Introduction: Socialism to Be Embodied

Abstract

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Family, Gender and (dis)Abled Bodies after 1953”, guest-edited by Maike Lehmann and Alexandra Oberländer. While the ideal of the New Socialist Wo/Man was never fully realized and seems to have been abandoned across the Eastern Bloc after 1953, the question still arises what role individuals were to play within the socialist system. As dichotomous conceptualizations of state and society have been repeatedly criticized in recent years, we propose to look at how the role of the individual was imagined by different actors in Eastern European countries and how the ideals inherent in these imaginations were (to be) embodied. One possible avenue would be to explore the role of official language for subjectivization processes as they have been discussed during the last twenty years in Soviet studies. We, however, want to turn the attention towards the body and its role in shaping the individual in a cluster dealing with the impact family, gender, and dis/ability (were meant to) have on the formation of an individual body and its place within broader society. This is to explore some of the ways in which anybody could become somebody in socialist Eastern Europe and might help to shift the attention from dichotomous conceptualizations of political dogma and social practice towards an exploration of socialism as a diverse, yet specific cultural system.