Left Perspectives on Cultures of Decline II: Cultural Biopolitics in Post-Soviet Russia

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

The focus of this roundtable session will be the cultural biopolitics of post-Soviet Russia. Inspired by recent work investigating the biopoliticization of life under Vladimir Putin by political scientists and historians such as Sergei Prozorov, Sergei Medvedev, and Andrey Makarychev, we will discuss the longer cultural history of this shift and the role that culture has played in reinforcing or challenging Russian biopolitical discourse and practices. Short presentations will examine a variety of topics: the legacy of the Moscow Conceptualists as theorists and therapists of the ‘collective body’; the publishing house Ad Marginem, whose publication of Sacher-Masoch’s novel Venus in Furs, as well as essays on masochism by Deleuze and Freud, in the early 1990s spurred reflection on the intrinsic violence of reason and the modern project, and on the ongoing ‘privatization of the self’ following the collapse of the Soviet Union; the construction of hegemonic masculinity in literary texts of the 2010s by neo-imperial and/or ultranationalist writers; the motif of immaculate conception in recent Russian films and its relation to patriarchal authority; and finally sewing patterns, their circulation, and their imagined communities. The remainder of the session will be devoted to discussing problems related to the study of Russian cultural biopolitics.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Maksim Hanukai, U of Wisconsin-Madison

Roundtable Members

• Marijeta Bozovic, Yale U

• Fabrizio Fenghi, Brown U

• Sof Sabbioni, U of Basel (Switzerland)

• Ellina Sattarova, U of Southern California