University of California, Berkeley

Graduate Student, Slavic

Letters & Sciences

Thesis Title: Silence and Alterity in Russia after Stalin, 1955-1975

About

Anastasia Kayiatos is a Townsend Center dissertation fellow and
doctoral candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures with a
Designated Emphasis on Women, Gender and Sexuality at U.C. Berkeley. She divides her time among writing, teaching, and running a couple of working groups: one on Deaf and Disability Studies; another called Socialisms and Sexualities, which thinks through transnational queer and feminist theory in the former Second World.  Her dissertation on silence and alterity in Russia after Stalin, 1955-1975, explores the conditions of speech and speechlessness under which the Soviet Union’s “others”—those marked and marginalized by the bodily differences of sexuality, gender, race and disability—came to be as subjects and came together as socialities within late socialism against an ideal Soviet subject predicated on perfect vocality.  She offsets stories of suppressed and strained speech with creative re/appropriations of silence as counterconduct by certain wily Soviet actors.  Her study comprises such styles of “silence” as censorship; pantomime; deaf theater; racially-inflected speech; speech pathology described by theclinical-pedagogical discipline of Defectology; and periphrastic poetics in queer and “women’s prose.”  The first chapter of the dissertation, which looks at Soviet avant-garde pantomime and deaf theater in the 1960s, has been published in the journal Theatre Survey.  Presently, she is writing a chapter on one archivally-vanished performance from 1972: the silent play, "Enchanted Island" (Ocharovannyi ostrov), written and staged by gay author-director Evgenii Kharitonov at Moscow's deaf Theater of Mimicry and Gesture.

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