Living the good life: Muslim women’s magazines in contemporary Russia

Abstract

Muslim women’s magazines are an emerging genre of media production in today’s Russia. They represent a venue where a gendered Muslim subject is constituted, and discourses about national and transnational belonging are articulated. These processes take place against the backdrop of complex post-Soviet nation building, the resurgence of nationalism and xenophobia, gendered moralization campaigns, the promotion of an urban middle-class modernity, general decline in income levels of ordinary people and political instability in the larger Muslim world. This article examines the narratives that circulate in Muslim Magazine and Musulmanka and analyzes the modes of belonging and recognition that they espouse. I argue that the magazines depict respectable and productive Muslim citizens of Russia who are normalized and assimilated through the replication of privileged consumption norms and of labor and leisure practices. The intimate juxta-political publics that flourish on the pages of these magazines endorse a disciplined minority citizen who adheres to dominant gender norms. This incorporates difference into legible similarity and relegates contentious politics of gender, class and racial privilege to the private domain. Along with the (unrequited) desire for national belonging, these magazines demonstrate affiliations with the global ummah. These discourses are frequently saturated with depoliticizing emotion and operate through exclusions. Hence, through the disciplining power of the market and intimacy, these magazines articulate desires for national belonging. Simultaneously, they reveal affective transnational attachments, which although expanding the possibilities of belonging significantly constrain them.