Affective Gender: Defining Early Soviet Bodies in Print and on Screen

• In Event: The Radical Utopianism of the Soviet Twenties II: Bodies

Abstract

In this paper, I will demonstrate the power of affects in constituting gendered bodies in the new Soviet cultural landscape. Aleksandra Kollontai has long been read through her role in the Zhenotdel and as a Bolshevik feminist most associated with her advocacy of free love and communal child rearing. In this paper, however, I will deconstruct aspects of her approach to gender to illuminate images of men and women in the 1920s and how they are understood as such in the new world, in a print culture that combines textual and visual material. Theories of gender performance have long been assimilated into scholarship, and yet have been underexplored in relation to affect – as both a Soviet concept and a recent Western scholarly turn. In a case study of Tret’ia Meshchanskaia (1926) and selections from the illustrated Komsomol journal Smena, I will parse the role of affects in the legibility and contours of gender in a rapidly changing cultural environment.

Author

• Emma Simmons, Princeton U