“To be a woman is hard work”. The Changing Landscape of Gendered Emotions in the Late Soviet Union

In closely reading the 1980 Soviet blockbuster “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears”, this article demonstrates how atypically gendered emotions in fact reified a binarycoded emotional and gendered order. Following the fairytale romance between Katia, a factory director, and Gosha, a rank-and-file worker, this film played with the boundaries of traditional gender roles. In doing so, the article argues, the film illuminated the broad scope of gender fluidity. The analysis takes into account public perceptions of the movie as presented in contemporary reviews and journal articles, concluding that key to the film’s success were the male hero’s emotionality as well as the heroine’s checked feelings. Whereas in Katia’s case her gender was constantly scrutinised both within the film and in audience reactions to it, this certainly was not the case for Gosha. The figure of the emotional man reified the gendered order of feelings with dream prince Gosha embodying its Soviet incarnation

Aesthetics · Art · Dream · Feeling · Femininity · Incarnation · Masculinity · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Romance · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · Gender Studies · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

• The Invisible Work of Intellectual Advocacy

  Open Access•Rósa Magnúsdóttir•Contemporary European History•2025

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