Gender and modernism in a Stalinist state

Abstract

The relation between gender and political regime has most often been theorized as a reciprocal naturalization of gender and political power. How, then, are we to understand the political role of gender in a regime that seeks legitimacy based upon its rejection of the naturalized social order? Rather than a mutual naturalization of gender and power, the Stalinist revolutionary project in Hungary destabilized gender. Gender, however, did not become unfixed and freely polyphonous. Rather, gender was redeployed through processes of familialization and rationalization, each of which had both homogenizing and differentiating effects. In this way the Stalinist state attempted to institute a new gender regime; this formed part of its drive to impose a variant of modernist rationality on society.