Dr Curro presents paper on the Vory-v-Zakony at a conference in Berlin

On June 16-18, Dr Costanza Curro and Dr Vakhtang Kekoshvili attended the international conference ‘Socialism’s divergent masculinities: Representations of male subjectivities in Soviet constellations and beyond’, organized by Dr Matthias Schwartz and Dr Dirk Uffelmann at the Leibniz-Zentrum fur Literatur-und Kulturforschung (ZfL) in Berlin. The conference, which was originally scheduled in June 2020 and was postponed twice because of the COVID-19 pandemic, hosted around 20 cultural and media studies, literature and social sciences scholars from German, American, British, Finnish, Georgian and French academic institutions. The conference papers explored the aesthetic representations of male subjectivities beyond the normative hegemony established by Soviet official propaganda from a variety of perspectives – film and music, satirical press, ethnography and literary production, amongst others. Participants discussed the discrepancies between socialist-realist and neo-traditionalist images and the multitude of divergent male subjectivities produced by Soviet everyday life, which somehow found their way into artistic and cultural representations. Such representations, we assumed, are a prism through which social and cultural changes can be analyzed. Dr Curro and Dr Kekoshvili’s presented a paper titled ‘The thieves in law in Georgia: Resilient, resisting or fallen masculinities?’, which investigated the masculinities attached to figure of the kanonieri kurdi (thief in law in Georgian) in the narratives and practices emerged from their recent fieldwork in Western Georgia.