Homo Post-Sovieticus: (Re)fashioning the Male Body in Putin’s Russia

Abstract

Abstract The subject of this article is the male body in contemporary Russian fashion photography. My aim is to locate such photography within current debates around subject construction, representation, and masculinity. In particular, I argue that a number of images of the male body that can be found on the websites of three Russian fashion designers—Serguei Teplov, Cyrille Gassiline, and Gosha Rubchinskiy—can be read as homoerotic. This emergent homoeroticism is all the more interesting because it comes at a time when Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has made heroic, heteronormative masculinity a central pillar both of his own personal popularity and of Russian national identity. As well as being noteworthy in itself, this raises important questions about the ideological nature of men’s fashion photography, not only in twenty-first-century Russia but also in a more general sense.