<p>This article traces an implicit theory of embodiment across the work of poet and labor theorist Aleksei Gastev, from his 1904 short story “The Accursed Question” through his poetry and commentary of 1907–1913, to his 1919 essay “On the Tendencies of Proletarian Culture,” and his work at the Central Institute of Labor. It argues that gender appears in Gastev’s early writing as a traumatic feature of individual subjectivity under capitalism—a wound produced by the fragmentation of the body into sexually differentiated zones—and that his later work reconceives embodiment in terms that render gender irrelevant. In “The Accursed Question,” masculinity is compulsory and alienating, defined by biological compulsions and social rituals that fragment body and psyche. Gastev’s mature work proposes an alternative: the machinic reorganization of the body through trained reflexes, producing a “proletarian unit” defined not by what it is but by what it does. Drawing on Bekhterev’s reflexological psychology, Gastev envisions a “mechanized collective” in which individual subjectivity—and the gendered suffering it enables—dissolves into collective being. The article situates this trajectory within late imperial Russian biopolitics and early Soviet labor culture and suggests that the questions Gastev’s work raises remain urgent today.</p>