Authors

Discussion

‘There is no sex in the USSR’. Coined by one of its participants, this phrase from the first female “tele-bridge” between the Soviet and American women has become an epitome of everything of the most backward. Yet the actual remark was made about sexual content in tele commercials, and the 1986 discussion anticipated a future state of ambivalent and bewildered craving of mass audiences for sexually explicit materials in late perestroika media. This uncontrollable break out of interest combined appetites for both ‘chernukha’ and eroticism. It led to the disruption of rigid Soviet norms and boundaries, but also created a general affective confusion and a rupture in the fabric of language. Quite often, visual arts and media appropriated these spaces of verbal emptiness and normative voids. But although this process led to the exploitation of the female body and resurrection of some earlier archaic concepts of femininity, it has also allowed new art to appear and women to take control of previously male-dominated fields. In doing this, they relied on the already established pre-perestroika tradition of working with polarised feelings in regionalist nonconformist photography networks. In this paper I will show how during perestroika women stormed photographic “boys’ clubs”, both disrupting the rigid Soviet boundaries and showing the diversity of sexual practices. In the process, they were creating art that helped their audiences to meaningfully navigate these complicated feelings and make sense of their affective confusion. I will also demonstrate how a male curator dealt with the expansion of interest in erotica and tried to educate his exhibition viewers.