Soviet Bodies in Transition: Sex and Stereotypes in the Visual Satire of Late Perestroika

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This article examines how late Soviet visual satire—particularly cartoons and caricatures—functioned as a vehicle for expressing and reinforcing gender stereotypes, with a specific focus on sexuality. The relative loosening of censorship under perestroika permitted an increased presence of sexual humour in Soviet media. However, this humour often reaffirmed patriarchal frameworks rather than indicating genuine liberalisation. In magazines such as Krokodil and Perets, the female body frequently appears as a hypersexualised figure, commodified and rendered interchangeable with consumer goods. These representations did not critique dominant gender ideologies; instead, they naturalised them through visual codes of desire, scarcity, and submission. Employing an iconological approach, the article analyses how this visual rhetoric encoded broader cultural anxieties about gender, sex, and social change. Soviet cartoons simultaneously reflected and shaped discourse on sexuality, portraying it as both emancipatory and destabilising. Through analysis of official satire, unofficial humour, and visual culture, the article explores how visual satire contributed to evolving gender discourses in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet space.