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
16 - A.K. 47 - Make Way for Winged Eros: Discussion III - Angelina Eimannsberger
This is the third 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." 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, Kristen Ghodsee speaks with Angelina Eimannsberger, a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Angelina hosts a bookstagram account, @indulgencezine, where she discusses novels and memoirs by contemporary women writers. Also mentioned in this episode are the books Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, The Matchmaker’s List, and Bastards of Utopia. Bastards of Utopia is also a documentary film, as is Knock down the house.
The intro and outro music is a Russian version of The Internationale.
More info about the host can be found at: www.kristenghodsee.com
You can follow Angelina Eimannsberger on Instagram at: @indulgencezine
Also see: AlexandraKollontai.com – A Website for All Things Kollontai
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