New Heroines of Labour: Domesticating Post-feminism and Neoliberal Capitalism in Russia, Sociology, 2015, volume 49, Issue 1, pages 88-105 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Aesthetic Labour, 2017
Full bibliographic details must be given when referring to, or quoting from full items including the author's name, the title of the work, publication details where relevant (place, publisher, date), pagination, and for theses or dissertations the awarding institution, the degree type awarded, and the date of the award.
Toward an Understanding of Gendered Agency in Contemporary Russia. SIGNS, vol 38, issue 3, 2013.
Assessments of Russian women’s current social and political status must take into account the complicated legacy of Soviet women’s “emancipation.” Although the Soviet government enforced women’s access to higher education and a broad array of professional opportunities, it never challenged traditional notions of masculinity and femininity, or the double burden tacitly assigned women. It did not invest in products and services that would have eased “women’s work” as homemakers and caretakers, nor did it protect women from sexual harassment on the job. The transition years have bared, glorified, and globalized the patriarchal state that lay just beneath the socialist veneer of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the Putin government has repackaged that patriarchy as conventionally and commercially masculinist. Women do exercise some power as consumers and mothers; they seek other-than-material fulfillment in facilitating positions rather than face opprobrium as public leaders. Some are attempting to scout new forms of agency as managers and business entrepreneurs. Yet there is no straightforward upward ladder for women in work and no generally acceptable movement toward lobbying for women’s rights. The women who wield the greatest sociopolitical influence in Russia today are media pundits, writers of serious literature, and journalists who combine writing with general social and political activism. In order to bridge the great divide in historical conditioning and contemporary circumstance that separates us from Russian women, we must work toward a better understanding of their complex forms of agency.
Gender's crooked path: Feminism confronts Russian patriarchy
In this article we discuss the uneasy development of gender studies in Russia as one example of public sociology. For empirical evidence we concentrate mainly on our own experience in the Gender Studies Program at the European University in St. Petersburg, but we also refer to the other cases. We observe how the political and academic context of the 1990s created opportunities for academic innovations that ideologically challenged Soviet patriarchy and invoked gendered criticisms of post-Soviet changes. We discuss the effects of the rapid but partial institutionalization of gender studies in the Russian academic context and how gender became the umbrella term for both feminist and anti-feminist standpoints. We claim that since international support for the gender studies diminished in the 2000s, the fashion and economic benefit of doing gender studies has declined, with only a small group of researchers maintaining their commitment to the feminist approach to gender. We focus on the politicization of gender in the last decade of Putin's Russia and the role of feminist researchers in the analysis of the new conservatism, expressed in gender ideology. We examine the problems of combining public expertise and academic work in the particular realm of gender politics.
Theoretical Debates within Contemporary Russian Feminism
Russian Politics, 2016
Feminism emerged as an important ideological trend in contemporary Russia. Different strands of this thought focus on divergent problems experienced by Russian women. Some researchers consider the experience of women representing Russia’s growing middle class. Others tend to focus on the problems of dispossessed and less privileged layers of the Russian society. The difference in the focus of attention is reminiscent of the pre-existing Western division of the feminist thought on the feminism of equality and feminism of difference. This paper will consider the main directions of these debates in Russia focusing on key aspects pondered by feminism in general. It will also argue that the state deploys both strands of feminist thought selectively in situations that suits its ideological and political purposes.
Re-assembling the feminist war machine: State, feminisms and sex workers in Russia
Routledge International Handbook of Sex Industry Research, 2019
This chapter deals with a variety of representations associated with debates around sex work in Russia. Just like in many other parts of the world, these debates are structured by the feminist ‘sex wars’ (Rubin 1984) that, having developed in the 1970s, continue to have a profound impact on the epistemology, imagination, organization and political trajectories of feminist projects locally and globally. Our aim is to analyse how the oppositional approaches to commercial sex that have emerged out of these feminist confrontations take shape in Russia, and we also suggest more general implications for sexual politics from our analysis. Thus, we offer a theoretically and empirically informed reflection of these debates as a transcultural phenomenon that is locally enacted in various forms.
The 'capital of beauty' at work: Russian women's negotiation of unspoken rules
The political transition in Russia in the early 1990s initiated a series of socio-cultural shifts as the population, particularly in urban areas, was gaining access to consumer goods and services unavailable under communism. The celebration of rising consumerism had its gender dimension. Women had come to view self-beautification as a means for them to return to their ‘natural’ femininity, supposedly lost under Soviet State’s policy of gender equality, combined with the lack of support for working mothers and chronic shortages of consumer goods. Drawing on interviews with women from Moscow, this paper interrogates the interviewees’ negotiation of their identities of an employee and a woman in the post-Soviet context. Although women’s accounts do suggest that beauty becomes a form of socially valuable ‘capital’ if they can afford to invest in it, the paper argues that such investment cannot be conceptualised simply as an unproblematic, mechanical transaction. While seeking to ‘utilise’ their femininity and beauty, women may face sexist assumptions about their inability to be feminine and professionally competent. Even having access to the capital of education and an established career, women may still engage in practices that simultaneously promise the path to self-perfection and perpetuate the idea that the female body is innately flawed. Key words: the ‘field’ of work, unspoken rules, the ‘capital’ of beauty, Russian women