Sounding the Body Soviet
Performing Subjectivity from Lenin to Gorbachev
My second monograph, Sounding the Body Soviet: Performing Subjectivity from Lenin to Gorbachev, reaches across Soviet history to situate music-making bodies—and bodies made by music—within broader discourses of individual agency and socialist ideology. Like Socialist Noise, this project draws on archival research and interviews to explore the idea of a sonic Soviet Union. Moving from ear to body, however, Sounding the Body Soviet situates individual agency in embodied performance rather than listening practices. Drawing on methodologies from performance studies and cultural anthropology, I augment scholarly discussions of personal agency and socialist ideology in historical studies of Soviet hygiene, sport, and public health. My case studies deliberately traverse issues of gender, physical ability, legality, and genre: the biomechanical musical experiments of the 1910s and early 1920s, amateur ballet education in the provinces in the 1920s and 1930s, fizkul’tura (physical culture) parades in the 1930s, depictions of war and physical trauma in music in the 1940s, gender and rhythmic gymnastics in the 1950s, hipster culture and tango dancing in the late 1950s and early 1960s, disco in the 1970s, the 1980 Moscow Olympics, techno and breakdancing in the 1980s, and absurdist performance art at the twilight of the Soviet Union.