TY - JOUR
T1 - Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to be Done? And the Prehistory of International Marxist Feminism
AU - Stuhr-Rommereim, Helen
AU - Jarris, Mari
N1 - Funding Information:
Helen Stuhr-Rommereim is a PhD candidate in the comparative literature and literary theory program at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation examines literary radicalism and anti-aestheticism in Russia in the 1860s and 1870s. Her research has been funded by fellowships from Fulbright and American Councils for International Education.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Feminist German Studies.
PY - 2020/3
Y1 - 2020/3
N2 - Recently, feminist and queer theorists have looked to utopianism to revive debates on gender and sexuality under capitalism initiated by Marxist feminists in the 1960s. In this article we take up this discourse not by turning to Marx and Engels but instead to a novel by one of their contemporaries, Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? (1863). We contextualize this work, acclaimed as Russia's most consequential nineteenth- century novel, in international socialist thought to contribute to historical understandings of the entangled German and Russian left ist traditions as well as to contemporary queer and feminist theory. Th rough an analysis of the novel's representation of collective labor, "fictitious" marriage, and its utopian dream, we demonstrate that in What Is to Be Done? gender relations are not merely conceived of as a Nebenwiderspruch; rather, women emerge as the revolutionary subjects who create the conditions for the radical transformation of society through collectivity.
AB - Recently, feminist and queer theorists have looked to utopianism to revive debates on gender and sexuality under capitalism initiated by Marxist feminists in the 1960s. In this article we take up this discourse not by turning to Marx and Engels but instead to a novel by one of their contemporaries, Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? (1863). We contextualize this work, acclaimed as Russia's most consequential nineteenth- century novel, in international socialist thought to contribute to historical understandings of the entangled German and Russian left ist traditions as well as to contemporary queer and feminist theory. Th rough an analysis of the novel's representation of collective labor, "fictitious" marriage, and its utopian dream, we demonstrate that in What Is to Be Done? gender relations are not merely conceived of as a Nebenwiderspruch; rather, women emerge as the revolutionary subjects who create the conditions for the radical transformation of society through collectivity.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85105867829&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1353/fgs.2020.0012
DO - 10.1353/fgs.2020.0012
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85105867829
SN - 2578-5206
VL - 36
SP - 166
EP - 192
JO - Feminist German Studies
JF - Feminist German Studies
IS - 1
ER -
