This edited volume provides the first collection of essays exploring gender in Georgia covering the period from the late nineteenth century to the present. The collection brings together a group of international feminist scholars and activists, the majority of whom are Georgian, in a concerted effort to provide a woman-centered perspective on historical and contemporary gender dynamics in the Georgian context. In doing so, the volume offers a comprehensive treatment of gender in Georgia as “social construct, personal and social experience, political focal point and analytic category in relation to the social forces of class, religion, and local and global political economy” (9). The key argument of the book is that political, economic, social, and cultural conditions and transformations are gendered, and that gender as an analytic optic can provide us with a deeper understanding of the powers and dynamics shaping the Georgian past and present, as well as disputed visions for the country's future.

Bookended by an introduction by Alisse Waterston that contextualizes gender in Georgia and introduces the main issues and themes covered in the volume, and an afterword by Elizabeth Cullen Dunn, the collection consists of fourteen chapters divided into three thematic parts. “Part I. Power and Politics” traces the history of the Georgian feminist movement and women's personal and political struggles for gender equality, voice, and representation under the complex influences of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, contemporary Russia, Europe and the United States, and, not least, “the West” as a normative idea contrasted with Orthodox Christianity and, hence, traditional national values. The chapters provide accounts of feminist pioneers in pre-Soviet Georgia, the influence of Soviet ideology on the gender division of labor and the roles and perceived agency of Soviet women as workers, activists, and mothers, as well as women's political representation in post-Soviet Georgia. Through these accounts covering the political contexts of the Russian Empire, the Soviet state, and independent Georgia, this thematic part demonstrates the significance and effects of Georgia being positioned in time and space between competing ideologies and imperial forces. Together, the five chapters are illustrative of the ways in which women's histories, struggles, and present day experiences are formed, legitimized, and contested through historical and political processes much more complex than the often invoked, simplistic ideological binaries and constructs allow us to see.

“Part II. Violence” consists of four chapters, two of which are concerned with the problem of domestic violence during Soviet and post-Rose Revolution rule, respectively. Here, the authors problematize the failure of both state systems to adequately address in policy, and particularly in practice, the persistence of domestic violence in spite of a declared ideological wish to combat gender-based violence and inequality, mainly due to their reluctance to identify and acknowledge the structural, social, and cultural foundations of the problem. The remaining two chapters are devoted to the experiences of women displaced from Abkhazia and South Ossetia due to the separatist conflicts of the 1990s and the 2008 war with Russia. These chapters provide the reader with women's accounts of life as experienced before and after displacement, as well as analyses of the reconfigurations of gender identities and agency resulting from the new economic and social circumstances facing IDP families, in which women increasingly take on new roles as primary breadwinners.

“Part III. Identities, Representations and Resistance” engages with “traditional” gender norms and ideas of what constitutes “proper” femininity and masculinity. Focusing on empirical cases as diverse as images of “the New Woman” in Soviet Georgian Cinema, the transformative experience of female labor migration, public attitudes toward gender equality, and the resistance and attitudes facing transgender persons and the nascent LGBT movement, they all demonstrate the prevalence and power of these “traditional” and predominantly heteronormative constructs in Georgian society. Through the descriptions and analyses, however, they also, implicitly or explicitly, call into question the natural legitimacy of these constructs, something they share with the chapters of the volume as a whole.

The essays of the collection are clearly written and, with varying levels of explicit analytical and theoretical framing and discussion, all provide relevant and important contributions to gaining a fuller picture of the multiplicity of intertwined historical, socio-political, and cultural conditions that have shaped, and continue to shape, dominant gender norms, as well as the gendered experience and agency of women and sexual minorities in Georgia. In doing so, the individual chapters, several of which explicitly draw on personal positioning and experience, do not as much engage in explicit conversation with a common theoretical framework as they offer descriptions of circumstances and processes that are in themselves illustrative of the complexities and contradictions inherent in debates and struggles pertaining to gender in Georgia, as well as to feminist theory and activism in a wider sense.

The book vividly illustrates that in past and present Georgia, gender and sexuality constitute a battlefield shaped by competing geo-political interests and identifications, and are discursively structured around binaries such as “modern—traditional,” “liberal—conservative,” “moral—immoral,” “individual—collective,” “Soviet—post-Soviet,” and “West—East.” Through giving voice to a group of predominantly female Georgian scholars and activists, the volume nuances and challenges these dichotomies and their association with, and attribution to, national as well regional and global actors. As a collection, the volume is valuable reading for anyone with an interest in the complex and contested configurations of gender categories, identities, experiences, and agency in Georgia (and beyond), and for their relation to history, power, nation, and geo-politics.