A Sexual Theory of the State: Reading Tolstoy in the Era of #metoo

Thursday, April 26, 2018
Reed Hall, Room 108 @ 4:45 pm
Ani Kokobobo, University of Kansas

In part due to biographical information about the Tolstoy marriage, and in part due to the author’s personal writings, for years, the critical debate of Tolstoy and gender has centered on a misogyny thesis. While some scholars have seen Tolstoy as a misogynist, who completely elides the female experience, others have advocated for a feminist Tolstoy, whose affiliation with women is central to his writing. As I argue in this paper, the problem with the misogyny thesis is that it has not allowed much room for scholars to conceptualize the complicated and interesting ideas about gender and sexuality that Tolstoy advances, particularly in his later years. I reevaluate Tolstoy from the perspective of contemporary debates on gender and sexuality, comparing compare him to feminist and queer thinkers. My objective is to shift the debate past the misogyny quagmire in order to reveal Tolstoy the sophisticated gender theorist. What I show is that as someone more interested in social reorganization than sexual repression for its own sake, in both his abstinence and related pacifist ideas, Tolstoy presents us with a coherent and complicated theory of the state with focused on establishing non-violent relationships among individuals.​

Ani Kokobobo received her BA from Dartmouth (2005) and PhD from Columbia (2011). She is currently assistant professor and director of graduate studies in the Slavic Department at the University of Kansas, as well as editor of the Tolstoy Studies Journal, and the new blog, Tolstoy Commons. Her monograph, Russian Grotesque Realism: The Great Reforms and the Gentry Decline recently came out with the Ohio State UP. She has published two edited volumes, Russian Writers and the Fin de Siecle -- Twilight of Realism (Cambridge University Press) as well as Russia's Regional Identities -- The Power of the Provinces (Routledge). She has published numerous essays on various aspects of 19th c. Russian literature, as well as many shorter writings which have come out in the Washington Post, Salon.com, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

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