The body politic: socialist science fiction and the embodied state

Virginia Lee Conn
2021
My dissertation explores why and how science fiction writers and policymakers from Soviet Russia, Communist China, and the German Democratic Republic put a transformed human body at the center of their visions of the future. Since socialism conflated individual bodies with the national body, writers and planners commonly sought to portray a "new socialist human" free not only from want but also from physical imperfection. Science fiction texts described the world these citizens would inhabit as
more » ... the socialist future, while policymakers drew up plans to create such utopias in real life. Both writers and planners placed narratives of the body at the nexus of modernizing developments as wide-ranging as marriage reform, cybernetics, hematology, labor camps, educational reform, and nuclear power.Chapter one surveys representations of socialism's ideal body in three national science fiction traditions. Since socialism erases the boundaries between individuals and the collective, then the health of the state should be reflected in that of its citizens. Science fiction authors influenced policymakers, scientists, and labor organizers (some of whom were, themselves, science fiction authors) through their literary projections of bodily perfectibility. At the same time, through what Marx identified as "the alteration of men on a mass scale," socialist policymakers proposed projects that were as much acts of imagination as any work of fiction. Socialist narratives of the future, whether literary or policy-oriented, required new bodies to fulfill their visions.The texts at the heart of chapter two, "Conjugal Happiness in the Arms of Morpheus" by Wei Yahua and Red Star by Alexander Bogdanov, decouple biological reproduction from social reproduction. Considering biological reproduction an impediment to physical perfectibility and even immortality, theorists and policymakers focused on reproduction as a specific point of intervention aimed at improving sexual equality. Though this split takes different forms in each case—one thro [...]
doi:10.7282/t3-86z7-6v18 fatcat:6jy2yqwlkvcl3g6kp7art42w3u