UTOPIAN SEX: THE METAMORPHOSIS OF ANDROGYNOUS IMAGERY IN RUSSIAN ART OF THE PRE AND POSTREVOLUTIONARY PERIOD (original) (raw)

Gender Roles in the Ukrainian Modernism Fiction Literature of the 1920S

2020

Forming a new philosophical and aesthetic paradigm of the early twentieth century, Ukrainian writers sought to comprehend an individual and the world through modern dimensions and relationships. One of the concepts that determined the essence of the aesthetically-artistic phenomenon of the literature of modernism was the confrontation of "patriarchal and contemporary ideas about the place and role of men and women in sociocultural processes, and about biological and social factors of gender identification" 1. The issue of gender receives an increased interest in the literary world of that time, specifically in the works by Ivan Dniprovsky, Arkady Lyubchenko, Mykola Khvylovy, and other prose writers of the second decade of the twentieth century. Modernist fiction is characterized through the reception of the relationship between man and woman as two different types of worldviews, two philosophies of being, the writers focus on interpersonal relationships, and the search of a partner and their place in the world. The interest in this theme was natural because the turn of the cultural epoch was marked by a comprehensive "re-evaluation of values", and the search for new ideas. The established values and normative ideas about the rights and opportunities of men and women have come to the background. The eternal passions that drive people's behavior (love, betrayal, disappointment, faith) are interpreted differently in comparison to traditional art. After 1905, the reorganization of society stimulated not only the deepening of thoughts of love but also, it caused the restoration of sensual love. In addition, science (psychology, physiology, ethics, philosophy) has inspired different, even opposite views on love. Z. Freud emphasized the sexual nature of this feeling, and A. Babel considered the problem of gender in connection with socialist ideologists, in the fight against any inequality. Ukrainian modernists of the 1920s explored both the biological-irrational and social aspects of love.

The transformation of gender visualization in photography: Soviet and Russian multisemiotics

Discursos Fotograficos, 2018

The article is devoted to the analysis of the construction of new system of gender images in the sociopolitical conditions in Russia during the last thirty ages. Based on Kress and Van Leeuwen multisemiotic theory and the ideas A. Dudareva, I.Groshev and M. Petrova, we conducted a research of gender images of women in the Soviet Union and modern Russian advertising. The data comes from 300 images of the Russian men and women in advertising. These 300 images were specifically chosen by the author in order to be acceptable for coding. As the result of the study, we developed the typology of gender images of woman in Russian advertisement. Our conclusion was that economic, political and socio-cultural factors were the main factors in the transformation of gender images in modern Russia. The gender of a woman, her body and figures as shown in the media, very often were object of sexual exploitation, when the impact of using the image and play with human sexual passion forces her to commit certain actions, such as buying goods. This characteristic of our commercialization of gender images turns a person, both men * Doctoral degree in Theology (Estern Pontifical Institute (Rome).

Multiple femininities in two Russian women's magazines, 1970s–1990s

In both the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, femininity and beauty were traits often attributed to the ideal working mother portrayed and promoted in state media. But with greater exposure to global beauty ideals in the post-communist era, the sexualized and beautified female body acquired a social value that was independent of its role in the reproductive process. In this paper, I analyse changes in the way care for the female body was represented in two Russian women’s magazines Rabotnitsa and Krest’yanka (1970s–1990s). Over this period, the ideal of the working mother figures less prominently and there is an increasing focus on the ways that women consumers ought to work on their individual body-projects. This might appear to be a radical change. But by analysing the representations of women more carefully, I show that the move towards the privatization of the body project was already under way in the late Soviet period, but only for some categories of women. That is, non-Slavic women of various ages could be working mothers, but individual consumption was a realm reserved for their Slavic country women.