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.

До и после тюрьмы: женские истории. Коллективная монография.

Author:
Омельченко Е.Л., Сабирова Г.А., Пэллот Дж., Гончарова Н.В., Нартова Н.А. Научный редактор: Е.Л. Омельченко.

Коллективная монография написана по материалам социологического качественного исследования женщин, имеющих опыт заключения в исправительных учреждениях. Основные темы, которые раскрываются в книге, - это формальная и неформальная структуры власти, гендерные аспекты быта и повседневности в российских женских колониях, а также специфика построения биографических нарративов осужденных женщин. Кроме того, в монографии представлены голоса самих женщин в форме их биографических историй.  Книга предназначена для специалистов, интересующихся проблемами женской колонии и ресоциализации женщин, вышедших из мест лишения свободы, а также для широкого круга читателей.

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.

"Childbirth Is Not A Car Rental": Mothers And Obstetricians Negotiating Choice And Relationships In Russian Commercial Maternity Care

Author:
Anna Temkina

This article explores how commercialization of maternity care in Russia offers new opportunities and imposes new limitations on both mothers-tobe and doctors. The research is based on 35 in-depth interviews with patients and 24 with professionals in paid maternity car in St. Petersburg (2015–2017). It is a significant and illustrative case within the broader trends in the Russian health care system of the 2000s–2010s. This article’s contribution is an understanding of maternity care’s post-socialism market development from the perspective of women: mothers-to-be and mostly female doctors. The ongoing reforms and organization of paid maternity care in Russia are analyzed. I explore the position of mothers-to-be as consumers with growing demands, and of professional women as they respond to such demands. I depict how doctors, though improving their economic and working conditions, resist the symbolic decline of their status and seek to restore their power, and how mothers-to-be accept doctors’
authoritative role in highly medicalized maternity care.

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.

Beijing +25 Years On. Parallel Report Ukraine 2014-2019

While highly appreciating the National Report prepared by the State, the Ukrainian women’s NGOs decided to independently summarize the efforts on promoting the rights of women and girls in Ukraine in the last five trying years. The war and loss of a part of the Ukrainian territories, over a million of internally displaced persons, economic decline, and the need for the countrywide reforms have created additional challenges for the governmental policy.

Исследование проблемы насилия в отношении женщин, живущих с ВИЧ, в Восточной Европе и Центральной Азии. Аналитический отчет 2019

Author:
Юлия Годунова, Светлана Мороз, Наталья Сидоренко, Алина Ярославская

В исследовании были проанализированы проблемы, с которыми сталкиваются ВИЧ-позитивные женщины, подвергшиеся насилию после того, как им был постав- лен диагноз «ВИЧ-инфекция». Уникальность исследования заключается в том, что оно было разработано, организовано и проведено сообществом женщин, живущих с ВИЧ и уязвимых для ВИЧ, в рамках региональной кампании против гендерного насилия «Насилию нет оправдания!». В этом исследовании приняли участие 464 ВИЧ-положительные женщины, пережившие насилие, и 120 женщин специалисток из 12 стран региона Восточной Европы Центральной Азии (ВЕЦА). Исследование подтверждает важность приоритезации вопросов насилия в отношении женщин, живущих с ВИЧ, в повестке дня, касающейся раз- вития стран региона ВЕЦА.

"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.

Crisis, War and Austerity: Devaluation of Female Labor and Retreating of the State

Author:
Oksana Dutchak

Following the Euromaidan, the outbreak of war and ensuing economic crisis, the Ukrainian government introduced wide-ranging reforms guided by the neoliberal idea that stability and economic growth can be generated by cutting social spending.

Despite the government’s proclaimed intent to support the poorest and weakest members of Ukrainian society, the opposite has occurred, and the negative effects of the new reforms have ended up targeting them most. Women in Ukraine are particularly harshly hit by these savings measures. Despite superficially pro-women legislation, women tend to have the opposite experience. Cuts to the civil service and social spending generally lead to lay-offs and thus to the firing of women, who overwhelmingly work in these sectors.

Further consequences of Ukrainian austerity policies are, among others, an ongoing devaluing of reproductive labour (care, education, etc.), the dismantling of social infrastructure and a neoliberal, profit-oriented restructuring of the education and health care systems.

The Ukrainian left is faced with the challenge of fundamentally criticizing these processes and articulating alternatives. Left-wing feminists must build a strong network of allies in order to lead the fightback.​

Gender and Choice After Socialism

Author:
Editors Attwood, L., Schimpfossl, E. and Yusupova, M.

The end of socialism in the Soviet Union and its satellite states ushered in a new era of choice. Yet the idea that people are really free to live as they choose turns out to be problematic.  Personal choice is limited by a range of factors such as a person’s economic situation, class, age, government policies and social expectations, especially regarding  gender roles. Furthermore, the notion of free choice is a crucial feature of capitalist ideology, and can be manipulated in the interests of the market. This edited collection explores the complexity of choice in Russia and Ukraine. The contributors explore how the new choices available to people after the collapse of the Soviet Union have interacted with and influenced gender identities and gender, and how choice has become one of the driving forces of class-formation in countries which were, in the Soviet era, supposedly classless.

Sexuality and Revolution in Post‐Soviet Ukraine: LGBT Rights and the Euromaidan Protests of 2013–2014

Author:
Tamara Martsenyuk

While some attention has been paid to the role of women and gender aspects during the Euromaidan protests (2013–2014), there is a lack of research focusing on questions of homosexuality in this connection. This article examines the evolution of the situation regarding homosexuality and LGBT rights during the Euromaidan protests. The empirical base consists of 20 interviews conducted in July–August 2014 with LGBT rights activists, all of whom were involved in the Euromaidan protests. The respondents were asked a number of questions about the visibility of the LGBT community during the Euromaidan; about which events they considered to be significant for the LGBT community; and about the positive and negative aspects of the Euromaidan with regard to the human rights situation for LGBT people. The “strategy of invisibility” chosen by LGBT activists during this protest is analyzed and criticized here with the help of the concept of “homonationalism.” In addition, the article investigates the ways in which LGBT activists in Ukraine reproduce the West vs. East and EU vs. Russia binaries.