990s, while looking back at more than thirty years of history in global development policies and debate. The study explores how, whilst travelling from South to North, the concept lost much of its critical potential. As gender mainstreaming goes through the various stages of "EUization", it becomes even more difficult to develop a sustained critical-constructive attitude.

This study explores the history of women's and gender studies in higher education in Central Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space since the early 1990s. It describes the interests – rooted in academic and non-academic contexts – of a whole variety of transnational and political actors and academics on the ground and relates them to the process of transforming higher education. The study highlights why and how varying transnational and local hegemonic constellations were conducive to the institutional development of women's and gender studies, while at the same time severely restricting the unfolding of their critical political potential.

Hungarian family law and the struggle for "gender order", 1848-1913The study contains three main theses: the idea that there was a need for ‘legal stability' in Hungary was a construction of positivist legal science, bound up with the idea of the (legally) unified nation state; legal and religious pluralism in Hungary posed a huge problem for legal science, especially when it came to developing a state-regulated family law; the process of "clarifying" and "stabilising" family law was at the same time a process of "clarifying" and "stabilising" gendered power relations within the family. The study argues that the inability of the state to complete this project was in fact symptomatic of deep uncertainties over the social roles of men and women, and multiple/competing definitions of both law and patriarchal power.