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unconscious, as Jean Laplanche explained Marr’s position, but shows how unconscious elements can serve as catalysts for anti-capitalist actions. 2 How does Marr’s historical materialism bring a new understanding of the unconscious to queer theory? Queer theory and Soviet Marxism have been kept apart, particularly in their conceptualization of psychological concepts. Given the Cold War, a
its normative assumptions, for Marxists the communist artists and bodies were transforming and producing a new society. 2 Productivism in Soviet Marxism created not only an important theoretical and industrial infrastructure, but also a wealth of artistic creations that were actively shaping a communist horizon. As Dobrenko argued, socialist realism’s basic function was not
productivist bodies has been increasingly depicted as a tired Stalinist convention. The idea that bodies can be produced collectively, along with an understanding of the dialectical transformation of characters, has been almost erased from productions that have abandoned the aesthetic conventions of Soviet Marxism. As I showed in Chapter 3, the Cold War ideological conflict was also a
liberal ideology that saw Soviet Marxism as a fundamental political threat. In contrast to a Marxist ideology that sought to create a new communist person, the analytic of gender reinserted the priority of individual consciousness and its freedom to transform social norms. 1 In the US Cold War model, white Anglo-American masculinity was not only the adequate response to the
can materialize a politics of solidarity. 3 Second, I argue that the pay-off of historical materialism is to show the contributions of trans and queer subjects to the abolition of a regime founded on private property. If a Cold War narrative kept Soviet Marxism and queer anti-racism in conflict, Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora argue that the term “queer postsocialism” seeks to
field. The key contribution of the book is to articulate a contrast between the concept of a productive body, which draws its epistemology from Soviet theorists, and the notion of Cold War gender, which is defined as the social construction of the body. In Soviet Marxism, productive bodies were theorized against the idea of an individual identity and functioned as vehicles to achieve
relations in a revolutionary way.” 3 Soviet Marxism produced not only an ideology, but also material objects that encapsulate this radical need to overturn capitalism. Socialist objects are part of a plan, as Oushakine argued, that was “a historically specific attempt to envision – and build – a community in which dynamic things could speak for themselves, unencumbered by the
epistemology of Soviet Marxism, which was the product of an eastern European world, with a queer of color analysis, which draws on tactics that racialized queers deploy under US racial capitalism. This part of the book seeks to depart from projects that try either to offer an accurate representation of the communist past or to be subversive within liberal capitalism. My argument is neither a claim
realism. My choice of these theorists is strategic: while Muñoz’s work has become a major analytic in current queer studies, Groys’s philosophy of Stalinist art led to a strong revitalization and interest in the link between Soviet Marxism and the traditional avant-garde movements. 10 These two theorists speak to different audiences. Whereas a socialist realist aesthetic wanted to
distinguished between cultural politics, including the use of psychoanalytic terms, and the structural analysis of capitalism. 5 As a result of this split, queer theory has inherited an understanding of the unconscious as unaffected by changes in capitalist production. 6 Unlike previous critics, I drew on a Soviet Marxism’s psychology to show that unconscious elements such