Red Feminism: The Politics and Poetics of Liberation

Abstract

This dissertation compares postcolonial and postsocialist intersections of gender and empire with the aim of reassessing and reorienting the conceptual framework of transnational feminist studies. By focusing on multiple, interlocking, and distinct modalities of oppression, this dissertation interrogates the relationship between resistance, power, and liberation within the context of the world communist movement. Although Marxism plays a crucial role in discussions about gender and women’s liberation, scholars from across a number of disciplines, such as history, sociology, gender studies, and comparative literature, have not given sufficient attention to the perspectives and lived experiences of postsocialist subjects. Marxist, socialist, and communist discourses are often examined solely from an intellectual perspective, with their social, cultural, and interpersonal implications deemed a secondary concern. My dissertation aims to remedy this gap by examining the complex legacy of communist movements in Central Asia and Japan from a gendered perspective. I use the concept of red feminism to contextualize and historicize women’s perceptions and experiences within the framework of gendered subject formation. Through an investigation of the red feminist movement, my work explores how the historical positioning of colonial empires, such as (Soviet) Russia and Japan, determined various strategies of inclusion and affirmation in both the politics and culture of liberation; how local specificities in language and context shaped various enunciations of gender within the movement; and how the task of liberation, in the Marxist-Leninist context of the revolutionary vanguard/women and the oppressed masses/women, complicated the relations of power, agency, and representation. By examining the politics and poetics of women’s liberation within the framework of world communism, this dissertation underscores the cultural impact of the movement in shaping the global discourse on gender and revolution. My comparative analysis of literature, cinema, and intellectual history in multiple languages—Russian, Kazakh, Japanese—and across multiple regions—Russia, Kazakhstan, Japan—demonstrates the complex interplay between power, knowledge, and resistance. It challenges prevailing assumptions about communist, socialist, and leftist discourses and illuminates the diverse ways in which these discourses have been adapted, contested, and reproduced across different cultural landscapes. I use a decolonial method to underscore hybridity and hybrid formations in both the political and personal dimensions of the red feminist movement. It is my contention that within the context of world communism, hybridity pertains not just to the fusion of ideas and agendas of different local actors but also to the difference in identity markers—including but not limited to class, ethnicity, and gender—that determine the power dynamics between these actors. By foregrounding the marginalized voices and experiences of postsocialist women, this dissertation not only enriches our understanding of the global communist movement but also contributes to the debate on transnationalism in feminist theory and gender studies.