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.

"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.

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.

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.​

Фразеологизмы о беременности и возможность репродуктивного выбора [On the Representation of Pregnancy and Reproductive Choices in Gender-Biased Idioms]

Статья рассматривает фразеологизмы, номинирующие репродуктивные процессы. Выделяются два основных способа такой номинации: ознáчивание репродуктивной «зрелости» и номинация различных стадий и «обстоятельств» беременности. Фразеологические единицы этой группы во многом представляют собой языковые «подсказки» направленые на сохранение существующего распределения властных и социальных ресурсов гетеросексисткого общества. 

The Gynaecologist’s Gaze: The Inconsistent Medicalisation of Contraception in Contemporary Russia

Author:
Anna Temkina

This essay discusses the medicalisation of contraception by gynaecologists in present-day Russia. I explore the disciplining discourse and tactics of gynaecologists as experts who aim to orient women towards properly planned and prepared pregnancy. Gynaecologists are important agents of reproductive control because they instruct women in detail about reproductive health and contraception. However, these disciplining medical discourses and professional practices are characterised by inconsistency. In accordance with the demographic priorities of the state, doctors are more oriented towards pregnancy treatment than consultation on contraception, and they are inconsistent in their regulation of contraceptive use. This biopolitical regime reflects the demographic priorities of the Russian state – to increase the population of Russia – and the role of women as the primary objects of this policy.