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1 Vladimir I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. XXX, 4th English edn. (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1965), 120.
2 Quoted in Sharon K. Hom (ed.), Chinese Women Traversing Diaspora: Memoirs, Essays, and
Poetry (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1999), 84.
3 Donna Harsch makes a compelling case that communist regimes failed to bring about
true equality between men and women: Donna Harsch, “Communism and Women,” in
Stephen A. Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 488–504. Martin King Whyte explains the difficulty of
making definitive pronouncements about the liberation, or lack thereof, of Chinese
women under communism: Martin King Whyte, “The Perils of Assessing Trends
in Gender Inequality in China,” in Barbara Entwisle and Gail E. Henderson (eds.),
422
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The Communist and Postsocialist Gender Order in Russia and China
423
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While men were expected to submit fully to party dictates in collective life,
disavowing any personal attachments or individual interests, women were
either absorbed into the national economy or, in the Soviet and East
European context, expected to play the starring role in the state-sponsored
motherhood cult by raising loyal and capable workers. The revolutionary
phase proved to be radical in its aim to advance women’s liberation, but
continued to privilege traditional masculinity, emphasizing the martial mas-
culine experience as superior and universal. Male citizens, however, did not
always benefit from this arrangement, since their social identities were
wholly governed and defined by a bureaucratic rank order. In public life
individual men played a supporting role to party demands, and in the
domestic realm they were also a largely peripheral element, obligated and
expected to provide little besides financial support.6
The Stalinist and Maoist eras thus ushered in a novel gender-relations
paradigm in which masculinity and femininity were not defined exclusively
in relation to each other, but were also delineated in their relationship to the
state. The new communist authorities relied on a triangular gender order in
which the state performed the role of the “third gender,” as both men and
women outlined their sociopolitical roles in relation to each other as well as
to the party’s norms and expectations.7 The state became a kind of universal
patriarch to which both men and women were subjugated. Although com-
munist parties were not unlike centralized bureaucracies in modern capitalist
societies in terms of their determination to regulate their citizens’ gender
identity and sexual practices, they differentiated themselves in that they were
publicly – at least during the revolutionary periods – committed to toppling
the existing gender order. Most communist parties staked their legitimacy
on achieving gender parity, and therefore their level of involvement in the
regulation of daily life was distinctive in its level of invasiveness. In the Soviet
case, this dynamic was most evident in Central Asia, where the Bolsheviks
waged a controversial and often coercive “deveiling campaign,” organizing
mass meetings at which thousands of women ceremonially burned their veils
in the late 1920s.8 China’s Iron Girls (tie guniang) and female Red Guards
424
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The Communist and Postsocialist Gender Order in Russia and China
9 Jin Zhaojun, “Feng cong nali lai? Ping getan “xibeifeng”’ [Where Is the Wind Coming
From? Commenting on the Pop Scene’s Northwest Wind], Renmin ribao (23 Aug. 1988).
425
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10 Lisa Rofel, Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
11 Janet Elise Johnson and Jean S. Robinson, “Introduction,” in Janet Elise Johnson and
Jean S. Robinson (eds.), Living Gender After Communism (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2007), 11.
12 Gail Hershatter and Wang Zheng, “Chinese History: A Useful Category of Gender
Analysis,” American Historical Review 113, 5 (2008), 1409.
426
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The Communist and Postsocialist Gender Order in Russia and China
creation of a new Soviet order.”13 The Bolsheviks and Maoists used the
longstanding discourse that pegged women as backward and anti-
revolutionary in order to engender policies that aimed to liberate women
to become productive citizens. The “uplift” of women was a key to
strengthening the nation and staving off colonization. Mao in particular
pushed women to occupy stereotypically masculine professions, extolling
female model workers (nü jie diyi) during the 1950s as well as the Iron Girls
during the 1960s.14 Within the official lexicon of Maoist China, the female
tractor driver represented the arrival of a socialist modernity that shattered
the fetters of Confucian, feudal and capitalist worldviews and their atten-
dant patriarchal forms. Some female Red Guards were also noted by
contemporaries for being especially brutal in confronting supposed traitors
of the revolution.15 Marxist doctrine on gender relations and economic
exigency prompted communist parties to create unprecedented opportu-
nities for financial independence for women of all walks of life. Between
1929 and 1935, of the 4 million Soviet women who began to work for wages,
nearly half entered industrial occupations. By 1935, 42 percent of all indus-
trial workers in the USSR were women. The demand for labor during the
First and Second Five-Year Plans was so intensive that, in 1932 and 1933,
women constituted the only new source of labor.16
Although some critics dismiss these phenomena as forced masculinization
and desexualizing of women, the practice demonstrated a genuine potential
to disrupt the gender binary and to lead to a practice of “female masculinity,”
which, as Judith Halberstam explains, does not constitute a poor imitation of
virility, but represents a meaningful and intentional staging of hybrid and
minority genders.17 More to the point, female Soviet Red Army soldiers
during World War II and female Red Guards during the Cultural
Revolution demonstrate that force, combat and violence did not constitute
an exclusively male domain. At a minimum, the 120,000 Soviet women
13 Elizabeth A. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 9.
14 Tina Mai Chen, “Female Icons, Feminist Iconography? Socialist Rhetoric and Women’s
Agency in 1950s China,” Gender and History 15, 2 (2003), 268–95.
15 Emily Honig, “Maoist Mappings of Gender: Reassessing the Red Guards,” in
Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom (eds.), Chinese Femininities, Chinese
Masculinities: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 255–68;
Emily Honig, “Socialist Sex: The Cultural Revolution Revisited,” Modern China 29, 2
(2003), 143–75.
16 Wendy Goldman, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1.
17 Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
427
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combatants and millions of female Red Guards testify to the fact that Stalinist
and Maoist authorities never had a uniform or consistent discourse regarding
women’s social roles and personal identity.18 Moreover, in practical terms,
the Iron Girl movement went far beyond the original intentions of the
organizers and became a dynamic political field in which lower-class
women were able to initiate challenges to local gender practices as well as
make claims to social recognition for their contributions.19 The working-class
image of the Iron Girl also became an inspirational role model for a whole
generation of young (rural) women who aspired to live an independent life
on an equal footing with men.
Complicating the narrative of women’s emancipation is the fact that Soviet
and Chinese women bore a double burden, expected as they were to
shoulder domestic and professional obligations. The cult of motherhood
and domesticity was particularly potent under Stalin.20 While female fertility
was openly celebrated and child-bearing elevated to a state responsibility,
domestic labor performed almost exclusively by women was “rendered
invisible and the time performing it made women less able to rise to super-
visory positions.”21 The androcentrism and tokenism that defined the party’s
attempts to create a gender balance in the workplace as well as the home also
characterized the realm of politics. Although a quota system aimed to ensure
that women filled approximately 30 percent of parliamentary seats, by the
1960s and 1970s Soviet women never exceeded 5 percent of the membership
of the highest party organs and constituted less than 4 percent of urban and
district party first secretaries.22 Men remained overrepresented in the party
and governmental apparatus and also occupied key positions in the eco-
nomic, cultural and academic spheres at the expense of their female counter-
parts. Although millions of women gained access to social and educational
mobility, men statistically and in real terms dominated society and govern-
ment. The communist experiment in achieving gender equity thus led to
a paradoxical legacy. While women were granted full legal equality and were
18 Anna Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Honig, “Maoist Mappings of Gender.”
19 Emily Honig, “Iron Girls Revisited: Gender and the Politics of Work in the Cultural
Revolution,” in Entwisle and Henderson (eds.), Re-Drawing Boundaries, 97–110.
20 David L. Hoffmann, “Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in its
Pan-European Context,” Journal of Social History 34, 1 (2000), 35–54.
21 Elisabeth J. Croll, Changing Identities of Chinese Women: Rhetoric, Experience, and Self-
Perception in Twentieth-Century China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
1995), 44.
22 Joel C. Moses, “Women in Political Roles,” in Dorothy Atkinson, Alexander Dallin and
Gail W. Lapidus (eds.), Women in Russia (Hassocks, UK: Harvester, 1978), 334.
428
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The Communist and Postsocialist Gender Order in Russia and China
23 Eliot Borenstein, Men Without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction,
1917–1929 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 3, 17.
24 Kam Louie, Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
429
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25 Lilya Kaganovsky, How the Soviet Man Was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male
Subjectivity Under Stalin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 4.
26 Helena Goscilo and Andrea Lanoux, “Introduction,” in Helena Goscilo and
Andrea Lanoux (eds.), Gender and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Russian
Culture (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 7.
27 Elena Zdravomyslova and Anna Temkina, “Gosudarstvennoe konstruirovanie gen-
dera v sovetskom obshchestve,” Zhurnal issledovanii sotsial’noi politiki 1, 3–4 (2003),
306–07.
430
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The Communist and Postsocialist Gender Order in Russia and China
28 David Gillespie, “Is Village Prose Misogynistic?,” in Rosalind Marsh (ed.), Women and
Russian Culture: Projections and Self-Perceptions (New York: Berghahn Books, 1998), 241.
29 Barbara Heldt, “Gynoglasnost: Writing the Feminine,” in Mary Buckley (ed.),
Perestroika and Soviet Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 167.
431
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them to positions of moral leadership and guidance that men in the Soviet
age had been unable to occupy. Nonetheless, village-prose writers domes-
ticate, idealize and desexualize their heroines, rejecting any other form of
feminine identity as inauthentically Russian. While (saintly older) women
figure prominently in village prose, men are depicted as either corrupt or
defeated; they play the role of either mindless, unethical, phony bureaucrats
or depressed, bamboozled, defeated Russian “blokes.” Village-prose writers
thus understand Soviet power as having destroyed the best of Russian
national culture through its revolutionary modernization drive, turning its
men into alcoholics and its women into consumerist sellouts. Even in the
world of the popular joke (anekdot), the frustrated Russo-Soviet male identity
was salvaged only through the subjugation of women and ethnic minorities
by the dual processes of stereotyping and scapegoating.30
The anxiety about communist sexual politics having perverted “natural”
sex roles was present as much among social scientists as it was among writers.
Soviet scholars began discussing a crisis of masculinity after the publication of
a 1970 article by the Soviet demographer Boris Urlanis. Building on his
insights, the discussion of the “masculine crisis” evolved during the final
two decades of the Soviet regime. Commentators pointed to a number of
benchmarks to buttress their call to “protect men”: Men lived shorter lives
than women, suffered higher instances of alcoholism and experienced much
higher mortality rates.31 Hidden from sight was the intellectuals’ implicit
condemnation of official policies that created this deplorable state of affairs.
The between-the-lines criticism accused the Soviet state of having both an
oversized effect on men’s private lives and a negligible influence on their
wellbeing. Within the public sphere men thus emerged as casualties, rather
than social agents who proactively shaped their own fates. Because the
communist apparatus was (ostensibly) so dedicated to resolving the
woman question, problems specific to the male portion of the population
were not frequently addressed on a policy level, let alone in practice.
Underlying the discourse on the male crisis was the idea that the system
had fundamentally undercut men’s autonomy. Because their rights – to
property, political action and freedom of conscience – had been restricted,
432
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The Communist and Postsocialist Gender Order in Russia and China
it was difficult to imagine how men could have developed the ability to
become independent and responsible agents.32 The flip side of the masculi-
nity crisis was a panic about “masculinized women” who were accused of
causing a spike in male hooliganism and alcoholism.33
The “gender panic” that was on full display during the 1970s and 1980s in
the USSR was also present in spades in China at the start of the reform era,
which heralded Deng Xiaoping’s drive to delegitimatize the Cultural
Revolution. As economic reforms accelerated during the 1980s, Chinese
intellectuals, writers and media shifted “from glorifying the Iron Girls as
a model of working-class women’s capability and strength to disparaging
them as a disreputable symbol of women’s masculinization.”34 Part and
parcel of Deng’s campaign to negate the Cultural Revolution was the
discrediting of Maoist notions of socialist femininity. At a 1986 meeting of
scholars discussing the status of women in China, there was open opposition
to Iron Girls being a feminine ideal; male academics in particular asserted that
a masculine woman was a “mutant” and that capable women should be
different from men in that “they have their own special charm, for example
exquisiteness and depth of emotions and well-developed imagistic
thinking.”35 This rejection of the Maoist female ideal was not simply mis-
ogynistic but also represented a denunciation of a rural working-class female
identity celebrated during the 1960s and 1970s; it diminished the value of
female labor and wished to erase it from public view.
The other side of the “gender panic” coin could be seen in the intellectuals’
discussion of a “masculinity crisis.” Zhang Xianliang’s 1985 novel Half of Man
Is Woman (Nanren de yi ban shi nüren) revolves around an intellectual who had
suffered twenty years of forced labor under Mao for writing poetry; he
becomes a symbol of anxiety paralyzing post-Maoist China since his inability
to properly discharge his marital duties stands in for the feebleness of the
country’s intellectual stratum in general. In one of the novel’s famous dream
sequences, a castrated horse gives voice to the disappointment with China’s
intellectual class more generally: “I even wonder if your entire intellectual
32 Elena Zdravomyslova and Anna Temkina, “The Crisis of Masculinity in Late Soviet
Discourse,” Russian Social Science Review 54, 1 (2013), 40–61.
33 Beth Holmgren, “Toward an Understanding of Gendered Agency in Contemporary
Russia,” Signs 38, 3 (2013), 537.
34 Wang Zheng, “From Xianglin’s Wife to the Iron Girls: The Politics of Gender
Representation,” in David S. G. Goodman (ed.), Handbook of the Politics of China
(Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2015), 298.
35 Marilyn Young, “Chicken Little in China: Some Reflections on Women,” in Arif Dirlik
and Maurice Meisner (eds.), Marxism and the Chinese Experience: Issues in Contemporary
Chinese Socialism (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989), 262.
433
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community isn’t emasculated. If even ten percent among you were virile
men, our country would never have come to this sorry state.”36 The response
to the critique expressed in Half of Man Is Woman could be most clearly seen
in the proliferation and popularity of rock music. The performers’ public
personae, together with the aural dynamics of the genre, cumulatively
expressed deep-seated anxieties and vocal demands that Chinese men restore
their dignity. It would not be an exaggeration to say that rock music served as
a kind of soundtrack to the events leading to the Tiananmen Square protests.
Open rebellion was the predominant sentiment featured in 1980s rock
songs.37 By celebrating uncompromising individuality, bold action, and brutal
straightforwardness, rockers and their audiences challenged both the com-
munist authorities and the Confucian insistence on self-control, submission
and discipline. While insisting on male autonomy, rock musicians were
unapologetically misogynistic and often equated state oppression with the
kind of pressure they imagined women exert on their male partners. Both the
state and women became “the other” that actively sought to limit men’s
autonomy and field of action.
The popularity of rock music also served as a vent for the frustration
Chinese men felt as China came into increasing contact with Western
culture, especially via Taiwan and Hong Kong. The sense of emasculation
grew during the late 1980s as China’s economic and technological backward-
ness relative to the West came into sharp relief. The West’s dominance
certainly evoked the trauma of China’s humiliation during the 1920s and
1930s. By accentuating China’s mainland culture, rock music combated the
sense that the West was again violating the nation’s autonomy. Chinese
rockers self-consciously adopted “the vocal style and melodic characteristics
associated with the rural area of northern Shaanxi province, one of the most
backward but historically significant geographic areas in China and the
Party’s headquarters in the course of the anti-Japanese resistance in the years
1937–45. The style thereby articulated its Chineseness, in other words its
independence from the West.”38 This development resulted in a hybrid
subgenre that came to be called xibeifeng, or Northwest Wind. Xibeifeng
announced the rejection of Western culture while mirroring Western rock
conventions. Rock performers thus defined post-Maoist masculinity in ways
that rejected Maoist notions of gender equity, compromise with political
36 Zhang Xianliang, Half of Man Is Woman (New York: Viking, 1988), 129.
37 Quoted in Nimrod Baranovitch, China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender,
and Politics, 1978–1997 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 117.
38 Ibid., 128–29.
434
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The Communist and Postsocialist Gender Order in Russia and China
39 Yunxiang Yan, “The Chinese Path to Individualization,” British Journal of Sociology 61, 3
(2010), 509.
40 Vanessa Fong, Only Hope: Coming of Age Under China’s One-Child Policy (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2004), 101.
41 Xiaoying Wang, “‘A Time to Remember’: The Reinvention of the Communist Hero in
Post-Communist China,” New Literary History 34 (2003), 133.
435
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436
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The Communist and Postsocialist Gender Order in Russia and China
44 Eliot Borenstein, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).
45 Ericka Johnson, Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband: Russian–American Internet Romance
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
46 O. Verkhovskaya and M. Dorokhina, Global Entrepreneurship Monitor: Russia 2010
(St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg University, 2010), 29, www.gemconsortium.org/coun
try-profile/104.
47 Ama Marston, Women in Business: From Classroom to Boardroom (London: Grant
Thornton International Ltd., 2014), https://www.grantthornton.jp/pdf/press/IB
R2014_WiB_report_en.pdf.
48 Dominic King, Women in Business: The Path to Leadership (London: Grant Thornton
International Ltd., 2014), www.grantthornton.global/globalassets/1.-member-firms/
global/insights/ibr-charts/ibr2015_wib_report_final.pdf.
49 Andrea Mazzarino, “Entrepreneurial Women and the Business of Self-Development in
Global Russia,” Signs 38, 3 (2013), 623–45.
437
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50 Björn Gustafsson and Shi Li, “Economic Transformation and the Gender Earnings Gap
in Urban China,” Journal of Population Economics 13 (2000), 305–29; Jieyu Liu, Gender and
Work in Urban China: Women Workers of the Unlucky Generation (London: Routledge,
2007).
51 Alicia S. M. Leung, “Feminism in Transition: Chinese Culture, Ideology and the
Development of the Women’s Movement,” Asia Pacific Journal of Management 20, 3
(2003), 367.
52 Pun Ngai, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2005).
53 Tamara Jacka, Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change
(Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006).
54 Minglu Chen, Tiger Girls: Women and Enterprise in the People’s Republic of China
(Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011).
438
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The Communist and Postsocialist Gender Order in Russia and China
439
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58 Alexei Yurchak, “Russian Neoliberal: The Entrepreneurial Ethic and the Spirit of ‘True
Careerism,’” Russian Review 62, 1 (2003), 73.
59 Elena Meshcherkina, “New Russian Men: Masculinity Regained?,” in Ashwin (ed.),
Gender, State and Society, 105–17.
60 Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).
440
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The Communist and Postsocialist Gender Order in Russia and China
61 Valerie Sperling, Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014).
62 Oleg Riabov and Tatiana Riabova, “The Remasculinization of Russia? Gender,
Nationalism, and the Legitimation of Power Under Vladimir Putin,” Problems of Post-
Communism 61, 2 (2014), 23–35.
441
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Conclusion
When they came to power, the Bolsheviks and the Chinese communists set
out to liberate women and put the sexes on equal footing. They shared the
goal of realizing Mao’s pronouncement that “Female comrades can do
whatever male comrades can do.” In a sense, what the Soviet and Chinese
Communist Parties tried to do was not only to erase the patriarchal cultures
steeped in Confucian and Russian Orthodox tradition, but also to eradicate
the view that human characteristics could be dichotomized into masculine
and feminine. Needless to say, this was a tall order, one of even utopian
magnitude. Nonetheless, communist regimes and their successors have
profoundly transformed men and women’s lived realities and the national
symbolic orders over the course of the twentieth century and into the new
millennium. As increasing numbers of women entered the labor force,
female citizens and workers not only became prominent as symbols of
communist-style modernity but also changed women’s perception of their
sociopolitical roles – even as true gender equality failed to materialize. To the
extent that women found work to be personally fulfilling, socially relevant
63 Ibid., 29.
442
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The Communist and Postsocialist Gender Order in Russia and China
and financially liberating, men could no longer play the role of unchallenged
familial patriarch. Moreover, within the context of a bureaucratic party-state,
male citizens had to submit to the vertical hierarchy of the party apparatus.
Thus, even as a large proportion of women remained subordinated to men’s
monopoly in private and public realms, the communist party and state
apparatus was powerful enough to assert its prerogatives and shape the
dynamics between the sexes. As such, during the revolutionary period the
communist party could be said to have played the role of the “third gender.”
The transition to neoliberal capitalism heralded a reform of socialist
gender relations but not their eradication, especially since the Chinese and
Russian state apparatus maintain control of the media and much of economic
activity. Nonetheless, there was a definite shift away from the socialist state
playing the role of the third gender to a more individualized gender order
shaped by the impact of the market. Simultaneously, however, echoes of
independent women engaged in the public sphere and (both mental and
manual) labor remain firmly entrenched in popular consciousness; this legacy
both rekindles reactionary anxieties about the imbalance of the “natural”
gender order and engenders opportunities for women to challenge men’s
monopoly on power. Despite the fact that the market has increased the
possibilities for hybrid and alternative gender identities, the perceived threat
of the West’s economic dominance has strengthened support for
a neotraditional gender order. Although Chinese and Russian authorities
propagate transnational business masculinity as essential to their postcom-
munist identity, equally as important to postsocialist states is a widely shared
sense of nationalist exceptionalism. While China and Russia understand
themselves to be participating in the global market, a hegemonic masculine
identity clearly divorced from Western-style modernity has emerged as the
postsocialist states define themselves against the West. As they articulate
their nations’ distinct form of capitalist development, the postsocialist
regimes create idealized hybrid masculinities in which entrepreneurial intel-
ligence is mixed with strains of virulent machismo or a sense of cultural
superiority.
Suggested Readings
Ashwin, Sarah (ed.), Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia
(London: Routledge, 2000).
Ashwin, Sarah and Tatyana Lytkina, “Men in Crisis in Russia: The Role of
Domestic Marginalization,” Gender and Society 18, 2 (2004), 189–206.
443
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marko d umanči ć
Baranovitch, Nimrod, China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender, and
Politics, 1978–1997 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
Goldman, Wendy, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Harsch, Donna, “Communism and Women,” in S. A. Smith (ed.), The Oxford
Handbook of the History of Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014),
488–504.
Hinsch, Bret, Masculinities in Chinese History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield,
2013).
Honig, Emily and Gail Hershatter, Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).
Jacka, Tamara, Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change
(Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006).
Louie, Kam, Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Ngai, Pun, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
Riabov, Oleg and Tatiana Riabova, “The Remasculinization of Russia? Gender,
Nationalism, and the Legitimation of Power Under Vladimir Putin,” Problems
of Post-Communism 61, 2, (2014), 23–35.
Rivkin-Fish, Michelle, “Pronatalism, Gender Politics, and the Renewal of Family
Support in Russia: Towards a Feminist Anthropology of ‘Maternity Capital,’”
Slavic Review 69, 3 (2010), 701–24.
Geng Song and Derek Hird, Men and Masculinities in Contemporary China (Leiden:
Brill, 2014).
Sperling, Valerie, Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014).
Yurchak, Alexei, “Russian Neoliberal: The Entrepreneurial Ethic and the Spirit of
‘True Careerism,’” Russian Review 62, 1 (2003), 72–90.
Zdravomyslova, Elena and Anna Temkina, “The Crisis of Masculinity in Late
Soviet Discourse,” Russian Social Science Review 54, 1 (2013), 40–61.
Bibliographical Essay
The fields of women’s studies and critical studies on men and masculinities
have had an uneven trajectory. While scholarship on the position of women
in the USSR and the PRC traces its roots to the late 1960s and early 1970s,
critical studies on Chinese and Russo-Soviet masculinities did not emerge
until the late 1990s. While women’s studies constitute a fundamental part of
both communist and postcommunist studies, the scholarship on the mascu-
linity side of the gender equation remains in a relatively nascent phase.
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The Communist and Postsocialist Gender Order in Russia and China
For the evolution of Russian and Soviet women’s history, see Barbara Engel
Alpern, “New Directions in Russian and Soviet Women’s History,” in Pamela
S. Nadell and Kate Haulman (eds.), Making Women’s Histories: Beyond National
Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 38–60. For the devel-
opment of scholarly studies on Chinese women in both China and the West, see
Gail Hershatter and Wang Zheng, “Chinese History: A Useful Category of
Gender Analysis,” American Historical Review 113, 5 (2008), 1404–21. The position
of women under communism is analyzed in Donna Harsch, “Communism and
Women,” in Stephen A. Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of
Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 488–504.
A useful overview of scholarship on Russian and Soviet masculinities
emerges in Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman and Dan Healey
(eds.), Russian Masculinities in History and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2002). A theoretical and longue durée approach to Chinese masculinity receives
coverage in Kam Louie, Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in
China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Two works that delineate the Soviet and Chinese Communist Parties’
paradoxical attitude toward women, as simultaneously sociopolitically
regressive elements and embodiments of historical progress and social
change, see Elizabeth A. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and
Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1997); and Tina Mai Chen, “Female Icons, Feminist Iconography? Socialist
Rhetoric and Women’s Agency in 1950s China,” Gender and History 15, 2
(2003), 268–95.
Evaluations of Soviet women’s contribution to Stalin’s industrial revolu-
tion and of their World War II combat roles are presented, respectively, in
Wendy Goldman, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Anna Krylova, Soviet
Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2011). The transformation of women’s sociopolitical
roles under Mao receives scrutiny in Emily Honig, “Socialist Sex:
The Cultural Revolution Revisited,” Modern China 29, 2 (2003), 143–75, and
Emily Honig, “Iron Girls Revisited: Gender and the Politics of Work in the
Cultural Revolution,” in Barbara Entwisle and Gail E. Henderson (eds.), Re-
Drawing Boundaries: Work, Households, and Gender in China (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000), 97–110.
For the fundamental transformation the masculinity ideal underwent
during the first three decades of Soviet rule, see both Eliot Borenstein, Men
Without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929
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(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), and Lilya Kaganovsky, How the
Soviet Man Was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity Under Stalin
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008). For the Chinese revolu-
tionary project’s impact on the social construct of masculinity, see
Bret Hinsch, Masculinities in Chinese History (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2013), 151–70.
The various elements of the late socialist Soviet masculinity crisis are
featured in Elena Zdravomyslova and Anna Temkina, “The Crisis of
Masculinity in Late Soviet Discourse,” Russian Social Science Review 54, 1
(2013), 40–61. Two studies that identify the rapidly changing gender politics
after Mao’s death include Nimrod Baranovitch, China’s New Voices: Popular
Music, Ethnicity, Gender, and Politics, 1978–1997 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003), as well as Wang Zheng, “From Xianglin’s Wife to the
Iron Girls: The Politics of Gender Representation,” in David S. G. Goodman
(ed.), Handbook of the Politics of China (Northampton, MA: Edward Edgar, 2015).
For an overview of how men’s domestic roles changed after the fall of
the Soviet Union, see Sarah Ashwin and Tatyana Lytkina, “Men in Crisis in
Russia: The Role of Domestic Marginalization,” Gender and Society 18,
2 (2004), 189–206. The emergence of the neoliberal entrepreneurial ethos
and its impact on gender relations are covered in Andrea Mazzarino,
“Entrepreneurial Women and the Business of Self-Development in
Global Russia,” Signs 38, 3 (2013), 623–45, and Alexei Yurchak, “Russian
Neoliberal: The Entrepreneurial Ethic and the Spirit of ‘True Careerism,’”
Russian Review 62, 1 (2003), 72–90. The hypermasculine and ethnoexclusivist
politics of the Putin era is examined in Oleg Riabov and Tatiana Riabova,
“The Remasculinization of Russia? Gender, Nationalism, and the Legitimation
of Power Under Vladimir Putin,” Problems of Post-Communism 61, 2, (2014), 23–35.
The realities of female entrepreneurs in China receive treatment in
Minglu Chen, Tiger Girls: Women and Enterprise in the People’s Republic of
China (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011). Monographs on women factory workers
include Pun Ngai, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), and Tamara Jacka, Rural Women
in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change (Armonk, NY:
M. E. Sharpe, 2006). For a comprehensive treatment of contemporary
Chinese masculinities, see Geng Song and Derek Hird, Men and Masculinities
in Contemporary China (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
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