Re/Production Cycles: Affective Economies of Soviet Menstruation

• In Event: Capitalizing Fertility: Feminist STS Approaches to Reproductive Bioeconomies - II

Abstract

In the aftermath of the 1917 Revolution, Russia pioneered a significant number of progressive policies directed at women that were way ahead of their time. It was the first fully independent country to grant its female citizens the right to vote, to enact a modern no-fault divorce law and to fully legalize abortion. The early Soviet period was also one of the most radical and audacious experiments in human development that was guided by daring modernist ideas about malleability and perfectibility of both human nature and the social environment. Especially since the end of the 1920s, the new Soviet authorities took far-reaching steps to master time and to make it serve the goals of socialist productivity. In this paper, I bring together these radical early Soviet projects of transforming both reproductive bodies and productive time by focusing on the case of female menstrual cycle. Echoing Emily Martin’s anthropological work, I examine the hidden affective economies of Soviet menstruation and place this discussion within the larger context of socialist politics of productivity and gendered citizenship. In doing so, I actively use the metaphor of ‘re/production cycles’ and highlight the double embeddedness of the female menstrual cycle in the politics of both reproduction and economic productivity. Focusing on the introduction of ‘menstrual leave’ provisions for working women in the 1920s and the shifting reproductive policies in the Soviet Union under Stalin, I explore the peculiar dynamics of this re/production nexus and situate it within the larger context of Soviet modernity.

Author

• Pavel Vasilyev, HSE University St. Petersburg