Mothers, Machines, Monsters:
Mapping the Gendered Apparatuses of Biopolitics in Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Town of Žeimiai

The overall aim of my thesis “Mothers, Machines, Monsters: Mapping the Gendered Apparatuses of Biopolitics in Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Town of Žeimiai” is to portray an example of how biopolitics of gender in late Soviet and early post-Soviet periods was activated in a rural area of Lithuania through the everyday life practises of labour, reproduction and intimacy to monitor the capacities and habituations of the Soviet female bodies. I aim at this in order to: a) reshape the current scholarship by demonstrating that Soviet biopolitics cannot be subsumed either together with Naziism or with Western biopolitics and must be claimed as a unique art of governing, b) help us to better comprehend the postsocialist transition and the ways Eastern European women react to the changes and transformations bodily, c) highlight the rationale and practices of both regulation and resistance afforded by the gender apparatuses in late socialist and early post-socialist worlds and reconceptualize the very nature of struggle and agency embodied by Žeimiai women in such contexts. During the four months in ZZF, I will be focusing on the part of my research, which analyzes the intimacy, intimate relations (family units, love and care practises, sex, non-human friendships) and will start working on the chapter of my thesis, dedicated to Žeimiai women and their (queer) relations and alliances with non-humans.

During her stay at the ZZF Potsdam Eglė Ambrasaitė researches in Dep. I "Communism and Society" on her PhD project..