Do you suffer from urbanitis? Gender, cybernetics, and environmental concerns in 1970s Estonian SSR

Epp Annus gave a lecture on, “Do you suffer from urbanitis? Gender, cybernetics, and environmental concerns in the 1970s Estonian SSR” on Thursday, February 22, 2024 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive. About the Lecture: On the cover of Aimée Beekman’s novel Valikuvõimalus (The Possibility of Choice, 1978) stands the figure of a naked woman with a calculator in place of her womb. Beekman’s novel is a difficult fit for the well-digested Russocentric Soviet gender crisis discourse: the main character Regina is an owner of a comfortable house, she proposes to a man of her choice and then conceives three children out of wedlock, all with different men. The novel is remarkable for its proliferative ambiguity: Regina’s character is presented both as admirable in her determination and agency, but also as a symptom of a society in crisis. Extramarital relations and broken relationships had become the norm, as people – ‘poisoned with noise’ and addicted to constant stimulation – moved along on the ‘conveyer belt’ of easy pleasures. People in the cities were figured as suffering from urbanitis, a malady of urban life that made people impatient and fidgety and inclined to fill their days with meaningless quotidian trivialities. In the novel’s view, at the outset of the information age, humanity was suffering a deep and multifaceted global crisis: growing commodification, unrestrained urbanization, and polluted air and water were all producing a sense of shared insecurity and uncertainty, impacting the most intimate spheres of everyday life. This talk situates Beekman’s novel within the media discussions in the 1970s Estonian SSR concerning gender, cybernetics, and the global environmental crisis. About the Lecturer: Epp Annus is Associate Professor with the Institute of Humanities at Tallinn University, Estonia. She also lectures in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University (USA). Her recent books include Soviet Postcolonial Studies: A View from the Western Borderlands (Routledge, 2018), and Coloniality, Nationality, Modernity: A Postcolonial View on Baltic Cultures under Soviet Rule, ed. Epp Annus (Routledge, 2018). She is currently working on a manuscript Environment and Society in Soviet Estonia, 1960-1990 (under contract with Cambridge UP). She is the author of two novels.