Knowledge

Here you can find links on academic articles, books, research and analytics. They can be useful for journalists, researchers and activists digging into the topic.

На перепутье: методология, теория и практика ЛГБТ и квир-исследований. Сборник статей

Author:
Редактор-составитель: Александр Кондаков

Данная книга — результат одноименной конференции, состоявшейся в Санкт-Петербурге в октябре 2013 года. В статьях сборника представлены выводы эмпирических и теоретических исследований сексуальности, выполненных специалистами разных дисциплин и при помощи широкого спектра подходов. Социологические, политологические, психологические, филологические, лингвистические, культурологические, юридические работы делают равноценный вклад в общий архив знаний о сексуальности в России и иных контекстах.

Russia’s spectacle of “traditional values”: rethinking the politics of visibility

Author:
Emil Edenborg

This article examines the role of visibility in efforts to define “the people” in specifically gendered and sexualized ways. In doing this, it contributes to queer and feminist international relations (IR) scholarship, where visibility and invisibility, although central themes, are sometimes insufficiently problematized. In a case study of Russia’s contemporary project of “traditional values,” I show how the Kremlin-promoted heteropatriarchal definition of community relates to efforts to control the visibility of gendered and sexualized bodies, and how those regulations are resisted, with respect to queer visibility, on the one hand, and patriotic military visibility, on the other. I argue: (1) that efforts by states to define and delineate “the people,” involve the production of arrangements of visibility, regulating what gendered, sexualized, and racialized bodies can appear in public, and how they are seen; and (2) that those who resist hegemonic conceptions of community seek to disturb and reorder those arrangements of visibility, by making visible bodies that have been rendered invisible or making already present bodies visible in new ways. However, such forms of embodied appearance will not necessarily come in the form of antithetical opposition, but may be more ambivalent.

Materials of the V International Gender Workshop “Gender and (Military) Conflicts in Easter-European Countries through Feminist Lenses”

On March 8-10, 2017 in Lviv, the V International Gender Workshop took place organized by Heinrich Boell Office in Ukraine in cooperation with hbs offices in Eastern European countries and the Caucasus. Researchers and activists from Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Poland, Macedonia, Serbia, Czech Republic and Germany discussed military conflict situations in the region from the perspective of feminist critique. This publication collects texts created on the basis of some of the presentations from the event.

"Prostitutes" and "Defectors": How the Ukrainian State Constructs Women Emigrants to Italy and the USA

Author:
Cinzia Solari

Scholars of sending countries emphasise the role of economics in shaping state policies towards emigration. They argue sending states are converging around a set of discursive strategies that aim to facilitate the influx of remittances from emigrants. One such strategy uses discourses of cultural nationalism to celebrate emigrants as ‘heroes’ of the nation. Drawing on a state sponsored media campaign and ethnographic data, I found the Ukrainian state does the opposite. It stigmatises its emigrants to both Italy and the USA as ‘prostitutes’ and ‘defectors’ respectively. However emigrants are differentially stigmatised. Emigrants to the USA are simply dismissed, but the Ukrainian state constructs migration to Italy as a shameful social problem. It does this even though emigrants to Italy send back significantly more remittances. Economic interests cannot explain Ukrainian state practices towards emigration. Instead, in the context of post-Soviet transformation, I suggest the Ukrainian state has prioritised the construction of a national identity. The state then constructs policy with an eye to cultural rather than economic outcomes. I argue the Ukrainian state actively stigmatises the migration to Italy because it poses challenges to the nation-building process, whereas the migration to the USA is peripheral to this key state concern.