Affective machines or the inner self? Drawing the boundaries of the female body in the socialist romantic imagination

ABSTRACT

This article explores two conflicting aesthetics of the female body in post-Stalinist Soviet science fiction. One represented women of the communist future as explorers of the space frontier in assemblages with machines, testing the cultural border between the female and the technological. Another appealed to the mysterious female nature as the Other of human culture, pushing forward the understanding of socialist progress as a masculine project. This article argues that both aesthetics grew within the cultural phenomenon of socialist Romanticism, which emerged in the mid-1950s as a reaction to Stalin-era quasi-Enlightenment rationality and its dominant style of socialist realism.

RESUME

Cet article étudie deux esthétiques contradictoires du corps féminin dans la science-fiction soviétique post-staliniste. L’une représente les femmes de l’avenir communiste comme des exploratrices de la limite spatiale dans l’assemblage avec les machines, mesurant la frontière culturelle entre le féminin et la technologie. L’autre fait appel à la nature féminine mystérieuse comme l’Autre de la culture humaine, en faisant avancer la compréhension du progrès socialiste en tant que projet masculin. Cet article affirme que les deux esthétiques ont augmenté pendant le phénomène culturel du Romanticisme socialiste, apparu au milieu des années 50 comme une réaction à la rationalité des quasi-Lumières de l’ère de Staline, et à son style dominant du réalisme socialiste.

KEYWORDS:

• gender and sexuality
• Romanticism
• Soviet fiction
• science fiction
• the female body

Acknowledgements

I would like to express gratitude to Natalia Balyasnikova, Stephanie Dreier, Anne Gorsuch, and Serguei Oushakine, as well as to the three anonymous reviewers and Heather Coleman and Oksana Vynnyk from Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Attwood, The New Soviet Man, 70–72.

2. Loginov, Muzhchina i zhenshchina, 27.

3. Ibid., 28. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Russian are my own.

4. Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society, 161–334; Gaiges and Suvorova, Liubov' – vne plana, 100–118; Attwood, The New Soviet Man.

5. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 4–8.

6. Berger, Ways of Seeing, 47.

7. Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, 24.

8. Vanslov, Estetika romantizma, 121–139.

9. Two ground-breaking conferences on the topic of socialist Romanticism were held in 2013 and 2014: “Sotsromantizm: The Poetics of Historical Imagination in the Late USSR” (Irkutsk State University, Russia, August 2013) and “Romantic Subversions of Soviet Enlightenment: Questioning Socialism’s Reason” (Princeton University, USA, May 2014).

10. Clark, The Soviet Novel; Lahusen and Dobrenko, Socialist Realism without Shores; Dobrenko, Political Economy of Socialist Realism.

11. Widdis, Visions of a New Land; Orlova, “Zaochnoe puteshestvie”; Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome.

12. Brandis, “Zhul' Vern v Rossii.”

13. Elistratova, “K probleme otnosheniia realizma.”

14. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 71ff.

15. Joseph Brodsky, A Ballad about a Small Tugboat.

16. Vail' and Genis, 60-e: Mir sovetskogo cheloveka, 54–60.

17. Gorsuch, “‘Cuba, My Love’.”

18. Siddiqi, The Red Rockets’ Glare, 74–113.

19. Cooper, “The Scientific”; Schattenberg, “‘Democracy’ or ‘Despotism’?”

20. On the body-machine complex see Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, 3–21.

21. Reid, “Khrushchev Modern”; Pence and Betts, Socialist Modern.

22. Kaganovsky, How the Soviet Man.

23. Ardener, “Ground Rules.”

24. Gerasimov et al., “Structures and Cultures”; Oushakine, “O liudiakh puti.”

25. Garrison, “Speculating Sexual Identities.”

26. Yefremov, Andromeda, 116–117, 251–258; Efremov, Chas byka, 143–149, 296–301.

27. Bogdanov, Red Star, 93.

28. Melent'ev, Golubye liudi rozovoi zemli, 252.

29. Al'tov, “Tret'e tysiacheletie”, 5.

30. Zhuravleva, “Vtoroi put'.”

31. Haynes, New Soviet Man, 1–67; Widdis, Visions; Kaganovsky, How the Soviet Man.

32. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” quote on p. 150.

33. Iakubovskii, “Nechto.”

34. Savchenko, Otkrytiie sebia.

35. Al'tov, “Sozdan dlia buri.”

36. Pavlov, Akvanavty.

37. On sexual motifs in post-Soviet culture see Borenstein, Overkill.

38. Valerii Barykin, The First Female Cosmonaut. The author did not permit the reproduction of his image in this article.

39. Barthes, Mythologies.

40. Loginov, Muzhchina i zhenshchina, 28.

41. Yevtushenko, The Collected Poems, 283.

42. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 179–181.

43. Goldman, Women at the Gates.

44. Lukács, The Theory, 112.

45. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 151.

46. Rosokhovatskii, “Moi podchinennyi,” 239.

47. Strugatskii, Kommentarii k proidennomu, 160.

48. Strugatsky and Strugatsky, The Snail; Howell, Apocalyptic Realism, 129–138.

49. Strugatsky and Strugatsky, The Snail, 174.

50. Greene, “Male and Female.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexey Golubev

Alexey Golubev is a PhD Candidate at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and a visiting faculty member (dotsent) at the Institute of History, Political and Social Studies, Petrozavodsk State University, Russia. Beginning in July 2016, he will be a Banting Postdoctoral Scholar at the History Department, University of Toronto.