Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/32/1/285/1932312/285averbach.

pdf by UNIV CA BERKELEY PERIODICALS user on 26 July 2023

Beyond Desire
Anticapitalism, Gender, and Sexuality in Eastern
European Marxisms

ruth averbach

A review of Keti Chukhrov, Practicing the Good: Desire and Boredom in

Soviet Socialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), and
Bogdan Popa, De-centering Queer Theory: Communist Sexuality in the Flow
during and after the Cold War (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2021). Cited in the text as PG and DQ, respectively.

My body is a component in my mission, subordinate to what I truly

am. If I say I am an attack helicopter, then my body, my sex, is too.
I’ll prove it to you.
Isabella Fall, “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter”

In the winter of 2020 the transgender science-fiction author Isabella

Fall published a story that reimagined a pervasive transphobic inter-
net quip—that one’s gender identity may be an attack helicopter—
into an engrossing tale of a woman physically and mentally trans-
formed into a multimillion-dollar piece of military hardware capable

qui parle Vol. 32, No. 1, June 2023

doi 10.1215/10418385-10428025 © 2023 Editorial Board, Qui Parle
286 qui parle june 2023 vol. 32 no. 1

of providing close air support to ground troops and delivering anti-

tank and antiair missiles. Fall’s story demonstrates how the most
intimate aspects of ourselves—our gender, our sexuality, and our
desires—are not necessarily liberatory but indeed malleable accord-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/32/1/285/1932312/285averbach.pdf by UNIV CA BERKELEY PERIODICALS user on 26 July 2023

ing to the dominant forces in our societies: economic systems and
the states that govern us.
Two recent academic studies by Keti Chukhrov and Bogdan Popa
pose a similar question, examining the role of Cold War ideology in
shaping Western critical theory’s perspectives on the “libidinal econ-
omy,” desire, gender, and sexuality. Both authors seek to critically
reexamine the dismissive attitude of leading Western social and crit-
ical theorists toward Soviet and Eastern European Marxist episte-
mologies in constructing their own anticapitalist thought, with spe-
cial attention paid to the relationship between gender, sexuality,
and systems of private property. Chukhrov and Popa, in their own
distinct idioms, demonstrate how a wide range of leading thinkers—
Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Judith Butler,
and others—have rooted their anticapitalist critiques not in the
context of concrete experiences of building socialist society, as in
Eastern Europe, but in a latent desire for capitalist alienation itself
as a disruptive and therefore positive force. Thus, they argue, Western
anticapitalist critiques themselves need and desire that which they
ostensibly repudiate, all the while projecting and affirming Cold
War dichotomies. This second point of critique has clear anteced-
ents in the writings of Mark Fisher, Boris Groys,1 Fredric Jameson,
and Slavoj Žižek, to name just a few, but Chukhrov and Popa’s books
offer a truly impressive breadth of cross-cultural readings between
Western theory and Eastern European Marxism, cinema, object
design, psychology, and aesthetic theory. Despite sharing similar
critical foundations, however, Chukhrov and Popa take different
approaches. Practicing the Good casts a wider net, analyzing polit-
ical economy, sexuality, aesthetics, and the “ontics” (PG, 9) of com-
munism, whereas Popa trains his focus through the topic of sexual-
ity and interrogates the origins and political assumptions of gender
and queer studies in the West, a phenomenon he terms “Cold War
gender.”
 Averbach: Beyond Desire 287

Unpacking Practices of Desire in Western Anticapitalism

and Soviet State Socialism
Keti Chukhrov is a poet, philosopher, and theorist of art at the Higher

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/32/1/285/1932312/285averbach.pdf by UNIV CA BERKELEY PERIODICALS user on 26 July 2023

School of Economics in Moscow. Her work covers literary analysis,
poetry, contemporary art, Soviet philosophy, and Soviet and post-
Soviet gender and sexuality. She has been called “one of the most
important theoretical voices to emerge from post-Soviet Russia”
and was previously shortlisted for the Bely Prize.2 Practicing the
Good exemplifies the full range of Chukhrov’s scholarly and critical
breadth, combining rigorous philosophical analysis with thought-
ful readings of Soviet literature and film.
Chukhrov’s thesis in Practicing the Good is twofold. First, she ar-
gues that since the 1960s Western theorists, in their attempts to for-
mulate their own anticapitalist ideas, have neglected, misunderstood,
and even dismissed Soviet and Eastern European experiences under
socialism as well as the contributions of key Marxist theoreticians in
the region, along the lines of the Cold War. Second, she maintains that
in doing so, they have located their anticapitalist thought in distinctly
capitalist experience, namely alienation. Boris Groys, in his foreword
to Practicing the Good, summarizes this phenomenon bluntly, writ-
ing that “one might describe this time [i.e., the decades after the col-
lapse of the USSR] as a transformation of the Cold War rather than
[its] end,” and that “today the Western Left still wants to remain in-
side the West—and, thus, it is still defined by Cold War divides” (PG,
11). Chukhrov demonstrates this point throughout the book effec-
tively, exploring how Western theorists’ uncritical dismissal of “really
existing socialism” curtails their own anticapitalist imagination. She
writes: “Historical socialism is exactly that ‘outside’ from which one
can see how the aberrations and fallacies in the critique of capitalist
subsumption are overlooked by the token of their own entanglement
in the logic of capital” (PG, 21). In other words, the Soviet socialist
experience serves as a lens to challenge or correct the capitalist under-
pinnings of Western theory. Where Chukhrov’s book excels is in the
breadth, depth, and insight of its readings of the superstars of West-
ern theory vis-à-vis Soviet philosophers, psychologists, theorists, nov-
elists, and filmmakers.
288 qui parle june 2023 vol. 32 no. 1

Chukhrov begins by exploring the political and economic assump-

tions of major Western poststructuralist and psychoanalytic think-
ers. Early on she introduces one of the book’s major arguments:
that while Western anticapitalist theory nominally denounces the

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/32/1/285/1932312/285averbach.pdf by UNIV CA BERKELEY PERIODICALS user on 26 July 2023

phenomenon of capitalist alienation, it simultaneously, and perversely,
desires it. Chukhrov cites Cornelius Castoriadis’s Imaginary Institu-
tion of Society, Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, Jean-François Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, and
Foucault’s History of Sexuality as primary examples, examining how
they conflate Marxist concepts with the psychoanalytic notions of
“desire” and “libidinal economy.”3 Her reading of these texts using
Marx and Engels’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
is convincing, arguing that the concept of “surplus value,” signify-
ing the contradiction between the forces of production and the rela-
tions of production, as it is taken up in poststructuralist and psycho-
analytic theory, is “ontologized and seen as an innate force of the
libidinal” in poststructuralist theory, conflating the material and libid-
inal (PG, 29).4 While these thinkers often accurately diagnose the neg-
ative effects of capitalism, she contends, they subconsciously accept
its conditions when their primary mode of resistance to capitalist
alienation is to exaggerate and intensify its most alienating features.
Chukhrov contrasts this translation of Marx’s thought with the
concrete anticapitalism of the Soviet state, namely the criminaliza-
tion of private property, surplus economy, fetishized consumption,
and thus the ethics and aesthetics of libidinality. Thus, Chukhrov
writes, “in the very act of repulsion there is a fascination with the
repulsive” for these thinkers (PG, 28). Capitalism, in other words,
is the toxic partner they cannot quit.
One of the more interesting applications of this idea is found in
Chukhrov’s exploration of Soviet thinkers to attempt to create a mate-
rialist theory of language, focusing on the works of Lev Vygotsky,
Aleksei Leontiev, and Evald Ilyenkov through the applied lessons
at the Zagorsk Internat, a school for deaf-blind children founded
in 1963 and the site of linguistic and pedagogical research and exper-
imentation throughout the 1970s. Alexander Mershcheryakov, the
founder of the school and a student of Vygotsky, and Ilyenkov were
interested in the students’ severe alienation from all they deemed
 Averbach: Beyond Desire 289

human, existing in a world “where there is only matter, but not

mind, spirit, psyche, and consciousness, volition, thinking, speech,
[or] image and idea of an outer world.”5 Researchers and instructors
developed a tactile language for students as well as techniques for

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/32/1/285/1932312/285averbach.pdf by UNIV CA BERKELEY PERIODICALS user on 26 July 2023

them to use everyday items and attain a degree of self-sufficiency.
Chukhrov examines how a materialist philosophy of language, one
which is not abstracted from reality and materiality as in poststruc-
turalism, guided the pedagogy at Zagorsk. Unlike the famous exam-
ple of Helen Keller, who was taught to repeat words before associat-
ing them with external stimuli (a priori), students at Zagorsk built
language on their sensations a posteriori, reflecting Vygotsky’s notion
that “the word is ready when the concept is ready” (PG, 51). Chukh-
rov asserts that the school made strides in proving that “pedagogy in
the social context of communism was capable of constructing a full-
fledged social subject with social consciousness, even despite gravely
impaired physiological and sensory capacities” (PG, 49); she cites a
particularly emotional statement by Alexander Suvorov, a student,
that “we see and hear by the eyes of all our friends, all people, all
humankind.”6
Though Chukhrov’s examination of the Zagorsk Internat would
be enriched by including work from disability studies, particularly
given these psychologists and philosophers’ use of students’ experi-
ences as a metaphor of consciousness, her reading of Ilyenkov and
materialist theories of language is cogent. Her enthusiasm for the
experiment—as well as Ilyenkov’s—shines through and serves as
an intriguing case study not only for materialist conceptions of lan-
guage, but indeed as an almost utopian model of transcending one’s
physicality through community with others. The section encapsulates
Chukhrov’s fascination with cosmism—a cultural and philosophical
movement originating in nineteenth-century Russia that sought to syn-
thesize natural philosophy, spirituality, and an unwavering belief in the
spiritual and scientific future of humanity—which greatly influenced
the Soviet avant-garde and efforts to build a distinct proletarian culture
and society, and which defines much of her writing. Chukhrov returns
throughout Practicing the Good to the Marxist notion of the “produc-
tive body,” which emphasizes the role of the body in realizing soci-
ety’s emancipatory (and often transhumanist) potential and stands in
290 qui parle june 2023 vol. 32 no. 1

contrast to theories of libidinal economy and Western gender theory

that posit the body as primarily a vehicle for articulating one’s desires
and individuality. While her critique of Western theories of desire and
the body are compelling, they would be served by further critical exam-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/32/1/285/1932312/285averbach.pdf by UNIV CA BERKELEY PERIODICALS user on 26 July 2023

ination of the “productive body” as a category, a topic addressed fre-
quently in the works of disability theorists.
Another highlight is Chukhrov’s chapter on Soviet films, titled
“Too Much Socialism: the Non-cinema of Soviet Film.” She asks
why the Western, libidinally conditioned subject finds the idea or
representation of life in a planned, nonlibidinal economy dull, weav-
ing observations about daily life under Soviet socialism with thought-
ful analysis of the aesthetic-political sensibilities of post-Stalin cin-
ema. As anyone knows who has taught nondissident Soviet fiction
and film to nonspecialists (often, even specialists!), the most common
complaints are that they are boring, lacking in recognizable conflict
and character development, and austere or even ascetic. Chukhrov
argues that the function of Soviet film is not aesthetic innovation
but “finding out how the already established noncapitalist modes
of production can be fully incarnated and inscribed into the tex-
ture of social production” or, in other words, “how reality can be real-
ized as real” (PG, 93). While the Western subject, conditioned to cap-
italist alienation, may find these films boring because they lack legible
conflict, it does not mean that they are artless or devoid of action.
Using Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of metanoia and halo, Chukhrov
asserts that Soviet cinema possesses “too much socialism,” requiring
protagonists to “exert almost superhuman ethical deeds posited
by de-privatized social systems and infrastructure” (PG, 94). Her
arguments bear similarity to aspects of Katerina Clark’s “modal
schizophrenia”—referring to the need of Soviet art to simultaneously
depict a positive, realistic present and evoke a utopian future—and to
E. A. Dobrenko’s assertion that Soviet cinema’s aesthetic was to pro-
duce socialism itself through representation;7 but Chukhrov presents
a convincing explanation of why Soviet cinema’s characterization
plots, to borrow a modern idiom, are to “do better,” and why this is
so difficult to understand through the lens of Western critical theory.
Chukhrov’s film interpretations, particularly of the Ukrainian So-
viet director Larisa Shepitko’s films Wings (1966) and You and Me
 Averbach: Beyond Desire 291

(1971), are well written but fairly conventional and echo the work of
Clark, Dobrenko, Groys, and others on Soviet art. What makes this
section interesting, however, is its use of “boring” Soviet films to
deconstruct erroneous assumptions about Soviet society as lacking,

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/32/1/285/1932312/285averbach.pdf by UNIV CA BERKELEY PERIODICALS user on 26 July 2023

informed by theories that conflate private property, fetishized con-
sumption, alienation, and sexual desire. The section also serves as
an effective counterweight to the more futurist and transhumanist
elements, demonstrating how the Cold War mindset of Western the-
orists failed to comprehend not only the utopian elements of Soviet
ideology but its prosaic realities as well.

Toward a Marxist Critique of Gender Studies and Queer Theory

Popa’s critique of Western theorists of gender, sexuality, and queer-
ness in De-centering Queer Theory unfolds along lines similar to
Chukhrov’s, but the author differentiates his project from Chukhrov’s,
which, in his words, “suggests a total rejection of queer performa-
tivity” by attempting to “generate a new Marxist queer model that
captures the progressive potential of a queer critique” (DQ, 14). He
does not reject Chukhrov’s analysis, indeed affirming much of it, but
does orient his project in a distinct, activism-informed direction. Popa,
a senior researcher in the Department of Literature and Cultural Stud-
ies at Transylvania University of Brasov, has published two earlier
books, Sexul şi capitalul: O teorie a filmului românesc (Sex and the
Capital: A Theory of Romanian Cinema, 2017) and Shame: A Geneal-
ogy of Queer Practices in the Nineteenth Century (2017), which exam-
ine the political and labor dimensions of gender, sexuality and race and
carefully explore the aesthetics and practices of resistance.8 In De-
centering Queer Theory he sets forth an ambitious critique of queer
theory, arguing that the field needs both “a deeper materialist under-
standing of its emergence and theoretical production” and consider-
ation of Soviet and Eastern European Marxisms (DQ, 1). Like
Chukhrov, Popa contends that queer theory (through its roots in psy-
choanalysis and poststructuralism) remains intertwined in the values
and aesthetics of anticommunism, and that this has impeded studies
of gender and sexuality in communist and postcommunist nations.
While the simplistic formulation of the communist East as sexually
repressed and the capitalist West as sexually liberated is certainly
292 qui parle june 2023 vol. 32 no. 1

long overdue for critical reassessment, Popa responds to recent ef-

forts to reconcile materialism, Marxism, and queer studies by David
Eng, Jasbir Puar, Stryker, and others, who lack area expertise in East-
ern Europe and the Soviet Union.9

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/32/1/285/1932312/285averbach.pdf by UNIV CA BERKELEY PERIODICALS user on 26 July 2023

Popa begins by advancing a provocative yet convincing argument
about the Cold War itself as “the driving social formation for under-
standing categories such as gender and queer” (DQ, 3). He focuses
on the centrality of the categories of personal identity and freedom
that permeate Western social theory in general, gender and sexuality
studies being no exception. This inscribes the central conflict of the
Cold War, Popa argues, within the field, an attack “not only on the
economy of socialists, but also on the types of sexed bodies and sex-
uality forged by Soviet Marxists” (DQ, 7). He contends that focus-
ing on the differences between gender and sex when directed toward
the goals of individual and collective liberation, respectively, consti-
tutes an important theoretical contribution to the academic study of
gender as well as a practical advance in reconciling the politics of
race, class, and queerness.
Popa substantiates his concept of “Cold War gender” by contrast-
ing American and socialist conceptions of a “productive body.”
Rather than serve as a vehicle for articulating one’s individuality,
as in the Western concept of gender, he asserts that the Marxist con-
ception of a body views it as a “device that generated a collective and
dialectical process to achieve communism” (DQ, 45). This closely
resembles key points of Chukhrov’s argument that a socialist econ-
omy created new conceptions of self and citizenship and engendered
different relationships between gender, sexuality, and desire. Popa,
too, turns to the thought of the cosmist Alexander Bogdanov, Pro-
letkult, and the productivists, who all believed that the revolution
and dictatorship of the proletariat would create not only a new pro-
letarian culture but indeed a new Soviet human. This model of the
“productive body,” Popa asserts, stands in opposition to the West-
ern notion of the “social body,” which reflects, rather than dictates,
the conditions of society. To demonstrate this point, Popa provides
several interesting case studies from socialist cinema, most notably
the Soviet film Alone (dir. Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg,
1931). In Alone the heroine Kuzmina completes her teacher training
and hopes to remain in Leningrad, where she can enjoy comfortable
 Averbach: Beyond Desire 293

living and ample consumer goods, but receives orders to relocate

and teach in Altai. Although there are certainly colonial overtones
to the film, best embodied by the conflict between Kuzmina and the
Altai bey, it is the hardworking Altai people, completely removed

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/32/1/285/1932312/285averbach.pdf by UNIV CA BERKELEY PERIODICALS user on 26 July 2023

from the consumer economy, who inspire the teacher to become a
“true” communist. As Popa explains, the film “captures the move
from a desire of commodities to a socialist experimental world” in
which Kuzmina becomes a “body-thing whose value is given by her
rejection of a profit-oriented world” (DQ, 51). Kuzmina forsakes
her individual sexual-romantic and consumerist desires, and in some
measure her own culture, and finds satisfaction in being an agent
of building socialism. Popa’s analysis dovetails nicely with Chukh-
rov’s reading of Soviet cinema through Agamben while provid-
ing additional explication of socialist concepts of the relationships
between body, object, desire, and sexuality.
Popa’s writing also intersects with and responds to Chukhrov’s cri-
tique of gender studies and queer theory. In her section on sexuality,
Chukhrov begins by asserting that the major theorists of gender and
sexuality in the West—Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Deleuze, Butler,
Julia Kristeva, and so on—do not fully “take into account the con-
ditions of the socialist non-libidinal economy in retrospectively ana-
lyzing gender composition in classless society,” specifically failing to
grasp how the economy of sex and sexuality exists outside the con-
cepts of private property and surplus value (PG, 122). Her critique
of Butler is provocative, asserting that Butler’s major concepts—
gender, performativity, melancholy, and subversion—reflect a capi-
talist logic in which the individual and their experience remain the
primary analytic locus. Chukhrov makes the case that Butler’s idea
of “trouble,” rooted in difference, loses its edge when applied to the
Soviet context, where productivist models of the body outside the sur-
plus economy sought to redefine gender “in terms of equalized neu-
trality, [functioning] as a virtue of the common” (PG, 128). Thus,
while Soviet society never achieved gender equality, it did posit a
system in which the generic citizen-subject’s individual gender iden-
tity was ostensibly irrelevant to their role in constructing socialism,
creating the conditions where “social markers of gender always pre-
vailed over the biological or sexual ones,” eliminating the founda-
tional social dynamics of Butler’s “gender trouble” (PG, 129).10 Just
294 qui parle june 2023 vol. 32 no. 1

as poststructuralists locate their anticapitalism in experiences of

capitalist alienation, Chukhrov stresses, so too does Butler’s theory
of gender performativity. She further links this perspective with post-
Soviet scholarship on women and sexuality, in particular, which as-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/32/1/285/1932312/285averbach.pdf by UNIV CA BERKELEY PERIODICALS user on 26 July 2023

sumes the existence of a powerful, underground sexuality that was
repressed by the party and the state, and that the realization of one’s
sexual desires or identity is synonymous with freedom and emanci-
pation. Notably, these assumptions have been challenged elsewhere
recently, such as in Kristin Rogheh Ghodsee’s claim that women
had better sex and more orgasms under socialism because of the rel-
ative lack of material precarity and reliance on men in Soviet soci-
ety.11 While Chukhrov’s writing lacks the anthropological specificity
of Ghodsee’s work, it makes an intriguing theoretical counterpoint
to pervasive assumptions in post-Soviet gender studies.
While Popa presents several Western counterexamples to Marxist
models of productive bodies, his most interesting concerns the work
of John Money. Money’s research on gender, gender identity, sexual
dimorphism in humans, and transsexuality was both controversial
and influential. He coined the terms gender role and sexual orienta-
tion, phrases that still exist in common speech, and cofounded the
Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic in 1965.12 Popa cites works
by Jemima Repo and Stryker who, among others, have explored
how Money’s writing and clinics posited the desirability of white-
ness, cisness, heterosexuality, and Anglo-Americanness in his con-
ception of gender and sex that posed blackness, indigeneity, and
disability as characteristics needing correction. Repo writes that
“gender” was “forged by psychiatrists in order to discipline the minds,
bodies, and selves of intersex children and trans-people,” a sentiment
most famously encapsulated by the case of David Reimer.13 Reimer
was born male in 1966, but because of a botched circumcision, lost his
penis. Money convinced the child’s parents to let Reimer undergo
vaginoplasty at twenty-two months and to raise him as a girl. Though
Money touted the experiment as a success, demonstrating the sociality
of gender, Reimer resisted femininity as a child and later transitioned
to male. Popa does not delve into the Reimer case specifically14 but
cites Money’s theories as the product of social constructivism, which
assumes that one’s sense of self is acquired and therefore that devi-
ancy is malleable. He presents a compelling reading of Money’s
 Averbach: Beyond Desire 295

gender epistemology—which assumes one has a hidden, “true”

identity at the core—vis-à-vis the Cold War practice of exposing
communists and other undesirables, explaining why Money and his
colleagues viewed transness and homosexuality as deviancies that

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/32/1/285/1932312/285averbach.pdf by UNIV CA BERKELEY PERIODICALS user on 26 July 2023

need to be cured or redirected and channeled into existing binary cat-
egories. Popa’s analysis effectively highlights that even though Cold
War gender adopts the idioms of personal expression and individ-
ual liberty, these discourses have shaped—and continue to shape—
gender and sexuality on the basis of the ideological desires of the
state.
Popa’s most radical and original insights come in the latter half of
the book, as he applies insights from Eastern European Marxist epis-
temology to contemporary queer theory, queer antiracism, and West-
ern film. He draws heavily from the Cuban American queer theorist
José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification, which poses minor-
itarian subjects as “tactically and simultaneously work[ing] on, with,
and against” dominant cultural forms, as well as from the works of
Dobrenko and Groys to argue that Stalinist art demonstrates a “vital
abolitionist imagination,” both in regard to its depictions of a world
without private property (something Western anticapitalism lacks)
and in its widespread availability and currency on the internet (DQ,
137).15 A reading of The Cruise and The Fiddlers, two Romanian
films on Roma enslavement in Wallachia and Bessarabia, makes a
strong case for the antiracist interpretive possibilities of socialist
cinema, although it would be strengthened by reading against depic-
tions of slavery in Western cinema which, as Popa argues elsewhere,
often struggles with the artistic and ideological representation of col-
lective struggle.
Also noteworthy is the chapter “Trans,” which builds on Stryker’s
linking of trans rage and collective action in opposition to capital-
ism vis-à-vis two vastly different films, It Came from Outer Space
(dir. Jack Arnold, 1953) and Tangerine (dir. Sean Baker, 2015). Po-
pa’s reading of It Came from Outer Space is straightforward, exam-
ining how the working class in the film is often not only ideologically
suspect but portrayed as sexually ambiguous, susceptible to alien
manipulation, and generally incapable of understanding or acting on
their class interests. The analysis of Tangerine, a film about two trans
296 qui parle june 2023 vol. 32 no. 1

sex workers and their Armenian driver, complements Popa’s observa-

tions on It Came from Outer Space. The film follows sex workers Sin-
dee and Alexandra. Sin-dee has just been released from jail after tak-
ing the fall for her pimp and lover, Chester; she soon discovers, how-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/32/1/285/1932312/285averbach.pdf by UNIV CA BERKELEY PERIODICALS user on 26 July 2023

ever, that Chester cheated on her and cheated her out of money, and
she seeks revenge. Popa effectively makes the case that Sin-dee and
Alexandra, much like the heroines of socialist cinema, seek to unify
their desires to reconcile their labor with personal-sexual fulfillment;
he argues that this resonance demonstrates the usefulness of socialist
realist aesthetics for building across class and racial lines, as embod-
ied by the cooperation between Sin-dee and Alexandra and with their
cab driver, Razmik. The juxtaposition of these two films is unex-
pected but productive, as is Popa’s film analysis as a whole.

Conclusion

Practicing the Good and De-centering Queer Theory highlight the

limitations of Western scholarly frameworks for understanding
Eastern European and Soviet Marxisms and socialism building, par-
ticularly regarding desire, gender, and sexuality. Both Chukhrov and
Popa make the important methodological argument that notions of
“desire,” which pervade Western critical theory, have their own cul-
tural and historical particularity in capitalism that must be accounted
for, particularly when applied to notions of gender and sexuality in
nonsocialist settings. Chukhrov and Popa, however, diverge sharply
at several junctures in content and methodology. Chukhrov’s writing
is more focused on theorists and theory from a philosophical perspec-
tive, whereas Popa’s text additionally makes a bold—and in this re-
viewer’s opinion, persuasive—claim about the relevance of Eastern
European Marxist thought and art for contemporary queer activism.
Though both books present effective arguments, certain topics
would benefit from further exploration and development. In partic-
ular, Chukhrov and Popa could do much more to examine transgen-
der and transsexual identities, which have become a major political
point of contention in West and East in recent years. While Western
governments have used homosexuality and queer acceptance as a dip-
lomatic weapon against Russia, often deploying the language of the
 Averbach: Beyond Desire 297

Cold War in doing so, this dynamic has shifted as Western conser-
vatives now look to Russia as an exemplar of state-sanctioned homo-
and transphobia—a phenomenon that poses interesting questions
for both authors’ works. Chukhrov, notably, makes no mention of

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/32/1/285/1932312/285averbach.pdf by UNIV CA BERKELEY PERIODICALS user on 26 July 2023

transness, nor does she engage with recent writing on it from Butler
or other contemporary queer theorists. While this subject is some-
what outside the purview of her study, it does offer an interesting point
of comparison to her sections exploring the sublation of masculine
and feminine identities in Marxist ideology, as well as an opportunity
to address more contemporary Western queer theorists and politicians
who often revert to Cold War discourses and erroneous conceptions
of gender in postcommunist Russia and the Soviet Union while oppos-
ing Putin’s state-sanctioned homo- and transphobia. Although Popa
engages the subject of transness explicitly, citing trans scholars and
trans media, this reviewer wishes he had delved further into the
materiality and biological realities of transition. While the sections
on Money and Christine Jorgensen are well written, they would ben-
efit from additional inquiry on how transition transforms the mate-
rial reality of gender identity. What is transition, after all, if not an
individual seizing the means of gender production for themselves?
In all, however, Practicing the Good and De-centering Queer
Theory are timely and valuable scholarly contributions that synthe-
size work from philosophy, critical theory, film, literary studies, and
Slavic studies. Very few academic works display such range, and,
most important, these books place voices that are rarely heard be-
tween these fields in conversation with one another.
......................................................
ruth averbach is a lecturer in the program for Civic, Liberal, and
Global Education at Stanford University. Her research examines
queer and trans fiction and autobiography in Russia.

Notes
1. See Fisher, Capitalist Realism; and Groys, Total Art of Stalinism.
2. The Andrei Bely Prize, the longest-running nongovernmental literary
prize in Russia, originated with the writers, artists, and critics of the
samizdat press in 1978. It is awarded every year for excellence in prose,
298 qui parle june 2023 vol. 32 no. 1

poetry, and theory. Chukhrov’s book Bytʹ i ispolni︠ ︡ atʹ (To Be and to
Perform) was nominated for the prize in 2011.
3. Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution of Society; Deleuze and Guattari,
Thousand Plateaus; Lyotard, Libidinal Economy; Foucault, History of

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/32/1/285/1932312/285averbach.pdf by UNIV CA BERKELEY PERIODICALS user on 26 July 2023

Sexuality.
4. See Marx and Engels, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
5. Ilyenkov, “Otkuda beriotsa um?,” 43.
6. Ilyenkov, “Otkuda beriotsa um?,” 43.
7. See Clark, Soviet Novel; and Dobrenko, Stalinist Cinema and the
Production of History.
8. Popa, Sexul şi capitalul; Popa, Shame.
9. See Eng and Puar, “Introduction”; and Stryker, “We Who Are Sexy.”
10. See Butler, Gender Trouble.
11. Ghodsee has written two fine books that touch on this subject. Why
Women Have Better Sex under Socialism contrasts the experiences of
women in socialism and capitalism, and Second World, Second Sex
examines the important role of women from socialist nations in global
women’s activism and argues that the political and ideological conflicts
of the Cold War remain a major factor in the theory and practice of
feminist activism. The two volumes serve as an excellent supplement to
Chukhrov’s philosophical critique of Western theory.
12. See Money and Tucker, Sexual Signatures.
13. Repo, Biopolitics of Gender, 158–59.
14. I wish that Popa had included more analysis of Reimer and Christine
Jorgensen from a materialist perspective. Jorgensen (1926–89) was an
American trans woman who transitioned after serving in the military.
Her social and medical transitions were extensively covered by Ameri-
can newspapers, and she had a successful career as an actress and a
recording artist after. See Jorgensen, Christine Jorgensen.
15. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 161. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and the other
major streaming services offered no films from the former Soviet Union
or the Eastern bloc at the time that this review was written. YouTube,
notably, still hosts a large catalog of Mosfilm, Leninfilm, and other
regional studios; however, one now must navigate several warnings
about their being “state-sponsored media” before viewing.

References

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

New York: Routledge, 1999.
 Averbach: Beyond Desire 299

Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge:

Polity, 1987.
Chukhrov, Keti. Bytʹ i ispolni︠ ︡ atʹ: Proekt teatra v filosofskoĭ kritike is-
kusstva (To Be and to Perform: The Project of Theater in the Philo-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/32/1/285/1932312/285averbach.pdf by UNIV CA BERKELEY PERIODICALS user on 26 July 2023

sophical Critique of Art). Saint Petersburg: Evropeĭskiĭ universitet v
Sankt-Peterburge, 2011.
Clark, Katerina. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1981.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Dobrenko, E. A. Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History: Museum
of the Revolution. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
Eng, David L., and Jasbir K. Puar. “Introduction: Left of Queer.” Social Text,
no. 145 (2020): 1–23.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester:
Zero, 2009.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley. 4
vols. Paris, 1978–2021.
Ghodsee, Kristen Rogheh. Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s
Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2019.
Ghodsee, Kristen Rogheh. Why Women Have Better Sex under Socialism
and Other Arguments for Economic Independence. New York: Na-
tion, 2018.
Groys, Boris. The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictator-
ship, and Beyond. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Ilyenkov, Evald. “Otkuda beriotsa um?” (“Where Does the Mind Come
From?”). Filisofa i kul’tura 30 (1991): 30–43.
Jorgensen, Christine. Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography. Edited
by Susan Stryker. San Francisco: Cleis, 2000.
Lyotard, Jean-François. Libidinal Economy. Translated by Iain Hamilton
Grant. London: Athlone, 1993.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
of 1844. Translated by Martin Milligan. Amherst, NY: Prometheus,
1988.
Money, John, and Patricia Tucker. Sexual Signatures: On Being a Man or a
Woman. London: Harrap, 1976.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Perform-
ance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
300 qui parle june 2023 vol. 32 no. 1

Popa, Bogdan. Sexul şi capitalul: O teorie a filmului românesc (Sex and

the Capital: A Theory of Romanian Cinema). Bucharest: Tracus Arte,
2017.
Popa, Bogdan. Shame: A Genealogy of Queer Practices in the Nineteenth

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/32/1/285/1932312/285averbach.pdf by UNIV CA BERKELEY PERIODICALS user on 26 July 2023

Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
Repo, Jemima. The Biopolitics of Gender. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2016.
Stryker, Susan. “We Who Are Sexy: Christine Jorgensen’s Transsexual
Whiteness in the Postcolonial Philippines.” Social Semiotics 19, no. 1
(2009): 79–91.