Shifting masculine terrains : Russian men in Russia and the UK (original) (raw)
Related papers
Masculinities in Russia and East Central Europe
The study of men and masculinities is a vibrant and complex field with researchers working from a wide variety of methodological and theoretical approaches. In recent years scholars have worked to establish a global history of masculinities and to integrate the study of gender into other stories about power and identity. Few scholars still believe in a male/female binary, and creative attempts are being made to transcend the either/or distinction between gender as grounded either in the body or in discourse. Zachary Doleshal’s article shows that even while trying to transcend their local and national context, Czech men created an ideal-type that was uniquely East Central European. Similarly, Katalin Kis’ research uncovers homophobia masquerading as tolerance that emerges directly out of the situation contemporary Hungarian men find themselves in. Finally, Marina Yusupova’s contribution emphasizes how discourses about masculinity can emerge out of the lived realities of much earlier periods and are not always accurate representations of the challenges and opportunities available to men in the present.
We are inviting papers for this international workshop that aims to gather scholars working on socialist masculinities in Central and Eastern Europe. Our main objectives are to reconsider the state of the art and discuss new ways for writing a history of masculinities under socialism. We wish to engage in a transdisciplinary discussion, involving historians, sociologists, anthropologists, demographers, art historians, political scientists, and scholars from neighbouring fields of research. The central questions of the workshop are: Which role were men and fathers to play in the construction of a “new” socialist family? How where masculinities transformed in socialist movements and state-socialist countries? The workshop is interested, on the one hand, in the ideologies and the utopian reflexions of the place of men in a future communist society. On the other hand, it aims at questioning the everyday life of socialist men and fathers, as well as the everyday life of men and fathers living under socialism.
Blurring masculinities in the Republic of Sakha Russia.pdf
Polar Geography, Vol 41, No. 3, 198-216., 2018
Siberia in general has traditionally been a region where men are expected to be ‘real’ men, i.e. to behave in a pronouncedly virile way. This perception is related to the history of the region – bringing ‘civilisation’ to the region was in direct relation to the intensive physical work. Urban life in Siberia was until recently dominated by such proletarian masculinity since urban centres were places where a large part of industrial workers lived. With the Western style urbanization and advent of new enterprises, this perception is changing. The new urban professional class mostly holds office jobs and is engaged in non-physical work. The article explains how socioeconomic factors have historically shaped the perceptions and performances of masculinity in Siberia. Further, I juxtapose ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ masculinity in the Republic of Sakha. In this region, softness is usually related with the office jobs. While certain masculine stereotypes continue to exist – like reliability, responsibility, loyalty – traditional understanding of toughness is often rejected. As one paradigm, I take the changes in attitudes towards alcohol consumption. The emergence of more diverse and ‘softer’ forms of masculinity do not generally question existing gender hierarchies, as I will point out toward the end of the article.
Social Politics, 2022
Much of the sociological work examining the changing fortunes of working-class young men has emphasized their newly precarious position as well as the "hollowed out" nature of their class subjectivities. By contrast, and echoing work on the adaptability of hegemonic forms of masculinity, this article points to the ongoing salience of working-class masculinities, drawing on longitudinal research with young men in Russia's Ul'yanovsk region between 2004 and 2013. It examines how young men are able to shift from a position of marginality to one of a complicit, breadwinning masculinity by bringing to bear a variety of social, cultural, bodily, and institutional resources rooted in their class, gender, and ethnic location. This journey also reflects young men's negotiation of dialogical, moral selves, central to which is their acquired ability to reflect upon different ways of being a man by appealing to wider moral currents within Russian society.
The Russian Male Macho Register and Performances of Masculinity
2012
This thesis argues that a speech register, the Russian Male Macho Register (RMMR) is a socially salient set of linguistic features used to project authority. En route to supporting this argument, I evaluate several models of Russian intonation and describe a synthesis that best accounts for salient prosodic characteristics in my data. I show that analyzing intonation in the context of discourse structure (1) reveals how speakers use suprasegmental elements to create meaning and (2) challenges some aspects of intonational study that focus on short, lab-produced speech samples (such as the Strict-Layer Hypothesis). After outlining the characteristics of RMMR, I analyze how these features index particular social personae and demonstrate how evaluative stances towards these figures are adopted through parody. Comedy performances which incorporate RMMR reinforce and rework Soviet-era tropes of toughness to comment on gender, nation, and ethnicity post-socialism.
The rise of masculinism in Eastern Europe
New Left Review, 1993
In the recent literature on gender relations in Eastern Europe, it is quite often said that democratization has 'opened up a space' within which women can now seek to identify their interests and organize. 1 That is undoubtedly the case. At the same time, however, as offering a space to women, the transition to liberal capitalism offers men the opportunity of putting a greatly increased social distance between themselves and women. It is the rise in masculinism which is the primary characteristic of gender relations in Eastern Europe today. If we grasp this, I argue, we also grasp the opportunity to more fully apprehend the way in which masculinism forms the very bedrock of Western liberal democracy. For Eastern Europe makes plain that the gender order of liberal capitalism is not simply the result of historical contingency. It cannot, for example, be explained in terms of women's lesser experience or expertise with respect to the functioning of democratic institutions or the market. Indeed, the very uniformity of the Eastern European experience indicates that the re-creation of the gender order in the transition to capitalism is in fact predicated on the rescinding of a range of rights accorded to women under state socialism.
Orthodox Ideology and Masculinity in Putin's Russia
Concilium, 2020
Customer service information All orders must be prepaid. Your subscription will begin with the next issue of Concilium. If you have any queries or require Information about other payment methods, please contact our Customer Services department.
to be written General Discussion on the Reports, including the 4 Thematic Areas 2.3.1 Home and Work. Recurring themes include men's occupational, working and wage advantages over women, gender segregation at work, many men's close associations with paid work, men in nontraditional occupations. There has been a general lack of attention to men as managers, policy-makers, owners and other power holders. In many countries there are a twin problems of the unemployment of some or many men in certain social categories, and yet workoverload and long working hours for other men. These can especially be a problem for young men and young fathers; they can affect both working class and middle class men as for example during 1. What are the main causes of male violence against women, including authoritarian social contexts, patriarchal privilege, structural violence, and violence between men? 5. How can an active gender policy be renewed and improved, especially in terms of men's participation?
The Journal of Modern History, 2020
Vladimir Putin’s macho image and his deployment of a masculinized Russian nationalism have fascinated Russians and non-Russians alike, generating considerable public and scholarly analysis. This article argues that the appeal of Putin as a powerful and hypermasculine leader over the last twenty years is best understood not just in the larger geopolitical context of Russia’s national and economic decline in the 1990s but also in terms of Soviet and post-Soviet discourses of failed manhood. In particular, this work focuses on the widespread critique of men as fathers in the 1950s and 1960s and the accompanying campaign to create a new model of Soviet fatherhood, aiming to make men into “family men” and better fathers. The construction of the new ideal father—actively engaged in household tasks and child-rearing—challenged the Soviet gender order and contributed to the development of a domestic and family-oriented model of Communist manhood. Although it is primarily an investigation of...