For several decades now, scholars have taken an interest in analysing the socialists' attempt to transform traditional gender arrangements and to revolutionise the family. However, these studies have concentrated almost entirely on women and women's "liberation" through their integration into the labour market and the socialisation of housework and childcare. The extensive research on the making of "new" women – better educated, economically independent and enjoying more legal freedom – has not been accompanied by an analysis of the impact that the creation of "new" women had on the constructions of masculinity and fatherhood. In contrasting the ideal of women’s emancipation with the everyday experience under socialism, previous studies have demonstrated the limits of the socialist "solution" to "the woman question." Yet, in adhering rather to a women's history than to a gender history, these studies have overlooked the issue of masculinity and, very often, reproduced an ahistorical vision of men’s domination over women. Different approaches aim at rethinking gender studies in order to include the question of masculinities. Men’s Studies have provided important inputs in challenging the essentialist understanding of patriarchy and in proposing to substitute "patriarchy" with a performative and dynamic perspective on power and gender hegemonies. Following these suggestions, scholars have started to historicize the "patriarchy" in questioning the interactions, dynamics, and negotiations that are at the heart of families' everyday life. Thus, analysing masculinities helps us to write a truly relational, interactive, and dynamic gender history.

However, only rarely are issues of masculinity and fatherhood applied to the history of socialism in Eastern Europe. Some studies deal with the artistic representations of masculinity, or with post-socialist transformations of masculinity. They examine the impact of political ruptures on masculinities and discuss the "crises" of masculinity, be it in the 1920s, after the Second World War, or at the end of the 1980s. Other scholars have analysed socialist homosexualities. Geographically, the majority of research is done into the history of the Soviet Union and Russia.

The workshop, therefore, concentrates on different aspects that are important for the study of masculinities: labour, music, political dissent, homosexuality, family and fatherhood, death, and the various representations of masculinities in cinema and litterature. The workshop has two major objectives. First, it will consider the state of the art of previous and on-going research on masculinities in state-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. Second, it will discuss the possibilities as well as the obstacles and limits of studying masculinities and fatherhood under socialism. It will deliberate upon the added value of research on masculinities for our understanding of gender arrangements under socialism. Thus, the workshop will reflect the (pragmatic, methodological, and theoretical) difficulties as well as the benefits of applying Men's Studies and the history of masculinities to the study of socialist movements and countries.