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Recent scholarship on Black American women and feminists in the radical Left documents how these women's travel to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries in the twentieth century influenced their understanding of racism, imperialism, patriarchy, and capitalism in the United States and abroad. This study draws from a related but ignored archive of documents to examine how the travel and knowledges of these Black women have affected women and feminisms in the socialist/postsocialist countries they were visiting. The study explores these affects in the encounter, in 1972, between a young Muslim girl in socialist Bulgaria and African American feminist Angela Davis. This encounter is linked to postsocialist Romani feminisms explicitly rooted in African American women's epistemologies of intersectionality to confront racism and anti-Gypsyism in the European Union and former socialist states in central and southeastern Europe. Women members of dominant majorities in Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania seek links to women of color in the Global North and South but their bridgework rests upon claims to racial innocence and shared victimization. The study relates these modes of socialist/postsocialist transnational feminisms to global and historical racial formations wherein Western racial sciences, colonial technologies, Marxist-Leninist imaginations, and socialist state policies intertwined to produce socialist women belonging to privileged ethnic majorities attached to racial Whiteness and European civilization, as well as Romani and Muslim women whose Otherness marked them for state-led socialist emancipation or eradication. These women engage with women and feminisms of color from the United States and around the world, and the consequences of these engagements illuminate possibilities for new and extended feminist collectives and political alliances that include women in the so-called “Second World.”

The intense development of high-rise condominium buildings in the city of Toronto has been supported by state, media and industry-based narratives depicting empowered women whose achievements and increased purchasing power drive the “feminization” of the city’s real estate market. This article looks beneath the veneer of female empowerment constructed by these cultural narratives. It explores how state, industry-based and mass media constructions of homeownership and luxurious condominium lifestyles in Toronto have empowered local women from different racial, ethnic and class backgrounds. It also explores how this empowerment has allowed Canadian state and capitalist patriarchal formations to adjust and survive by accommodating women’s need and desire for independence, safety, choice, and consumer power, and by reproducing social distances between women and others, including non-humans and the natural world. By mapping and analyzing the occurrence and reiteration of these social distances and the hegemonic powers exerting them, this article contributes to feminist studies of cultures of vertical capitalism.