Sex and the (Post-)Soviet Woman

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Four decades ago, the Soviet Union went viral for not having sex. Since the infamous 1986 Donahue-Pozner telemost broadcast, a number of scholars have tracked the explosion of sex and indeed the advertisement of sex (“Seks u nas est’, u nas net reklamy!”) in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, from glasnost’ and perestroika to collapse. This panel offers an updated account on the history of erotica, sexuality, and sexualization in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, an account attentive to questions of labor and migration, nationality, race, and ethnicity, and political economy. Furthermore, it rounds out a crucial dimension of this history by focusing on the international circulation of marketable ideas about Soviet and post-Soviet women through traditional and new media: among them, Playboy magazine, mail-order bride websites, and documentary film. Papers examine the entanglements between display and sex work in the emergence of New Russia; US representations of an eroticized and nationally undifferentiated “type” of Slavic woman; and the marriage and migration stories of post-Soviet women mobilized through international dating agencies.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Margaret Borozan, Stanford U

Papers

• Natalia/Natasha: Russian Women at Work, 1998-2008 - Mina Magda, New York U

• Sisterhood of Survival: The Making of the Post-Soviet International Marriage Industry - August Brereton, U of Wisconsin-Madison

• Centerfold and Periphery: How Playboy Defined the ‘Russian Woman’ - Fiona Bell, U of Utah

Discussant

• Eliot Borenstein, New York U