Late/Post-Soviet Media Networks and Gender Technologies

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

In contemporary feminist movements, particularly in the digital space, media networks—composed of makers, users, and consumers—are central to how ideas circulate and collective identities are formed. This panel proposes to examine the pre-digital feminist movements of the late-Soviet and early post-Soviet periods by shifting the focus from singular leaders and major organizations to the decentralized, networked forms of feminist cultural production. By adjusting our lens to foreground networks rather than individual figures, the panel aims to uncover the modes of connection, mediation, and community-building that structured feminist activity in the materially grounded contexts of late socialism and its aftermath.

The first paper analyzes the zines, music lyrics, and literary production of female Russian punks, tracing how these cultural strategies resisted male domination in both mainstream and alternative music scenes. The second paper explores the communities and publics that emerged around late-Soviet underground and semi-official feminist journals, focusing on the communicative regimes that simultaneously reproduced and contested Soviet ideological frameworks and Western feminist models. The third paper reconfigures narratives of emancipatory cultural production within the late-Soviet context through the practices of women who sew, foregrounding the collective, networked dimensions of material and affective labor often obscured by dominant historiographies. Together, these papers aim to look for alternative genealogies of feminist solidarity, mediation, and resistance grounded in the material infrastructures and informal networks of pre-digital feminist formations."

Sub Unit

• Gender/LGBTQ Studies

Chair

• Anastasia Kostina, Columbia U

Papers

• Feminist Journals and Networks in Late-Soviet and Post-Soviet Contexts - Tatiana Efremova, George Washington U

• Separatism and Integration in Feminist Russian Punk - Ania Aizman, U of Chicago

• Patterns for Freedom: Sewing and State Socialism - Marijeta Bozovic, Yale U

Discussant

• Lilya Kaganovsky, UCLA