Abstrakt
It comes as no surprise that "emancipations is tricky word" (Scott, 2012: 148). Since half of the 19th century it "became multivalent", even "a catchword" (Koselleck, 2004: 254 - 255) and therefore any stabilization of its meaning presupposes its contestation.
My initial interest in the concept of emancipation was fueled by recent usage of the term in the Slovak and Czech republics. There from the turn of the 1990s it was conflated with the emancipation of women.
Whenever the word emancipation was mentioned, no specification was needed - unanimously it was recognized as pertaining to women, to women during real-socialist period (1948 - 1989), more specifically. The thesis that I would like to develop is that after the change of the regime in 1989 the uses of the concept of emancipation served precisely to prevent the emergence of emancipatory politics, both in general and more specifically in case of emancipatory politics concerning women.
Again, this may come as no surprise. As Koselleck states, "legal emancipation acts [...] are retarded again and again by backlashes" (2004: 256). (And perhaps his statement could be modified - emancipation acts are subsequently, after their putative completion, turned into mere "formalities" and as such are overrun by backlashes.)