p Gendering the Cold War in the Region An Email Conversation between Malgorzata (Gosia) Fidelis, Renata Jambrešic ´ Kirin, Jill Massino, and Libora Oates-Indruchova Edited by Francisca de Haan p Although historians have established that gender was a crucial element of the Cold War competition between the United States of America and the Soviet Union, there is not much historical literature yet exploring that aspect of the Cold War. 1 Even less literature specifically addresses the role of gender and/in the Cold War in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe (CESEE), the region that Aspasia covers. Since As- pasia’s first issue (2007), each volume has had a Forum, though in different formats. This Forum, based on an email exchange conducted over several months between four regional experts, addresses questions about gender and/in the history and historio- graphy of the Cold War in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Of these countries, the first three were Soviet dominated, but Yugoslavia, aĞer the Tito–Stalin split in 1948, developed its own branch of state socialism. Based on the limited but nonetheless growing scholarship about gender and the Cold War, Bonnie Smith’s introduction to the recent collection Women and Gender in Postwar Europe (2012) summarizes some of the consequences of that conflict for women and men in “the Soviet bloc” as follows. In the early Cold War, “individual women activists [were] purged [and] women’s organizations, including feminist ones, were closed down. … From the 1950s on, the eastern and western blocs carried out the Cold War over consumer issues such as which side could provide the best domestic appli- ances and styles in furniture, dishware, and household decoration.” 2 Smith continues that, in order to enhance the birth rate, popular culture across Europe was resexualized. In her words: “This resexualization and regendering entailed seĴing strict lines between masculinity and femininity to give society a heterosexual look. … Even in east- ern Europe, the young demanded the highly sexualized ‘rock and roll’, includ- ing its paraphernalia of tight blue jeans for men and sexy blouses for women. forum aspasia Volume 8, 2014: 162–190 doi:10.3167/asp.2014.080109