Undisciplined bodies: Deviant female sexuality in Russian and Yiddish literatures, 1877-1929

“Undisciplined Bodies: Deviant Female Sexuality in Russian and Yiddish Literatures, 1877-1929,” analyzes the representation of female bodies and eroticism in Russian and Yiddish literatures in dialogue with medical and journalistic works. I use Foucault’s theories of power, control, and discipline as a point of departure to argue that artistic literature served as a space of increasingly unregulated pleasure for the reader, while nonfictional texts tried to discipline and control the reader. Sometimes, however, there was an overlap between the two types of text. Nonfictional works often included sensationalistic narratives to titillate their readers, while literature often staged the punishment of deviant women characters. Authors of fictional and nonfictional texts from this period used the figures of unhappy wives, Jewish converts to Christianity, prostitutes, promiscuous women, and adulteresses to construct new myths of female deviance. Literary authors, scientists, and journals linked the promiscuous female body to the sexual excess that they saw as characteristic of modern life. They also cast women and Jews as remnants from past stages of human development that could not be modernized. Even as scientists and many literary authors attempted to clean up, normalize, and homogenize sexuality, they created images and representations that in their grotesqueness worked against the very tendencies they were trying to instill. Depictions of women in this light evoked the experience of abjection, that is, the simultaneous desire for and disgust at the object being represented. My project reveals how these negative, often misogynistic visions of femininity were central to both literary modernism and the professionalization of the sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Slavic Languages & Literature

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Hamel, Leianna Xenia

Contributors dc:contributor

• Murav, Harriet
• Sobol, Valeria
• Avrutin, Eugene
• Cooper, David

• Yiddish Literature
• Russian Literature
• Women
• Sexuality
• Medicine

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2024 Leianna Hamel

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/125681

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F125681