‘My Family and I Are Absolutely against This Law’: Gender Citizenship and Domestic Violence in Contemporary Russia

Abstract

The article examines how post-soviet legal initiatives on prevention of intimate partner and domestic violence relate to the concepts of gender citizenship and “new private” which transformed gender order in the Russian Federation. To explore emerging concepts the article focuses on the discursive practices of the public debate on the draft law “On prevention of family-domestic violence,” which was released by the Federation Council for the online public discussion on 29 November 2019 and became the most debated draft law drawing 11,186 online entries as comments. Using grounded theory to identify main discursive clusters of the public debate, the article offers an analysis of how theories of cultural sovereignty and “new private” are articulated in contemporary Russian public space. This analysis, supplemented by the examination of other legal and policy documents on prevention of violence against women, gender policy and human rights of women, resulted in conclusions that in post-soviet Russia the concept of gender citizenship has been developing in the close relationship with the concept of cultural sovereignty, which provides the State with legitimate ways to exercise a selective approach to the guarantees of human rights and reject gender-sensitive legislation on the grounds of protecting the family as a traditional value at the expense of human rights of women.