A.K. 47 - Selections from the Works of Alexandra Kollontai
Kristen R. Ghodsee reads and discusses 47 selections from the works of Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952), a socialist women's activist who had radical ideas about the intersections of socialism and women's emancipation. Born into aristocratic privilege, the Ukrainian-Finnish Kollontai was initially a member of the Mensheviks before she joined Lenin and the Bolsheviks and became an important revolutionary figure during the 1917 Russian Revolution. Kollontai was a socialist theorist of women’s emancipation and a strident proponent of sexual relations freed from all economic considerations. After the October Revolution, Kollontai became the Commissar of Social Welfare and helped to found the Zhenotdel (the women's section of the Party). She oversaw a wide variety of legal reforms and public policies to help liberate working women and to create the basis of a new socialist sexual morality. But Russians were not ready for her vision of emancipation, and she was sent away to Norway to serve as the first Russian female ambassador (and only the third female ambassador in the world). In this podcast, Kristen R. Ghodsee – a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (Bold Type Books 2018) – selects excerpts from the essays, speeches, and fiction of Alexandra Kollontai and puts them in context. Each episode provides an introduction to the abridged reading with some relevant background on Kollontai and the historical moment in which she was writing.
A.K. 47 - Selections from the Works of Alexandra Kollontai
14 - A.K. 47 - Make Way for Winged Eros: Discussion I - Elisheva Levy
This is the first episode in a series of discussions that will feature Kristen R. Ghodsee with various guests reflecting on Alexandra Kollontai's 1923 essay: "Make Way for Winged Eros: A Letter to Working Youth."
Kristen Ghodsee's guest this week is the artist and Penn School of Design grad student, Elisheva Levy.
In this essay, Kollontai works out her theories of how love and sexuality will be superior under socialism as compared to the bourgeois capitalist past. She provides a Marxist history of love and sex as ideals that change depending on how the ruling class uses them to promote their own economic interests. It is an essential essay in terms of thinking about the intersections of sexuality and political economy, and it was an important inspiration for Ghodsee's 2018 book: Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. In this episode, Elisheva Levy discusses her research project, "Beyond Monogamous Architecture" in relation to Kollontai's essay.
FYI - the intro music is a Russian version of The Internationale.
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Kristen R. Ghodsee is the award-winning author of twelve books and a professor and chair of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
