Красавица и неудачник: культурные репрезентации гендера при позднем госсоциализме (original) (raw)

Красавица и неудачник: культурные репрезентации гендера при позднем госсоциализме

2012, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie / The New Literary Observer (Moscow)

(Article in Russian) Research on gender under state socialism has been predominantly concerned with women in the labor force, including the issue of the double burden, state and private patriarchy, and women and welfare. Little research has so far been published on discursive space open for negotiation or, indeed, the creation of new meanings and/or positions in terms of gender. On a sample of the official bureaucratic rhetoric, and journalistic and popular texts, the article argues for the existence of diverse discourses of gender in late state socialism: their full scale from an unchallenged and unreflected residual patriarchal discourse to protofeminist elements and even alternatives to both. While the dominant emancipatory discourse contained within itself conserved traditional preconceptions about the gender order, traditional attributes of femininity also had a resistant, even subversive, potential. The emancipatory discourse fashioned with the façade of traditional femininity opened a textual space for limited protofeminist imagery. Traditional models of masculinity, however, did not have the same resistant and/or subversive potential, but instead, were either co-opted by the authoritative ideological discourse for its state-socialist hero, or tied up with images of criminal or semi-criminal behavior within that discourse. In the absence of acceptable models of masculinity that would be free from the ideological baggage, an alternative discourse of masculinity that places the male body at its center emerges in the textual sample. Imperfect and incomplete as the state-socialist emancipation project may have been, it did broaden the range of discursive positions available to women, although not to men.