The paper discusses the history of the relation between feminist scholarship and cultural anthropology as two ways of thinking about culture and social relationships. It focuses in particular on the feminist critique of the anthropological theory and ethnographic research. In points out the different epistemological and political standpoints of feminism and anthropology as the sources of the tensioned relationship between these two traditions of thinking about culture.
This text analyses the construction of gender relations in the state-socialist societies, namely the former Czechoslovakia. Main source of findings about these relations are sociological interpretations of ''gender under communism'' written predominately for Western audiences after 1989. I propose several theoretical concepts suitable for understanding of the topic, including ''gender order'', ''patriarchy'', ''communist subject'' and ''social organization of masculinity''. On the basis of the texts mentioned above I distinguish between two important processes of the construction of state socialist gender order, which I call ''the unfinished project of women's emancipation'' and the ''changed public and private spheres''. Then I turn my attention to locating position of men in the state-socialist gender order. To understand the ''patriarchy of the state socialist type'' I find it useful to recognize several types of relations between different groups of men as included in Robert Connell's concept of ''social organization of masculinity'': hegemony, subordination, complicity and marginalization. I recognize subordination as the dominant form of masculinity in state-socialist society.