Gender and Social Reproduction the Socialist Way

This article turns to the question of social reproduction to explore the rich contributions of humanist scholarship around gender, sexuality, care, and leisure during the post-Stalinist years in Bulgaria. In Eastern Europe, social reproduction appeared in the writings of socialist humanists as early as the mid-1960s. Humanist critics of Stalinist Marxism mobilized the concept to move away from an exclusive focus on industrial labour and to expose the limitations of Stalinist Marxism more generally. The social-reproductive sphere became an organizing principle of „developed“ socialist society and a terrain for the shaping and reshaping of social relations and subjectivities. For feminist activists, it was not only about delivering social benefits to women; it was also a matter of breaking down deep historical structures of subjugation and reorganizing society as a whole. The article also explores the shortcomings and ambivalent effects of these legacies. With their naturalizing and imperative discourses, these regimes collided with the biopolitical logics of the socialist state and its ethnonationalist agenda.