The Radical Utopianism of the Soviet Twenties II: Bodies

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This is the second in the proposed two-panel series on “The Radical Utopianism of the Soviet Twenties” that looks to examine the emancipatory ideas and pathos in the early Soviet Union before the Stalinist conservative turn. Bringing together works and theories that invented and promoted new radical forms of historical and social imagination, both panels seek to bring them into conversations with the social critique of today. The focus of the second panel is on theories of labor and production and on new cultures of the body.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Joseph Kellner, U of Georgia

Papers

• The Poetics of Labor: Alexei Gastev’s Body-Machine Assemblages - Alexey Golubev, U of Houston

• Affective Gender: Defining Early Soviet Bodies in Print and on Screen - Emma Simmons, Princeton U

• Into Production! But Not from the Easel: The Development of New Soviet Materiality beyond Artistic Avante-Garde - Ekaterina Kulinicheva, Northwestern U

• Less Drama, More Action: Proletkul't Theater's Second Impulse - Elisa Purschke, Princeton U

Discussant

• Maria Taroutina, Brown U