Kristen Ghodsee

Kristen Rogheh Ghodsee (born April 26, 1970) is an American ethnographer and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania known primarily for her ethnographic work on post-communist Bulgaria as well as being a contributor to the field of postsocialist gender studies. Contrary to the prevailing opinion of most feminist scholars in the 1990s who believed that women would be disproportionately harmed by the collapse of communism, Ghodsee argued that many East European women would actually fare better than men in newly competitive labor markets because of the cultural capital that they had acquired before 1989. She was critical of the role of Western feminist nongovernmental organizations doing work among East European women in the 1990s. She examined the shifting gender relations of Muslim minorities after communism, and the intersections of Islamic beliefs and practices with the ideological remains of Marxism–Leninism.

Ghodsee’s 2018 popular book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence, has already had twelve foreign editions, including five translations into the languages of former state socialist countries in Eastern Europe. Her lates book, Second World, Second Sex, appear in Bulgarian in 2020. Ghodeee's articles and essays have also been translated into over a dozen languages and have appeared in publications such as Dissent, Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, The Baffler, The New Republic, NBC Think, The Lancet, The Washington Post, and the New York Times.