220069 Gendering the Revolution (S) (WiSe 2026/2027)

This seminar offers a comparative, transregional exploration of how state socialism reshaped and was shaped by gender regimes across Eastern Europe and East and Southeast Asia. Moving decisively away from top-down institutional narratives that treat the socialist bloc as a monolith, the course centers on the everyday "lifeworlds" of women as they navigated revolutionary upheavals, structural modernizations, and the reordering of private life.
Rather than following a conventional chronological progression, the curriculum is organized conceptually to expose the friction between state-mandated ideology and lived reality. Students will trace how gender operated across multiple scales, engaging with the hypermobile spaces of transnational Cold War diplomacy and mass organizations like the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), while also narrowing the focus to the biopolitics of state-managed reproduction, family planning, and bodily autonomy. We will critically examine the structural reorganization of labor, analyzing how both the collectivization of the countryside and the rapid industrialization of the factory floor relied upon women’s productive output while simultaneously cementing a gendered "double burden" of waged work and reproductive labor.
In its final arc, the course delves into the intimate and often invisible economies of the socialist state. We will explore how the physical architecture of the socialist apartment and the material realities of consumer shortages dictated the rhythms of everyday domesticity, while investigating underground queer lifeworlds, hidden histories of domestic violence, and the highly gendered emotional labor required by international educational solidarity initiatives. Ultimately, by analyzing shifting maternalist state policies, and the realities of care under late socialism, this seminar invites students to evaluate the enduring legacies, successes, and myths of socialist emancipation from a genuinely comparative Eurasian perspective.