Authors

Claire Shaw¹;  ¹ University of Warwick, UK

Discussion

As Toby Clark has noted, theorists in the early Soviet Union focused on the human body as ‘the principal site for utopian speculations’, with the ideal body of the future understood as both the product, and the architect, of revolution’s success. Yet what did this mean for those with disabilities, whose permanently imperfect bodies seemed to forestall any attempts at transformation? This paper examines the sometimes surprising engagement of scholars of disability, and of disabled communities, with the ideal of the perfect future body. While the perfect, homogenous, and able human body was initially understood as the inevitable outcome of the transition to communism, revolution had also fostered communities united in their physical deviation from an idealised norm. By considering the attempt to write physical disability into the Soviet vision of the future, this paper seeks to complicate the aesthetics and imperatives of the Soviet transformative project.