Genders 22. Ellen E. Berry
to this history of the erasure of the body’s materiality, its calcification into asexual heroic images and ideas, that Mikhail Epstein offers his “sensuous epistemology”: a system of knowledge based on the diversity of erotic experiences, on a comingling of all faiths, all disciplines, on rapprochement with another through intimate physical exchange. Epstein’s desire to re-eroticize the body, to extricate it from the ideas and images within which it has been confined (in both East and West as he explains in “On the Two Revolutions”) also involves revaluing the singularity of the individual, a process Epstein enacts in “Helenology.” In her mystery and beauty, her ability to inspire the poetic faculty and divine feeling, Helen may be viewed as an example of the eternal feminine stereotype. Yet this tendency is also offset by the loving particularity conveyed on her by the speaker; Helen becomes a singular and individualized woman who frustrates all attempts to categorize her, whether philosophically, scientifically, or ideologically, and to make her serve as a conduit for ideas.
Among the consequences of relaxed state censorship practices, the emergence of new venues for producing and receiving culture, and the development of new market forces such as consumer demand, has been the energetic proliferation of sexual discourses and commercial activities involving the selling of sex. As Helena Goscilo argues in her essay, however, this new freedom has produced mixed results, especially for women. When pornography is promoted uncritically as evidence of the growth of democratic tendencies, “What — after decades of censorship and regimented puritanism — impresses Russians as hard-won delivery from restraints” in fact merely enacts a substitution: “the sexual Stallion replaces Stalin, institutionalizing a kindred mode of ritualized repression…. The porn revolution in Moscow has merely ushered in yet another Party with different organs and members but an all-too-familiar agenda of domination.” In her survey of the current porn market in Russia, Goscilo interestingly underscores this point by analyzing depictions of Stalin — as a visual incarnation of an ideal, as, in other words, a pinup — through the iconography of sexuality: both images of Stalin as perfect leader and the porn pinup are in fact structured by the same pornographic aesthetic, she argues.
Masha Gessen’s fascinating survey of the birth of the “sex industry” in Russia casts a wider net, providing a valuable context within which to situate Goscilo’s essay in its case study of the media’s general testing of the limits of the openness called for by Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost. Sex presented the biggest challenge to this policy, Gessen argues, because more than seventy years of Soviet puritanism ensured that no established public discourse existed through which to discuss it. The sex media may also represent glasnost’s biggest success story: “The media [Gorbachev] had said needed reform had indeed been reformed, becoming the liveliest, most diverse … most read … most sexual — if not the sexiest — media in the world.”
Taken as a whole, the essays that follow suggest the wide variety of symbolic forms and material effects engendered by a shifting body politic. They map a dramatic, still-evolving landscape on which to witness the performance of distinct expressions of global postmodernism’s heterogeneity and contradictoriness, its perils and possibilities.
NOTES
1. For further discussion of these features see among others: Mike Featherstone, ed., Global Culture, Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity (London: Sage, 1990); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979).
2. Andrew Ross, “Introduction,” in Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism, ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xi.
3. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992), 13–14.
4. Ibid., 2.
5. Ibid., 5.
6. For additional speculation about the possibilities and the difficulties of dialogues between feminists in the East and in the West, see Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller, eds., Gender Politics and Post-Communism, Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (New York: Routledge, 1993). See especially Funk’s “Introduction: Women and Post-Communism,” 1–14 and “Feminism East and West,” 318–30. See also her “Feminism and Post-Communism,” in Hypatia 8, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 85–88 and other essays in the “Special Cluster on Eastern European Feminism.”
7. Rey Chow, Women and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 163.
8. For farther speculation on the importance of combining feminisms developed in the West and East, see Zillah Eisenstein’s “Eastern European Male Democracies: A Problem of Unequal Equality,” in Funk and Mueller, Gender Politics, 303–17.
9. bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 27.
10. Anne McClintock, “No Longer in a Future Heaven: Women and Nationalism in South Africa,” Transition 51 (1991): 122.
11. Lipovskaia, cited in Funk’s “Feminism and Post-Communism,” 86. Hana Havelkova, “‘Patriarchy’ in Czech Society,” Hypatia 8, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 95.
12. Cited in Jane T. Costlow, Stephanie Sandler, and Judith Vowles, Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 30.
13. Igor Kon, “Sexuality and Culture,” in Igor Kon and James Riordan, eds., Sex and Russian Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 28.
14. Kon, in Kon and Riordan, Sex and Russian Society, 28.
ONE Bug Inspectors and Beauty Queens: The Problems of Translating Feminism into Russian
Beth Holmgren
A few years ago, when the Russian writer and lecturer-provocateur Tat’iana Tolstaia was endorsing the “truth” of Francine du Plessix Gray’s book on Soviet women, she penned this grim portrait of Western feminists rapping on the collective door of Soviet women and grilling them in the “cold, rigid manner” of bug inspectors: “How do your men oppress you? Why don’t they wash the dishes? Why don’t they prepare the meals? Why don’t they allow women into politics? Why don’t women rebel against the phallocracy?”1 As comforting as it might be to dismiss this image as typical Tolstoyan reductionism, a less extreme version of it recurs in the commentary of Ol’ga Lipovskaia, the editor/publisher of the journal Zhenskoe chtenie (Women’s reading). Lipovskaia remarks on Western feminists’ bewildered, sometimes alienating contacts with Soviet women — the “real confusion of purposes and activities” manifest in various official meetings between the two groups, Western women’s one-track insistence on the value of their own agendas, the problem with effectively translating the most basic Western terms like “feminism,” “emancipation,” and “gender” for a slogan-weary Soviet audience.2
Impressions from the other side of the border record similar misconnections and sometimes vent a counter-dismay. Reporting in a January 1993 issue of the Nation, Andrew Kopkind notes the lack of a Russian feminist movement and Russian adoption “in the space of a few months” of “some of the West’s most reactionary gender roles and sexual stereotypes.”3 As he selectively interviews self-avowed Russian feminists like Lipovskaia and Anastasiia Posadskaia (the director of Moscow’s Center for Gender Studies), Kopkind relays stories and statistics sure to upset a Western feminist readership — for