CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Costache, Irina |
|---|---|
| Title | Archiving Desire: Materiality, Sexuality and the Secret Police in Romanian State Socialism |
| Summary | This dissertation aims to write its history from a bodily and embodied perspective. This salient locus is the ideal venue to discuss issues of sexuality, gender, pleasure, emotions and sensations that are not usually part of histories of state socialism. In fact these topics are quite marginal or rendered insignificant when simply circumscribed to the “resistance” paradigm that necessarily accompanied the well-known “totalitarian” paradigm employed to describe experiences in the former Eastern Block. Making the body central to my investigation enabled me to offer three theoretical openings. First, it re-grounded the history of state socialism from the (rather abstract) discussions with ideology, politics and economics towards lived and embodied experiences. Secondly, by making the body central it allowed me to bring in a series of connected topics and phenomena, for example the constitution of bodies during socialism, either normal or deviant that would otherwise be simply relegated to the realm of socialist policy when in fact they dovetail more complex relations. Thirdly, by focusing on the body I was able to bring forth experiences and personal histories of people like the nudists, the yoga practitioners and homosexual men. Their particular common situation within socialism, but also their evident differences, would have been lost without the common theme of the body. The argument that this dissertation makes is that far from being repressive, the functioning of state socialist regimes itself generated and sustained a broad range of desires and libidinal investments, thus enabling the formation of very complex gendered subjectivities and bodies. State surveillance, its gaze upon the people, its disposition of bodies was traversed by erotic desires and based on sexual pleasures. I argue that what sustained the communist regime was its scopophilia: the voyeuristic pleasure of looking, taking pleasure in looking, in the surveillance itself. Consequently, while sexuality was officially repressed, in fact I will argue that it was affirmed in the very functioning of the regime. This argument brings into discussion immediately the role of the secret police and of secrecy more generally. Secrecy becomes then a focal point of my investigation as a practice that generates arousal itself. Secrecy also elicits the desire to look, to penetrate with the gaze what is hidden and unknown. Secrecy I argue remains inseparable from penetration: the phallocentric affirmation of the regime. For building up my case I use materials such as oral history interviews, secret police archives and memoirs. |
| Supervisor | Cerwonka Allaine |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/costache_irina.pdf |
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