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Russian Style
Performing Gender, Power, and Putinism
Julie A. Cassiday
Pushkin House Book Prize Finalist
“A brilliant, entertaining work of scholarship that sheds light on some of the most important phenomena in contemporary Russian politics and mass culture. Using style as her central concept, Cassiday brings together many seemingly disparate examples from mass media, pop culture, and politics in a way that is truly enlightening.”
—Eliot Borenstein, New York University
The politics of gender and sexuality in Russian popular culture
In the two decades after the turn of the millennium, Vladimir Putin’s control over Russian politics and society grew at a steady pace. As the West liberalized its stance on sexuality and gender, Putin’s Russia moved in the opposite direction, remolding the performance of Russian citizenship according to a neoconservative agenda characterized by increasingly exaggerated gender roles. By connecting gendered and sexualized citizenship to developments in Russian popular culture, Julie A. Cassiday argues that heteronormativity and homophobia became a kind of politicized style under Putin’s leadership.
However, while the multiple modes of gender performativity generated in Russian popular culture between 2000 and 2010 supported Putin’s neoconservative agenda, they also helped citizens resist and protest the state’s mandate of heteronormativity. Examining everything from memes to the Eurovision Song Contest and self-help literature, Cassiday untangles the discourse of gender to argue that drag, or travesti, became the performative trope par excellence in Putin’s Russia. Provocatively, Cassiday further argues that the exaggerated expressions of gender demanded by Putin’s regime are best understood as a form of cisgender drag. This smart and lively study provides critical, nuanced analysis of the relationship between popular culture and politics in Russia during Putin’s first two decades in power.
Julie A. Cassiday is the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian at Williams College. She is the author of The Enemy on Trial: Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen and the coeditor of Russian Performances: Word, Object, Action.
Praise
“Well conceived, researched, and executed, Russian Style makes an invaluable contribution to the field and to broader discussions of gender, sexuality, and the body in contemporary popular culture. Bringing to the forefront questions of citizenship and national identity, Cassiday thinks through the changes (political, ideological, sexual) that have taken place over the past two decades in Putin’s Russia.”
—Lilya Kaganovsky, UCLA
“Incisive. . . . What Cassiday proposes is nothing less than a new political and cultural theory that shows how a militaristic ideology is created through a participatory internet culture, winking irony and an emphasis on entertainment and performance. . . . Russian Style is an important book.”
—The Times Literary Supplement
“Provocative. . . . Cassiday provides a fresh and insightful lens. . . . [A] valuable study.”
—The Russian Review
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1. A Genealogy of Post-Soviet Pop Performativity
Chapter 2. The Soviet Legacy of Traumatized Bodies
Chapter 3. Travesti and the Post-Soviet Drag Queen
Chapter 4. Queer Performativity in Putin’s Russia
Chapter 5. Post-Soviet Post-Feminism
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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Larger images
December 2023
270 pp. 6 x 9
16 b/w illus.
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