Russian Style: Performing Gender, Power, and Putinism - Softcover

Cassiday, Julie A

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0299346749 ISBN 13: 9780299346744

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2025

Synopsis

As the West liberalized its stance on sexuality and gender between 2000 and 2020, Vladimir 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, the multiple modes of gender performativity simultaneously 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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0299346749
• ISBN 13: 9780299346744
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 270