Docile Bodies

Abstract

The research proposes a dialectical re-reading of the Romanian Communist housing as a gendered control mechanism. Therefore, the thesis concentrates on Berceni neighbourhood between 1977 and 1989 as a case study for a larger urban phenomenon under the late Romanian Communist Regime (1965-1989). In this context, the research juxtaposes the Marxist ideologies on women's emancipation (proliferated throughout the Eastern Block) with the experiences of female inhabitants in Berceni. This contextualisation is crucial, given that response to women's issues was state-enforced and disseminated top-down. In aiding with a broader political and economic agenda, state policy dictated that women should be liberated from home duties (the private sphere) and be transposed into productive members of the society (the public sphere). Given that decision making was assigned to a predominantly male political elite, the state disregarded the family resources necessary to fulfil tasks historically associated with womanhood. Therefore, Socialist Women became just as tied to domesticity as their predecessors. What changed was that they were now forcefully assigned a dual character: an aseptic asexual public persona of state worker along the already existing sexualised domestic one. In understanding the link between women and domesticity, the research confronts the implications of state propaganda on the Lived Experience identified in the stories of some of the women inhabitants of 1977-89 Berceni. Among other points, the paper highlights women's isolation, over-working and distrust as some of the aftermaths of this clash between ideology and context.