The body politic: socialist science fiction and the embodied state
Creators: name: Conn, Virginia Lee
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2021

description: My dissertation explores why and how science fiction writers and policymakers from Soviet Russia, Communist China, and the German Democratic Republic put a transformed human body at the center of their visions of the future. Since socialism conflated individual bodies with the national body, writers and planners commonly sought to portray a “new socialist human” free not only from want but also from physical imperfection. Science fiction texts described the world these citizens would inhabit as the socialist future, while policymakers drew up plans to create such utopias in real life. Both writers and planners placed narratives of the body at the nexus of modernizing developments as wide-ranging as marriage reform, cybernetics, hematology, labor camps, educational reform, and nuclear power.Chapter one surveys representations of socialism’s ideal body in three national science fiction traditions. Since socialism erases the boundaries between individuals and the collective, then the health of the state should be reflected in that of its citizens. Science fiction authors influenced policymakers, scientists, and labor organizers (some of whom were, themselves, science fiction authors) through their literary projections of bodily perfectibility. At the same time, through what Marx identified as “the alteration of men on a mass scale,” socialist policymakers proposed projects that were as much acts of imagination as any work of fiction. Socialist narratives of the future, whether literary or policy-oriented, required new bodies to fulfill their visions.The texts at the heart of chapter two, “Conjugal Happiness in the Arms of Morpheus” by Wei Yahua and Red Star by Alexander Bogdanov, decouple biological reproduction from social reproduction. Considering biological reproduction an impediment to physical perfectibility and even immortality, theorists and policymakers focused on reproduction as a specific point of intervention aimed at improving sexual equality. Though this split takes different forms in each case—one through the creation of a national superorganism connected through bloodsharing, the other through the production of robots as a check on population growth—both texts redistribute social processes historically associated with one biological phenotype as egalitarian projects. By rejecting the connection between sex and social reproduction altogether, however, they suggest that actual reproducing bodies are irreparably flawed.Chapter three asks how, in socialist narratives, workers were portrayed in the absence of work. Writers and policymakers often described the future as a post-labor utopia while exalting work in the present as a necessary duty, much like childbirth, from which every citizen would soon be freed. I argue here that the understudied ephemera lian huan hua (连环画)—linked serial images, or propagandistic comic books from the PRC—exemplify this ideal of a future free from labor. As quotidian projections of futurity, lian huan hua depicted aestheticized and politicized images of the human not as a user of tools creating the state, but as tools utilized by the state for measuring individual and social progress.I turn in the last chapter to three texts about illness and deformity: the Chinese novelette “Corrosion” by Ye Yonglie, the Soviet story “Pkhentz” by Andrei Sinyavsky, and the GDR short story “The Eye that Never Weeps” by Angela and Karlheinz Steinmüller. Though formally different, all three are troubled by the imperfect bodies of their socialist citizens—bodies whose infirmities call out for correction through the application of the state's hygienic practices. For these texts to acknowledge the continued existence of disability, however, is to risk betraying the socialist vision of a perfected humanity. Across national and linguistic traditions, socialist science fiction encountered its limit in representations of deviant bodies that resist idealization—bodies that these narratives nonetheless cannot do without.