Moral Economies of Wartime Intimacy: One Facet of Gender in the Blockade of Leningrad

Abstract

Because it is political and simultaneously linked to one's sense of self and intimate relations with others, "gender" is never truly given or set. Even in relatively stable circumstances, social meanings of "man" and "woman" as physical, sexual, or status classifications can become objects of contestation in private spaces and public arenas. In the Blockade of Leningrad, these classifications were under a different kind of assault in fields and habitus: less from any political mobilization (highly problematic in the Stalinist era anyways), and more from a combination of demographic feminization of the city (as men entered the Red Army or died in mass numbers before women) and shifts in the value of gendered skills and positions.1 As they entered factories and took over men's jobs, and as they applied caregiving and homemaking skills to make efficient use of scarce food or food substitutes to help men and children survive (to the extent they could), women gained an increased sense of status that altered their own perceptions of their status vis-à-vis men and broader Leningrad society. Yet not only were senses of status and position shocked by the trials and tribulations of Blockade survival. Intimate