A post by Misha Yakovlev | 18 May 2020

Today, I find myself in Term 3 of my first year of PhD research at the Department of Film and Television, University of Warwick. Last week, I delivered a paper summarising my research to date and a provisional [this cannot be stressed enough!] roadmap for the future to an internal postgraduate conference[ held on Microsoft Teams due to COVID-19]. This blog is based on that paper.

Thesis title: heteronationalism in unsocialist times: shifting norms of gender-sexuality-race on the russian screen during ‘transition’ (1986-2008)

As you can tell from the word “screen” in this blog’s title, TV histories are only one part of my research. Nevertheless, I hope this blog can offer you something useful whether in terms of theoretical thinking, methodologies or as an introduction to the incredibly niche[ that is, “incredibly niche” in Anglo-American context] topic of russian screen culture from the late twentieth century and early noughties.

My research seeks to explores the shifts in norms of gender and sexuality on the russian screen during the period often imagined in terms of “transition to democracy” – Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’ on one side and vladimir putin’s first expansionary war (2008 Invasion of Georgia) on the other.[1] I pose three major questions. Did gender-sexual normativities on the russian screen change during this period and how? What were the ideological effects of these changes – which subjects bodies get excluded on and erased from screen? [How] does queer [and] decolonial thinking help us answer the first two questions? To some extent, these questions are tautological because I do not pretend ‘scientific impartiality’ – my own personal encounters (interpellations by, rejections of, etc.) with the russian screen inform these questions themselves, foreshadow my answers and sculpt the overall cartography of my research. Speaking of the latter, a number of academic volumes on the role of women on the [pre-]soviet russian screen have appeared in the west since 1991.[2] On the whole, these leave unaddressed issues of ‘transition’. So far, no substantial work of film scholarship on gender (or, indeed, women) and ‘transition’ exists. However, Emily Schukman Matthews’s Chapter in Ruptures and Continuities in Soviet/Russian Cinema (2018) explores the dominant construction of Woman in late-glasnost cinema – the glamorous prostitute.[3] Significantly, this and other existing scholarship treats the category ‘Woman’ itself as stable, unitary and essential.[4] Two related issues with existing scholarship are: the slippage between ‘wome/an’ and ‘gender’; and, a persistent blindness to intersectionality.

This year, I have started work on Chapter I of my thesis. This Chapter aims to reframe the debate by asking how dominant on-screen constructions (as opposed to representations) of Woman changed in relation to the broader socio-political context of transition – the emergence of an unsocialist russian heteronationalism. I start by arguing that popular films from the soviet twilight replaced the ‘working mother’ as the dominant Woman on-screen with a ‘sexually-emancipated’ (read, heteroticised) subject who rejects the factory-kitchen domesticity of her soviet predecessor.[5] Two films are key in this regard: Vasily Pichul’s 1988 Little Vera was the first film to screen sexual intercourse outside of marriage and without feelings in soviet film history; one year later, the last soviet blockbuster, Petr Todorovsky’s Swedish co-production Intergirl (1989) became the first film to screen russian sex workers since the suppression of the twenties avante-garde.[6] The still above is from Intergirl. In my opinion, this still both highlights the constructed looked-atness of the prostitute body on the late soviet screen and emphasises the glamour and desirability of her subject position through Western clothing, unattainable to most soviet citizens. Both films use the figure of Woman to explore the economic and, in Little Vera’s case, ideological bankruptcy of the soviet system. I argue that a number of nineties productions follow in the footsteps of these films to entrench the schizophrenic duality of Woman as Mary (suffering pure and resigned) and Magdalen (promiscuous and ‘fatal’) in a conservative effort to ‘re-masculinise’ the russian nation. In the process, these films reject the entirety of soviet culture as a corruption of natural Christian-Orthodox russian values.[7] Finally, the emergence of domestically-produced sitcoms in the early noughties introduced a competing construction of ‘respectable’ or heteronormative Woman, defined through capitalist consumption and forward-looking reproduction of the affluent heterosexual family – possibly, signifying a shift away from ‘transition culture’. Despite these changes, this Chapter is haunted by two continuities in constructions of Woman on the russian screen: her compulsory heterosexuality; and, whiteness.[8] [The latter is hardly surprising given that soviet Woman was always a white russian Woman under her red clothes.[9]]

Todorovsky, Petr. Intergirl [Интердевочка]. Mosfilm, 1989.

Taking the former as a starting point, Chapter II will explore the emergence of a tentative ‘homonationalism’ on the russian screen from 1989 onwards. I plan to argue that this homonationalism does not threaten but buttresses heterosexuality as the norm and operates “a commitment to the global ascendancy of whiteness” by imagining a particular gendered (Man), racialised (White) and classed (Rich) subject as Acceptable non-heterosexual.[10] I propose concluding this Chapter with a [mis]reading of Sergei Balavanov’s critically-acclaimed feature Of Freaks and Men (1998), suggesting that it passes white Man’s violent control of women, disabled and Oriental bodies for queer experimentation.[11]

Chapter III will focus on post-soviet screen texts that celebrate russia’s Orientalist wars – both historical and the so-called First (1994-1996) and Second Chechen Wars (1999-2009) that were occurring during the period in question. Suturing previous Chapters together, I claim that these texts produce and operate a tiered Orientalist geography of gender-sexual perversity to justify material colonialism. Reversing the linear Chronology of Chapter I, I will conclude this Chapter with two little-known 80s films – Dodo Abashidze and Sergei Parajanov’s Aşıq Qərib (1988) and Sulambek Mamilov’s A Little Golden Cloud Spent the Night… (1989).[12] I propose reading these with hindsight as an unlikely queer assemblage that offered the possibility of rupture from russian-soviet Orientalist cartographies and their temporal regimes. These films make “possible rereading of these terrorist bodies, typically understood as culturally, ethnically, and religiously nationalist, fundamentalist, patriarchal, and often even homophobic, as assemblages”.[13] The soviet state’s deployment of censorship to deny wide release to these films (an unintended[?] unholy alliance with Azerbaijani and Armenian nationalisms, in Aşıq Qərib’s case) despite glasnost prompts me to read them as queer events that muddy the linear chronology of ‘transition’.

In terms of its theoretical contribution, my work urges a shift in gender and queer scholarship of russian screen from a narrow focus on ‘women’, non-heterosexuals and ‘queer aesthetic’ to the cultural processes that racialize certain bodies as gender-sexually perverse precisely to deny them access to both respectable and transgressive(?) identity categories of and claims to life in late-soviet modernity and post-soviet transition.[14] In so doing, I hope to contribute to the relatively-established academic project of querying homonormative, racist-Orientalist and classist assumption which haunt some queer thinking, praxis and aesthetics in the west.[15]

References

[1] Birgit Beumers and Eugenie Zvonkine, ‘Introduction: Re-Construction, or Perestroika’, in Ruptures and Continuities in Soviet/Russian Cinema: Styles, Characters and Genres Before and After the Collapse of the USSR, ed. by Birgit Beumers and Eugenie Zvonkine, Routledge Contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe Series, 79 (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 1–12 (pp. 1–12).

[2] Lynne Attwood and Maya Turovskaya, Red Women on the Silver Screen: Soviet Women and Cinema from the Beginning to the End of the Communist Era (London: Pandora, 1993); Women in Soviet Film: The Thaw and Post-Thaw Periods, ed. by Marina Rojavin and Tim Harte (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York: Routledge, 2017); Rachel Morley, Performing Femininity: Woman as Performer in Early Russian Cinema, KINO: The Russian and Soviet Cinema Series (London ; New York, NY: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2017).

[3] Emily Schuckman Mathews, ‘The Prostitute as Everywoman: The Role and the Evolution of Sex Worker in Russian Cinema’, in Ruptures and Continuities in Soviet/Russian Cinema: Styles, Characters and Genres Before and After the Collapse of the USSR, ed. by Birgit Beumers and Eugenie Zvonkine, Routledge Contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe Series, 79 (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 71–89.

[4] Some exceptions exist: Yulia Gradskova, Soviet Politics of Emancipation of Ethnic Minority Woman: Natsionalka (Cham: Springer, 2019); Justin Weir, ‘Gender, Sex and the Fantasy of the Non-Expressive in Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates’, in Women in Soviet Film: The Thaw and Post-Thaw Periods, ed. by Marina Rojavin and Tim Harte (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 176–96.

[5] On ‘working mother’ as the dominant gender trope in soviet cinema and state socialist discourse more broadly: Schuckman Mathews, pp. 73–74; Светлана Айвазова, ‘Контракт “Работающей Матери”: Советский Вариант’, in Гендерный Калейдоскоп, ed. by Марина Малышева (Moskva: Izd-vo ‘Academia’, 2002), pp. 291–309; Chris Corrin, Superwomen and the Double Burden: Women’s Experience of Change in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (London: Scarlet Press, 1992).

[6] Василий Пичуль, Маленькая Вера (Центральная киностудия детских и юношеских фильмов имени М. Горького, 1988); Пётр Тодоровский, Интердевочка (Mosfilm, 1989).

[7] For a similar perception of Maoist socialism as a “distortion of people’s natural genders and sexualities” in contemporary prc:Petrus Liu, Queer Marxism in Two Chinas (Duke University Press, 2015), p. 3 <http://read.dukeupress.edu/lookup/doi/10.1215/9780822375081> [accessed 21 November 2018].

[8] One race and racism in russia, pre/post and soviet: Olya Reznikova, ‘The Role of Gender and Race in Researching Postcolonialism in Russia: Grief and Chechen Feminism’, in At the Crossroads: Methodology, Theory, and Practice of LGBT and Queer Studies, ed. by A. Kondakov (Saint Petersburg: The Centre for Independent Social Research, Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung, 2014); Nikolay Zakharov, Race and Racism in Russia, 2015; Jeff Sahadeo, ‘Black Snouts Go Home! Migration and Race in Late Soviet Leningrad and Moscow*’, The Journal of Modern History, 88 (2016); Jeff Sahadeo, Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019).

[9] Gradskova, pp. 13–14.

[10] Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Next Wave (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 9–10, 3.

[11] Алексей Балабанов, Про Уродов и Людей (Of Freaks and Men) (СТВ, Союзкино, 1998).

[12] Dodo Abashidze and Sergei Parajanov, Aşıq Qərib (ქართული ფილმი, 1988); Sulambek Mamilov, Ночевала Тучка Золотая... [A Little Golden Cloud Spent the Night...] (Центральная киностудия детских и юношеских фильмов им. М. Горького, Экспериментальное творческое объединение «Ладья», 1989).

[13] Puar, p. 221.

[14] On inability to formulate a legitimate or legible claim: Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, Theory and History of Literature, v. 46 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

[15] Puar, pp. 14, 22, 221; Liu, pp. 21–33.