When Women Speak Phallocentric Positionalities: Biopolitics of Female Loneliness in the Russian Cinemascape

Abstract

This article approaches an emerging archipelago of visual biopolitics from two grounds: ontological security studies, and black feminist existentialism. The first perspective deals with visual representations that encapsulate (hu)man anxiety about the imaginary loss of a stable, unique and complete identity. And secondly, feminist existentialism provides an apparatus to reveal how these representations are underpinned by a (hu)man desire to avoid loneliness. The first part of the article unites in a single theoretical framework literature on phallocentric positionalities, political narcissism, but adds two new components—gender hierarchies, and the politics of “female loneliness.” The second part explores empirically how cinema mirrors the “war gaze” that started to dominate Russian society and has led to a militarized virility in both domestic and foreign affairs. The article shows in examples from the twenty-first-century Russian cinemascape how silenced machismo is transforming Russian “vertical” biopolitics of loneliness for “home use” into a masculine “geopolitics of loneliness” in international relations. Both are based on the commodification of womanhood, and a consequent replacement of women’s voice with phallocentric intonations.