Androgyny and Power. Gender and Politics in the Soviet Union of the 1920s-30s

There is a certain tendency towards masculinisation of women as well as feminization of men in Soviet figural depiction of the 1920s-1930s. The project aims to analyze different forms of this gender uncertainty and how the gender difference is (de)constructed in the visual arts, particularly in painting, political posters as well as in film and literature. These depictions clearly show how complex the relation of the political power towards gender was. The political propaganda of the 1930s offers a great amount of examples of androgynous depictions in the matrix of various mythological narratives. As certain limitation of the material corpus is needed this project analyzes not only the prominent examples of political iconography, film and other visual arts but also some of the party documents (decrees, directives, etc.)