Peripheralising Patriarchy? Gender and Identity in Post-Soviet Art: A View from the West

Abstract

The overall intention of the paper, is to consider, from a western viewpoint, the problematic nature of gender issues within a nascent, east European postcolonial discourse, informed by lingering traces of Soviet constructs of the New Man and ‘equal by decree’ woman. The paper looks at some body-based practices from the ex-Soviet bloc which seem to relate to the impact of the centre-periphery model on ideological constructs of gendered identity. The central theme is an alleged ‘collapse of patriarchy’, identified in two very different, conflicting arguments, deriving from different contexts, but both targeted on western audiences in the late 1990s. One of these arguments, put forward by Russian writers Olesya Turkina and Viktor Mazin in the exhibition catalogue After the Wall, Stockholm 1999, locates this collapse of patriarchy at the level of male psychological identity – a contention for which there is some supporting evidence. The other argument, mounted by the Spanish-born but American-based sociologist, Manuel Castells in The Information Age, claims a disintegration of patriarchal structures at socio-economic levels – an assertion which conflicts with evidence of an intensification of such patriarchy.