Russian Masculinity Research Articles

Проблема представления материнства в русской литературе XIX века

Towards the Problem of Motherhood in Russian Literature of the 19thCentury. For the objective reasons, Russian masculine literature of the 19thcentury did not pay attention to maternal subjects, which play an important rolein women's prose, especially in the modern one. There is an opinion that theimages of mothers depicted by the Russian writers are characterized by a tendencyto self-sacrifice, and maternal love seemed to be described as exclusivelyiconic. This article aims to deny this statement because it’s not based on thehistorical development of the concept of motherhood. The examples from theworks of Nekrasov, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who portrayed images of mothers,demonstrate that their attitude towards motherhood was based on the understandingof its functions typical to that time. The Russian writers also outlinedsome trends that would be put forward by feminist criticism in the field ofmotherhood problems.

Coloniality of Gender and Knowledge: Rethinking Russian Masculinities in Light of Postcolonial and Decolonial Critiques

This article explores how the legacy of European colonialism and its role in transforming gender relations globally, shapes post-Soviet Russian masculinities. It points to historical connections between European and Russian/Soviet colonial projects, both of which relied on the notion of ‘progress’ in gender relations. Drawing on analysis of biographical interviews with a diverse sample of Russian men interviewed in Russia and the UK, this work identifies how the research participants use the core modern/colonial narratives to establish their individual masculinities. Shifting from a common conceptualisation of Russian masculinities as ‘traditional’, ‘conservative’ and ‘macho’, I show that they are instead, closely bound up with the European project of modernity/coloniality. The study advances the analysis of postcolonial masculinities and posits an agenda for decolonisation of sociological research on global masculinities.

Homophony avoidance in the grammar: Russian nominal allomorphy

It has long been observed that languages tend to preserve contrast, either by introducing sound changes or by inhibiting them. However, it is not clear if any instances of so-called homophony avoidance reported to date constitute an active synchronic restriction in the grammar. This paper presents an instance of homophony avoidance in Russian masculine nouns. A perception experiment shows that the trends observed in the corpus are only partially extended to nonce words. I argue that the asymmetry observed in the experimental results can only be attributed to a synchronic restriction against homophonous forms in the same paradigm. Thus this paper presents strong evidence in favour of a synchronic anti-homophony constraint.

Transformation of Masculinity in the Russian Cinema

The article discusses the issues of gender identity and the crisis of masculinity in the Soviet and post-Soviet cinema in comparison with Western films. Social instability becomes the basis for rethinking cultural identity and expanding the typology of masculinity. This imbalance is most clearly visible in the cinema, which is a beneficial environment for actualizing problematic socio-cultural issues and forming some gender stereotypes and normative behaviors that later enter everyday reality. Following the West, the Russian cinema also focuses on the substantive side of the concept of “masculinity”, which is based on the specifics of national identity, traditional goals and social foundations. It is significant that the hegemonic masculinity characteristic of the Western cinema was not basically common in the Soviet era, whose masculinity model was the image of a leader, a worker, and, in the post-war period, a front-line soldier. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the beginning of capitalist relations in Russia caused the overthrow of former cultural values and the crisis of Soviet identity. The suppression of the male characters’ “sensitivity” was replaced by a total emancipation and sexuality, which can be witnessed in the abundance of scenes of a sexual nature in the films of the 1990s. However, in the post-Soviet cinema, the focus on the values of Western culture, in which a crisis of masculinity was already evident, stimulated the interest in the Russian image of masculinity, which initially manifested itself in romanticizing the image of a “fair gangster,” and later — in the appeal to traditional Russian and Soviet heroes. Since the 2010s, the glorification of the Russian criminal past has declined, opening the space for the emergence of new types of Russian masculinity. The general context of these transformations is represented by the changes of masculinity from the Soviet traumatic, through the post-Soviet (crisis) to the contemporary one.

Beardsley Men in Early Twentieth-Century Russia: Modernising Decadent Masculinity

This article explores the reception of the Decadent artist Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) in Russia concentrating on new gendered meanings acquired by ‘Beardsleyism’ in modernist Russian culture. While the so-called ‘Beardsley Woman’ became a widely discussed literary construct and journalistic trope in Britain, the imagination of Russian artists and literati was captured by a ‘Beardsley Man’. Due to the circulation of the artist's portraits and descriptions by modernist periodicals such as Sergei Diaghilev's Mir iskusstva (1899–1904), a specific form of male (self-)representation emerged in the homophile art circles of St Petersburg and Moscow. Exploring this new urban Russian masculinity, I use the case studies of four men who were compared to Beardsley or used Beardsley as a model in their work and self-fashioning: artist Nikolai Feofilaktov, poet Georgii Ivanov, writers Mikhail Kuzmin and Iurii Iurkun.

Soviet and Russian Masculinities: Rethinking Soviet Fatherhood after Stalin and Renewing Virility in the Russian Nation under Putin

AbstractVladimir Putin’s macho image and his deployment of a masculinized Russian nationalism have fascinated Russians and non-Russians alike, generating considerable public and scholarly analysis....

The International Vocabulary of Russian and Slovenian Languages: Gender Category

Slovenian and Russian substantive internationalisms of different grammatical gender are compared in the present article. Five groups of internationalisms have been distinguished on the basis of the formed glossary based on the dictionaries of the two languages which includes about 450 pairs of lexemes with different gender characteristics: 1) Slovenian feminine ~ Russian masculine; 2) Slovenian masculine ~ Russian feminine; 3) Slovenian masculine ~ Russian neuter; 4) Slovenian feminine ~ Russian neuter; animated nouns constitute a separate group. The significant difference is the small number of neuter gender internationalisms in Slovenian, while there are a great number of such internationalisms in Russian; as well as the predominance of feminine gender borrowings in Slovenian. The analysis has illustrated that the internationalisms gender in both languages is determined by a common set of factors (the influence of gender of the prototype word, features of the morphological category of gender in language, lexical and semantic characteristics), which have different importance in the two languages. The influence of the prototype word gender is mainly characteristic in Slovenian, while structural and paradigmatic factors play a much larger role in Russian. The differences in the donor languages are of great importance for understanding the gender distinction of internationalisms in Slovenian and Russian. The time factor is more evident in Russian, where there is a gradual increasing importance of a paradigmatic factor in the gender determination of a number of borrowings, whereas for Slovenian, where a number of borrowings-internationalisms were formed later, the time factor does not play a big role.

The queer coat: Konstantin Goncharov’s fashion, Russian masculinity and queer world building

I re-assess Russian sartorial economics of the 1990s by examining fashion by Konstantin Goncharov, who was credited for styling Russian rock stars and making costumes for artistic projects. I focus on the relationship between queer masculinity and sartorial practice. The former relies on a visual code encompassing a range of multi-platform, cross-media strategies and a network of references. The latter refers to a community of individuals engaged in the production of a characteristic style across different sites. The article proposes the concept of queer world-building, which brings together object-oriented and community-oriented practices. Central to Goncharov’s world is ‘the queer coat’, a costume designed for his clientele and a historically grounded metaphor for Russian society. It designates the process of creative re-modelling of pre-Soviet and Soviet aesthetics, producing a complex cultural exchange challenging dominant notions of masculinity. Goncharov’s cross-platform and intermedial work captures the spirit of multi-centric cultural activity of the 1990s.

„U nas adin prokuror czestnyj czeławiek, a i on — prawdu skazat’ — swinia” — „rossica” w felietonistyce Stanisława Michalkiewicza

The article aims at presenting and analyzing rossica (linguistic and culturalborrowings from Russian) retrieved from the texts written by Stanisław Michalkiewicz. Stanisław Michalkiewicz is a conservative-liberal author and a former politician. Along with borrowings from Latin and French, Michalkiewicz, known for his command of Russian, incorporates various Russian and Soviet linguistic and cultural elements in his writings. Rossica come in the form of lexical and textual borrowings, e.g. quotations from politicians, literary works, popular songs and jokes. One can also distinguish indirect sources of rossica, such as quotations from Polish literary works referring to Russian reality. Moreover, Michalkiewicz creates original derivates of Russian borrowings and modifies the forms of dative case of Polish personal names according to the Russian masculine noun declension paradigm.

Angels with Dirty Faces: Gosha Rubchinskiy and the Politics of Style

In many ways, twenty-first century Russia is the land par excellence of extreme masculinity. President Putin himself regularly indulges in spectacular performances of extreme masculinity, whether it be pledging to ‘bump off’ Chechen terrorists in their ‘shithouses’, swimming in ice-cold Siberian lakes, or posing in the pilot’s seat of a supersonic strategic bomber. Men’s fashion and fashion imagery is one of the rare areas of Russian culture where the kind of masculinity embodied (in a literal sense) by Putin is still challenged, and indeed subverted. Perhaps the most interesting Russian men’s fashion designer working today, certainly the designer who has engaged most persistently with political change, is Gosha Rubchinskiy. In his work he foregrounds various ‘extreme’ forms of Russian masculinity, from the angelic youth at one end of the spectrum through the brown-shirted neo-fascist adolescent, to the shaven-headed football fan at the other end. He does so, he maintains, in order to change the way Russia is perceived in the world. Indeed, if Dostoevsky once claimed that ‘beauty will save the world,’ Rubchinskiy self-consciously enlists what he refers to as the ‘beauty’ of his models in an attempt to challenge the negative image of Russia generated by western media as part of what he has called an ‘informational [sic] war’ against his native country. Borrowing concepts from Bakhtin (the chronotope, carnival) and Foucault (heterotopia), I examine Rubchinskiy’s extreme masculinities, and the questions they raise about masculinity, about the cultural relationship between Russia and the West, fashion as a discrete cultural practice, and the place and role of the fashion designer in society.

Дискурс Василия Шукшина и исследование русской мужественности

Дискурс Василия Шукшина и исследование русской мужественности

Multiple Masculinities

This article explores expressions of Russian masculinity in the Russian anekdot—a short humorous (and at times politically subversive) narrative that was highly popular during the late-Soviet era. Although anekdots challenged the legitimacy of Soviet power and highlighted inconsistences between propaganda and reality, they utilize and therefore reinforce categories and concepts of the very social system they contest. In conducting a paired content and discourse analysis of 1,290 Soviet-era Russian anekdots, this article demonstrates how this genre both (1) reveals a crisis in Soviet-era Russian masculinity and (2) contributes to a hierarchy of cultural citizenship established through the definition of particular racial, national, and gendered groups as “other.” In doing so, the focus is not only on the objects of the jokes, individuals or groups that are scrutinized and ridiculed, but also on the subjects of the joke and the joke tellers themselves. This project demonstrates how Russian men are distinguished from Russian women as well as ethnic and national others through discourses of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality.

How multiple past tenses divide the labor: The case of South Baffin Inuktitut

AbstractIt is a common perception that in languages having multiple past tenses with different remoteness specifications, the past tenses cover the entire past without a gap or overlap. This paper demonstrates that this way of looking at multiple-past tense systems is not appropriate for the system in South Baffin Inuktitut (a variety of the Inuit language). The dialect has at least four past tenses: recent, hodiernal, pre-hodiernal, and distant. We argue that the relation between the four tenses cannot be represented by a simple linear scheme for two reasons. First, the pre-hodiernal past has a special status as the “conventionally designated alternative”, which is chosen in cases of remoteness indeterminacy, analogous to, for example, the Russian masculine gender being used in cases of gender indeterminacy. Second, there is overlap in their coverage. The pre-hodiernal and hodiernal past tenses collectively cover the entire past and thus any past situation can be described with one of them. The other two provide means to make more fine-grained and subjective temporal specifications. Comparison will be made between the system in South Baffin Inuktitut and those in some Bantoid languages which have been pointed out in the literature to have a comparable layered system of tenses.

A Study on the Change of the Russian Masculine Plural Nominative in -Á in Diachronic Aspect

A Study on the Change of the Russian Masculine Plural Nominative in -Á in Diachronic Aspect

Laughing at Carnival Mirrors: The Comic Songs of Vladimir Vysockij and Soviet Power

Much of Vladimir Vysotskiiʼs enormous popularity throughout the Soviet Union arose from his audienceʼs appreciation of his humorous songs. The current studyʼs primary focus is on the relationship between these songs and the Soviet State. It explores his use of satire and examines the connection between Vysotskiiʼs comic songs and Russian jokelore culture, examining how they construct Russian masculinity. It also contains an analysis of certain themes in Vysotskiiʼs works in order to discern the ways in which his satires are a response to Soviet totalitarianism and to what degree they consist of universal carnival themes.

Cognitive Predictors of Generalization of Russian Grammatical Gender Categories

This study explores how learners generalize grammatical categories such as noun gender. Adult native English speakers with no prior knowledge of Russian (N = 47, ages 17–55 years) were trained to categorize Russian masculine and feminine diminutive nouns according to gender. The training set was morphophonologically homogeneous due to similarities induced by the diminutive suffixes. Generalization was tested using simplex and diminutive nouns with trained or novel stems. Age, familiarity with other second languages, nonverbal intelligence, and verbal working memory capacity were used to predict performance. Compared to trained diminutives, learners showed equally high accuracy in gender categorization of transparent simplex nouns with trained stems and diminutive nouns with novel stems. Accuracy dropped significantly for nontransparent simplex nouns with trained stems and transparent simplex nouns with novel stems. Verbal working memory capacity predicted gender categorization of nontransparent nouns and vocabulary recall, whereas age, nonverbal intelligence, and prior experience with languages with transparent gender categories affected performance in nouns containing at least some degree of gender transparency. The findings indicate that pattern‐based and memory‐based learning processes coexist in adult learners. However, age affected performance on pattern‐based processes but not memory‐based processes like rote memorization of vocabulary and gender categorization of nontransparent nouns. This finding is interpreted in the context of proposals concerning the role of declarative and procedural memory in L2 learning.

Russia's Post-Communist Transformation

This article develops a gendered analysis of the Chechen wars (1994–6, 1999–present) in the context of Russia's post-communist transformation. I argue that the leadership used the first war to associate itself with a notion of militarized, ordered, patriotic Russian masculinity in juxtaposition to a notion of destabilizing, aggressive, criminal Chechen masculinity. Justification for the second war additionally relied on constructed differences between civilized, modern Russian masculinity and terrorist, fundamentalist Chechen masculinity. However, men's evasion of conscription as well as women's anti-conscription and anti-war organizing as soldiers' mothers have undermined the Russian state's ability to wage war and use it as a strategy of legitimation. While the second war initially had considerably more popular support than the first, the crisis in militarized masculinity has not been resolved and soldiers' mothers continue to challenge notions of patriotic motherhood. The article demonstrates that a gendered analysis improves our understanding of the state's decision to go to war, its justifications for war and citizens' responses to war.

Russian Masculinities in History and Culture. Edited by Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Don Healey. Houndsmill: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. ix+242. $65.00.Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent. By Don Healey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Pp. xvi+392. $40.00.

Russian Masculinities in History and Culture. Edited by Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Don Healey. Houndsmill: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. ix+242. $65.00.Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent. By Don Healey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Pp. xvi+392. $40.00.

The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State

Dans cet article, l'A s'interesse a l'ideologie de genre concernant la securite de l'Etat. En se basant sur les ecrits de Thomas Hobbes a propos de l'autorite, l'A revient sur le concept patriarcal de protection de la femme et de l'enfant, les subordonnant ainsi a des citoyens de seconde zone. L'A met en relation le comportement masulin traditionnel avec l'engouement pour les conflits armes internationaux, et les appels et mouvements feministes pour la paix, en s'intorrgeant sur l'avenir de la democratie aux Etats-Unis depuis les evenements du 11 septembre 2001

<sc>Barbara Evans Clements</sc>, <sc>Rebecca Friedman</sc>, and <sc>Dan Healey</sc>, editors. <italic>Russian Masculinities in History and Culture</italic>. New York: Palgrave. 2002. Pp. ix, 242. $65.00

Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healey, editors. Russian Masculinities in History and Culture. New York: Palgrave. 2002. Pp. ix, 242. $65.00 Get access Clements Barbara Evans, Friedman Rebecca, and Healey Dan, editors. Russian Masculinities in History and Culture. New York: Palgrave. 2002. Pp. ix, 242. $65.00. Eric Naiman Eric Naiman University of California, Berkeley Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 108, Issue 3, June 2003, Pages 942–943, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/108.3.942 Published: 01 June 2003