elanya

...although I am probably the last person to have seen the movie.

Black Widow, Motherhood, and Social Death

So, in the movie, we learn that Natasha was forcibly sterilized as part of her graduation from the Red Room's assassin training program for women. We see her try to fail the test so that she won't pass, and get called on it by a woman who is presumably a teacher or mentor of some kind.

I have seen various discussions about whether her speech to Bruce was intended to correlate monstrousness with infertility or not. I was hoping to go see the scene again to judge more calmly - I went in to the movie knowing that there was some kind of infertility storyline for Natasha, but not what it was, and I'd tried really really hard not to look at what anyone was saying about it so that I wouldn't be biased when I saw it.

When I saw the scene, my raw interpretation was that yes, she was equating the two things. I've read other people's takes seeing it the other way, but without a second viewing I'm not sure how best to interpret it. On the one hand, I don't think it was necessary to make her point to Bruce to explain that she was forcibly sterilized so that she could be a better killer, unless she believed it to be true and successful. The idea that kids would be 'the one thing' that could divide her from her loyalty to the state seems a little ridiculous to me on the first run by. Something else was evidently successful! But she wasn't really explaining her own thinking, she was explaining the Red Room's logic as a demonstration of their monstrousness, and thereby of hers, right? I don't know - it all seemed a little messy to me.

But I was thinking about it more today, being mother's day (hah!) and I started thinking that I am looking at this very much form a Western perspective - so I decided to do a little bit of poking and see what I could find about ideals of Motherhood in the late Soviet Union. And this is what I found: "From duty to pleasure? Motherhood in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia" by Olga Issoupova, in Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, edited by Sarah Ashwin. Alas it is not the whole of it, but it does cover some of the changes!

So,you can read it for yourself if you like - Of course we don't actually know when Natasha was in the Red Room in MCU, or who was running it or exactly what their politics were, but I think it is probably safe to assume that it was closer to the Soviet side of things. All this assuming we can do anything like map real world politics directly onto the MCU... There are some pretty strong parallels, but it is really not the same.

Anyway, I think a couple of things Issoupova says are useful to think with: the ideal of motherhood being a state function, the role of women as mothers *in* the state and to society, and the implications for women who couldn't live up to that role. it isn't even about actually *raising* your own kids, even, because the state will step in and help with that, or do it for you. Basically, force sterilizing their assassins meant they could never fully integrate into soviet society. It was just taking away their ability to have kids, it was severing all their social ties. With no other families to fall back on, they had no one else but the state, and the state only had one use for them, which was to be the exact opposite of useful and virtuous female mothers. I think that if she has feelings about being monstrous because she is not able to have babies, it makes a lot of sense given that context.