Abstract
Veronica Porumbacu (1921-1977) was a Romanian poet and translator who has been unjustly forgotten today due to her proletcultist poems of the 1950s. Yet her work was widely published and well-known during the socialist regime, and is especially relevant for the two decades of growth and ideological innovation of the 1960s and 1970s. In my article I analyze a remarkable volume of hers published in 1966, situating it in the context of her work and in the wider frame of the political context of Romania. I argue that Return from Cythera can be considered a conceptual manifesto of socialist feminism, relying on reflexive eroticism, embodied thought, and historical consciousness to challenge the surrounding patriarchal order and to claim the necessity of developing a different cultural genealogy, centered on the standpoint and experiences of women.
Recommended Citation
Ţichindeleanu, Ovidiu
(2020)
"Veronica Porumbacu’s ‘Return from Cynthera’ (1966): A Conceptual Manifesto of Socialist Feminism,"
Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies: Vol. 21:
Iss.
1, Article 3.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.cortland.edu/wagadu/vol21/iss1/3
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