In this presentation I will examine the relationship between gender, (reproductive) sexuality and desire taking pronatalism during Ceausescu's Romania as a case-study. The paper is based on my dissertation research on the social memory of abortion in Ceausescu's Romania (2005-2010) and on a recent collective research project on film and propaganda in communist Romania (2009-2011). From 1966 to 1989, the communist regime conducted by Nicolae Ceausescu imposed extreme policies of controlled demography in Romania, as it was imputed, for 'the good of the socialist nation'. In short, the family was supposed to be as large as possible and sexuality was to be conceptualized only in terms of reproduction. Starting with the late 60s, a powerful propaganda developed in the public sphere in order to impose 'desire' as 'desire to procreate', and to inflict the responsibility to enlarge the Romanian nation on the women's bodies. Thus, being the moral communist subject was equal to being the prolific 'socialist-mother' (rom. femeie-mamă), a family model which was slowly developed into an overwhelming 'Romanian tradition'. My research shows that this reinvention of 'tradition of maternity' determined gender inequalities not only in terms of responsibility inside the couple, concerning mainly contraception and abortion, but restructured the idea of 'sexual desire' in the very patriarchal way the communists tried to overcome with the construction of the New Man and its gender equality. In the communist Romania's context, women became in time the victims of their own reproductive capacities. For many, as showed in their memory-narratives about that period, the alienation between desire and sexuality became a modus vivendi.< Réduire