Affective machines or the inner self? Drawing the boundaries of the female body in the socialist romantic imagination

This article explores two conflicting aesthetics of the female body in post-Stalinist Soviet science fiction. One represented women of the communist future as explorers of the space frontier in assemblages with machines, testing the cultural border between the female and the technological. Another appealed to the mysterious female nature as the Other of human culture, pushing forward the understanding of socialist progress as a masculine project. This article argues that both aesthetics grew within the cultural phenomenon of socialist Romanticism, which emerged in the mid-1950s as a reaction to Stalin-era quasi-Enlightenment rationality and its dominant style of socialist realism.