RE(DE)FINING MASCULINITY: MAN AS MOTHER IN FUTURIST LITERATURE.

Futurism is often considered a highly masculinized, even misogynistic artistic movement despite the fact that many members of the group were women. In their manifestoes, the Futurists violently rejected the possibility of "the feminine" subsisting in the highly industrialized world of the future; however, they took issue not with women per se, but in the outmoded representations of the feminine in society and literature. A wife, a mother, a femme fatale, or the eternal feminine Sophia no longer satisfied those who looked into a future where the mind dominated and possibly eradicated the body. Because femininity has long been associated with the body and the material, while the mind, the realm of ideas and cerebral creativity, was linked instead to the masculine gender, the obliteration of the feminine from all spheres of life and art seemed to guarantee a simultaneous repudiation of the weak and mortal human body in favor of the mind, capable of achieving the impossible. Ironically, however, instead of moving toward overt masculinity, the Futurist literary and artistic practices suggest very strong ties to the feminine and even to the maternal. Focusing on David Burliuk's poem "Plodonosiashchie" and Vladimir Maiakovskii's play Vladimir Mayakovsky. A Tragedy, my paper explores the paradox of Futurism that on the one hand rejects the female body, and on the other hand engages in literary practices that, according to Julia Kristeva, return the subject to the realm of semiotic chora--a prelingual space associated with femininity and the maternal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]