Heal and Serve. Soviet Military Doctors “Doing Masculinity” during the Afghan War (1979–1989) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Aspasia
The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan can be seen as a laboratory for examining the Soviet construction of masculinity during the last decade of the USSR. Focusing on male Soviet military doctors as individuals, this article aims to present how these doctors constructed their virile presentation of self in a war situation and how they managed their position within the military community. Taking a pragmatic historical approach, the article considers the doctors through their interactions with both women and men, examining gendered practices such as “protecting weak people,” “asserting authority,” “expressing emotions (or not),” and “impressing others.” It offers a case study for the analysis of one of the many forms of Soviet military masculinity under late socialism and its place in Soviet society.
Masculinity and (Hetero)Sexuality in the Late Imperial Russian Military
Slavic Review, 2024
This article examines how sexual health became an important component of ideal military masculinity in the final decades of the Russian Empire. Rising rates of venereal diseases (VD) in the military in the final years of the nineteenth century forced the Russian imperial state to increasingly turn their attention to the sexual health and hygienic habits of military personnel. State officials enlisted the help of military physicians, who prepared sex education brochures and lectures with the aim of reducing venereal infection. Sex education materials encouraged conscripts to abandon the habits and practices of rural life and embrace "modern" hygienic manhood. Physicians saw military personnel as an important link to the Empire's vast lower-class population and regarded the inculcation of new norms of health and hygiene within military populations as a key method for improving public health more generally, especially in the countryside. Within this context, expert knowledge became intertwined with visions of ideal military masculinity, and good sexual health and hygiene were presented as important markers of manhood.
Introduction: Gender in Russian and Soviet Military History
Russian Review, 2023
This cluster of articles explores the gendered history of the military in the Russian imperial and Soviet contexts during periods of imperial conquest, war, and their complex aftermaths. The cluster began at the 2021 ASEEES virtual convention, when the contributors joined the Zoom panel while their respective countries were in various stages of lockdown. Chronologically, the cluster stretches from the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1960s, with two articles on the Russian Empire and two covering the Soviet period. From the imperial borderlands of the Caucasus in the nineteenth century to the Nazi-occupied western frontiers of the Soviet Union during the Second World War, ideas about appropriate feminine and masculine behavior shaped the enactment of and reactions to violence. Veterans of the Russo-Japanese and Second World Wars drew on vocabularies of military masculinity to claim authority within their respective postwar societies. In this short introduction, we reflect on the relationship between gender history and military history and underline the importance of integrating the Russian/Soviet case into international historiographies of gender and war.
Issue 17 - Autumn 2015 (Women in arms: from the Russian Empire to Post-Soviet States)
The Journal of Power Institutions in Post Soviet Societies, 2015
This article focuses on the tension between female soldiers' military duties and sex/romance in the ranks of the Red Army. Drawing on terminology used during the war, the author posits "girls" and "women" as two models of behavior -the former emphasizing soldierly duties, the later the realization of civilian norms. Female soldiers were placed in a highly ambiguous situation, in which the Komsomol, which had recruited large numbers of "girls" into the army, promoted sexual abstinence and feminine culturedness, while the Party and Army acquiesced to the desire of commanders to take lovers from among their subordinates. The article ends with a discussion of pregnancy and its implications.
Critical Military Studies
The subject of British military medicine during the First World War has long been a fruitful one for historians of gender. From the bodily inspection of recruits and conscripts through the expanding roles of women as medical care providers to the physical and emotional aftermath of conflict experienced by men suffering from warrelated wounds and illness, the medical history of the war has shed important light on how the war shaped British masculinities and femininities as cultural, subjective and embodied identities. Much of this literature has, however, focused on the gendered identities of female nurses and sick and wounded servicemen. Increasingly, however, more complex understandings of the ways in which medical caregiving in wartime shaped the gender identities of male caregivers are starting to emerge. This article explores some of these emerging understandings of the masculinity of male medical caregivers, and their relationship to the wider literature around the complex and sometimes contradictory relationship between warfare and medicine. It examines the ways in which the masculine identity of male medical caregivers from the ranks of the Royal Army Medical Corps, namely stretcher bearers and medical orderlies, was perceived and represented both by the men themselves and those they cared for. In doing so it argues that total war played a crucial role in shaping social and cultural perceptions of caregiving as a gendered practice. It also identifies particular tensions between continuity and change in social understandings of medical care as a gendered practice which would continue to shape twentieth-century British society in the war's aftermath.
For the Father of a Newborn: Soviet Obstetrics and the Mobilization of Men as Medical Allies
Aspasia, 2021
This article introduces the translated pamphlet For the Father of a Newborn by contextualizing it in Soviet medical eff orts to deploy men as allies in safeguarding reproduction and bolstering procreation in the 1960s and 1970s. It examines the pamphlet as an illustration of how doctors and other health personnel tried to educate men to protect their wives' pregnancy and the health of their wives and newborns in the postpartum period, and it considers the implications of these initiatives for women's bodies, gender norms, sexual practices, models of masculinity, and the socialist goal of promoting women's equality.
The Systemic Masculinism of Power: the post-Soviet Affliction of History and Ideology
Nowy Prometeusz, 2024
[en] This text is an attempt to outline one of the most deep-rooted systemic challenges of the post-Soviet experience of independence. The article analyzes closely related phenomena of post-Soviet systems of power and their narrative: masculinism and the non-attachment of women in political discourse and their subordinate significance in sociocultural understanding. The diagnosis presented here is an attempt to theorize the systemic masculinism of power through some practical cases that can be attributed to post-Soviet autocratic regimes. Systemic masculinism is presented in this article as a deeply discursive phenomenon that permeates every aspect of public space. The examples outlined in the article refer to Russia, Eastern European countries as well as to the countries of the Central Asian region. The purpose of this territorial scope of the problem described in the article is to show how closely related the experience of colonial dependence was within Russian and Soviet imperialism. [pl] Niniejszy tekst jest próbą nakreślenia jednego z najgłębiej zakorzenionych systemowych wyzwań postsowieckiego doświadczenia niepodległości. Artykuł analizuje ściśle powiązane ze sobą zjawiska postsowieckich systemów władzy i ich narracji: maskulinizm i nieuwzględnianie kobiet w dyskursie politycznym oraz ich podrzędne znaczenie w rozumieniu społeczno-kulturowym. Przedstawiona tu diagnoza jest próbą teoretyzacji systemowego maskulinizmu władzy poprzez kilka praktycznych przypadków, które można przypisać postsowieckim reżimom autokratycznym. Systemowy maskulinizm jest przedstawiony w tym artykule jako głęboko dyskursywne zjawisko, które przenika każdy aspekt przestrzeni publicznej. Przykłady przedstawione w artykule odnoszą się do Rosji, krajów Europy Wschodniej, a także krajów regionu Azji Środkowej. Taki zakres terytorialny opisywanego w artykule problemu ma na celu pokazanie, jak ściśle powiązane było doświadczenie zależności kolonialnej w ramach rosyjskiego i sowieckiego imperializmu.
Soviet Military Sociology : History and Present Day
Sociological Research, 2005
In the more than 100 years that it has existed, military sociology in this country has gone through periods of vigorous growth and development as well as years of complete oblivion during which it struggled to exist in a rigid ideological framework, times when the results of research were unjustifiably kept confidential and were not in demand. At the end of 1993 we stated that “military sociology in this country is going through times that are far from the best right now”. Ten years later, in 2003 we can say that from the standpoint of today those times look more or less like a period in which the sector flourished, and the difficulties that prevailed then seem like natural problems of growth. In the development of this area of research in today’s Russia we can discern certain analogies with the Soviet period of the sector’s revival and institutionalization.