Fall Semester Redux

S&S Update. Courtesy of Comrade-with-Benefits, Nina Aron.


During the Fall 2008 semester, the group focused on sexuality during the early Soviet period. We strove to engage with sexuality broadly, in its prescriptive ideological forms, as a set of complex discursive and cultural practices, and as lived or embodied reality. We read selections from a number of literary, theoretical, and scholarly texts, including Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology by UC Berkeley professor Eric Naiman, following which Naiman joined the group for a lively roundtable discussion about his work.

This semester (Spring 2009), we will consider new themes, including the sex trade and sex trafficking, pornography in post-Soviet contexts, and postsocialist GLBTQ experience and gay rights activism, among others. We will also welcome a number of guest speakers, including Shana Penn, Sonja Franeta and Juana Maria Rodriguez. In addition, we will be viewing many late socialist and postsocialist films, and will screen in May a new film entitled Maggots and Men, a retelling of the Kronstadt rebellion with a “subtext of gender anarchy.”* We have invited prominent film and gender scholars to participate in a panel discussion following the film. This event will be open to the UC Berkeley community.

*from the Maggots & Men homepage