Red Days on the Calendar: The Politics of Menstruation in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia

Event time: 
Monday, December 10, 2018 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm
Location: 
William L. Harkness Hall (WLH) See map
100 Wall Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

In this talk, Dr. Pavel Vasilyev investigates the connections between the menstrual cycle and the Soviet experience of the short twentieth century (1917-1991) in order to provide a new historical perspective on gender, body and affect in a state-socialist setting. In doing so, he highlights several peculiar features of this case as well as its enduring legacy that continues to inform and influence the everyday lives of women across vast post-socialist spaces and their extensions.

Dr. Vasilyev is currently a Polonsky Academy Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Junior Research Fellow at Siberian State Medical University. His current research project, tentatively entitled “Red Days on the Calendar: A Cultural History of Soviet Menstruation,” examines various types of knowledge about menstruation, diverse emotions associated with it as well as evolving bodily practices and technologies that the Soviet women used to deal with their menstrual cycles.

Pavel Vasilyev