Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology

by Naiman, Eric

• ISBN13: 9780691026251
• ISBN10: 0691026254
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-07-06
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

Sex in Publicexamines the ideological poetics and the rhetoric of power in the Soviet Union during the 1920s, a period of anxiety over the historical legitimacy of Soviet ideology and Bolshevik power. Drawing on a wide range of sources--Party Congress transcripts, the classics of early Soviet literature, sex education pamphlets, the cinema, crime reports, and early Soviet ventures into popular science--the author seeks to explain the period's preoccupation with crime, disease, and, especially, sex. Using strategies of reading developed by literary scholars, he devotes special care to exploring the role of narrative in authoritative political texts. The book breaks new ground in its attention to the ideological importance of the female body during this important formative stage of Bolshevik rule. Sex in Publicprovides a fundamentally new history of the New Economic Policy and offers important revisionist readings of many of the fundamental cultural products of the early Soviet period. Perhaps most important, it serves as a model for the sort of interdisciplinary work that is possible when historians take literary and ideology theory seriously and when ideology theorists seek to conform to the standards of documentary rigor traditionally demanded by historians. It thus becomes a study that can be read as both positivistic and postmodern.

Author Biography

Eric Naiman is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Note on Transliteration, Citation, and Translation	p. xi
Introduction	p. 3
Menstruation and a New Pair of Glasses	p. 3
Approaching NEP: Ideological Anxieties and the "Unarmed Eye"	p. 5
Utopia and Its Infections	p. 12
Sacrificing Culture / Reading Ideology	p. 16
Things to Come	p. 25
The Creation of the Collective Body	p. 27
Utopia, Misogyny, and the Russian Philosophical Tradition	p. 27
The Signification of Sex	p. 45
Fantasies of the War Communist Body	p. 57
"Let Them Penetrate!": Strategies against Dismemberment	p. 79
The Discourse of Castration	p. 124
Behind the Red Door: An Introduction to NEP Gothic	p. 148
NEP as Female Complaint (I): The Tragedy of Woman	p. 181
NEP as Female Complaint (II): Revolutionary Anorexia	p. 208
The Case of Chubarov Alley: Collective Rape and Utopian Desire	p. 250
The "Facts" of the Case	p. 250
The Corruption of the Innocent	p. 257
The Corruption of the Experienced	p. 263
Ideological Resonance	p. 266
Conclusion	p. 289
Index	p. 301
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