Courses

 This upper-level online seminar examines the cultures and politics of the body in socialist and postsocialist countries. As we will engage with embodied aspects of living under post/socialism, we will treat bodies as sites of political contestation, as well as makers and breakers of cultural worlds. Drawing on anthropological and historical scholarship, we will explore several thematic clusters: corporeal anchors of post/socialist political regimes and ideological formations, variability and commonality of bodily regimes across different post/socialist contexts, and the effects of the creation and dissolution of the Soviet Union on the viability, mortality, and vibrancy of life. We will develop an understanding of post/socialism as a political reality populated by a wide diversity of bodies: laboring and idle, cared and uncared for, gendered and racialized, craving and satiated, disabled and enhanced, among others. This course offers an account on post/socialist idiosyncrasies of the medicalization, politicization, economization, and moralization of the body.