Authors

Sofia Lopatina¹;  ¹ Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany

Discussion

I will talk about agency and the invisibility of women using the example of non-conformist youth groups in Leningrad in the 1960s. How did women try to overcome their silence? Are there patterns of silencing women in state-produced sources and in narratives of dissidence? Recent literature has revised our understanding of the recalcitrant, unruly sides of late socialism and its participants, and complicated our understanding of the resistance-compliance dichotomy. However, it is important to add women's experiences to this picture and analyse the relationship between gender, the exercise of power, and dissent at different levels: power and gender within non-conformist groups, power and gender in society at large, and how these two levels reinforced each other.