Presentations by Streams

This panel explores the embodied experiences of everyday life under state socialism in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia through the materiality of refrigerators, typewriters, and the various accoutrements of the erotic. Using ethnographic and archival research, the papers investigate the contingencies of human subjectivity as it is shaped by the inanimate objects that were produced, used, desired, bartered, gifted, repaired, and recycled in non-market economies in the 20th century.