Body, gender, and a communist’s shame (side notes on Stanisław Lem’s utopian science fiction novels from the 1950s)

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This article is an attempt to answer the question: what prompted the authors of utopian science fiction novels which appeared during the communist period (mainly in the 1950s) in Poland and the Soviet Union, to adopt a particular convention of presenting the human body, and especially the woman’s body. The analysis of these works (the novels Astronauci [The Astronauts] and Obłok Magellana [The Magellanic Cloud] by Stanisław Lem and Ivan Yefremov’s Andromeda Nebula) is conducted in a dialogue with the concepts of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, as well as Judith Butler or contemporary sociologists (e.g., Chris Shilling), regarding the body image and an idealistic element contained in the Marxist-Leninist ideology, which is the theoretical basis of the utopian vision of a society of the future. Psychoanalytic and deconstructive readings of Lem’s and Yefremov’s texts lead the author of this article to the conclusion that the image of the female body (and, thus, inseparable from human sexuality of shame) undergoes here a sort of ‘politicisation’ in relation to a vision of capitalism as a ‘dark vortex’ of life governed by drives, mediated falsely by logos. However, the image of femininity and sexuality, included in the novels, refers to the early Gnostic version of Christianity (among others to opinions by Marcion, Valentinus, and the Syrian’s ‘Encratites’), kindling the hope to transform body by eliminating areas of drives, but the place of the Gnostic ‘salvation of the soul’ in the communist utopias is occupied by progress, understood as an increase in knowledge and an achievement of the ideal of the ultimate end of human history through a union with nature.