‘Ass‐kicking’ Women: Doing and Undoing Gender in a US Livestock Auction

Using in‐depth interviews with farm operators and participant observation at a livestock auction, this article explores how women in conventional agriculture in the USA ‘do gender’ in a male‐dominated world. In particular the ways that space, both public and private, alters the performance of gender are analysed. Given that agriculture in the USA has traditionally been tied to masculinity and that more and more women are entering the field, the article examines the strategies women employ to negotiate the tension between being women and being farmers. The findings suggest that in general women's success is intricately tied to their ability to reproduce the masculinity that spells success for their male counterparts. These women dress in masculine clothing, swear and are ‘tough as nails’. Furthermore, women's mere presence as farm operators does not necessarily subvert the relationship between masculinity and agriculture. In many ways this notion is reinforced by the presence of these women and so the performance of gender ultimately reinforces rather than subverts the ties between hegemonic masculinity and agriculture.     

The Embedding of Russian State-Sanctioned Multipolarity in the Post-Soviet Conjuncture

This article demonstrates the manner in which key Russian officials engaged with and propagated the notion of multipolarity in the wider post-Soviet conjuncture—first in the 1990s and intensively during Vladimir Putin's first two presidencies. I argue that this demonstrates an earlier disarticulation of neoliberalism, globalisation, unipolarity, and hegemony than that offered in the nascent ‘multipolar turn’ in the sub-disciplines of International Political Economy and International Relations. Embedding understandings of multipolarity that cohere to state strategy, key Russian officials invite us to efface the divide between academic and political practice when understanding how world order concepts are propagated and normalised. A multifaceted treatment of multipolarity does not render it analytically dubious; rather, it cements its importance as a common sense and ‘polysemic’ understanding of global political affairs serving an explicit political function.     

Poetry of the Swamp: Blok’s “Folks” Cycle Bubbles of the Earth

Gogol'’s “A Few Words about Pushkin” has traditionally been viewed as evidence that Gogol' idolized Pushkin as a national poet par excellence. This article argues that behind Gogol'’s deference for Russia’s greatest poet lie layers of polemic and subversive iconoclasm. Though he initially proclaims Pushkin Russia’s national poet, Gogol' goes on to use his trademark rhetorical tools to effectively strip the poet of the honour. In doing so, he attempts to influence the reception of his own writings, which at the time predominantly concerned Ukrainian themes, in ways that would encourage his Russian audience to consider him—and not Pushkin—as Russia’s premier national writer. Countering Pushkin’s Russocentric model of national culture, Gogol' champions instead a centrifugal conception of national-imperial identity that places Russia’s imperial periphery at the center of the “Russian” experience.     

Gendered practices in institutions of hegemonic masculinity

Vital knowledge about gender relations can be gained through the study of military and defense organizations. Such institutions of hegemonic masculinity tend to represent and reify specific notions of masculinity in ways that make it the norm. The article suggests that such institutions can be approached through feminist methodology, for example, by using critical analysis to question what appears ‘normal’ in institutional practice and by listening to the voices of women who challenge the norms of hegemonic masculinity by engaging in daily institutional practice. The article relates ‘women's voices’ and this ‘site’ of knowledge to feminist methodology by developing the standpoint perspective. It is argued that the notion of struggle formulated in standpoint theory is a useful way to understand the knowledge gained by women engaging with institutions of hegemonic masculinity, and an important contribution to the understanding of gender dynamics. Furthermore, it proposes that this ‘site’ of knowledge production will become increasingly relevant as women in rising numbers are taking positions within defense and military institutions and challenging historically embedded norms of hegemonic masculinity.     

The interaction of masculinity and control and its impact on the experience of suffering for an older man

Previous work suggests that control and suffering are related to one another. Although it would be expected that within cultures which emphasize the importance of masculinity, as well as personal control, there would be greater suffering among individuals who lose their sense of masculinity or control, how these constructs relate to each other and are individually negotiated has been largely understudied. This paper takes a case study approach to further exploring how the constructs of control, masculinity, and suffering are related in the lived experience of an older European American man, Mr. Gregor. Analysis of this case shows that masculinity is related to control and that these constructs act as themes which interact over Mr. Gregor's lifetime in a variety of ways. The level of control maintained by Mr. Gregor in different aspects of his life affects his sense of suffering. In some instances his sense of masculinity helps to protect Mr. Gregor against suffering; in others, it contributes to his suffering. These findings support the notion that there are culturally dependent possibilities for how control and masculinity are related.     

Pussy Riot,Putin and the Politics of Embodiment

On 21 February 2012, five young women clothed in brightly coloured short skirts, knit tights and rudely made balaclavas ruptured the silence of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, Russia, with an obscenity-laced song asking the Virgin Mary to deliver Russia from the impending re-election of its former president Vladimir Putin. The Russian Government responded to this provocative but non-violent act with unexpected and unprecedented coercive force against the small group of activists. In this article, we argue that Pussy Riot's ‘Punk Prayer’ and its aftermath demonstrate that the volatility of the conflict arises from a socio-historically specific form of the tension between a political citizenship and an embodied social agency. The Pussy Riot phenomenon was particularly explosive because it exposed the unstable coexistence of authoritarianism with a liberal constitutional state whose legitimacy depends upon the exclusion of arbitrary authority from the political field. Pussy Riot's ‘Punk Prayer’ and its aftermath demonstrate the subversive potential of even the most local, sporadic and symbolic feminist and queer challenges to the established order. The response of the Russian State exposed its dependence upon and investment in patriarchal and heteronormative power structures often rendered politically invisible through relegation to ‘private life’. The value of Pussy Riot's performance lies in its making visible, and thus available for public debate, the ways in which authoritarianism legitimates its exercise of power by exploiting social divisions through a network of institutionalized forces which civil society had come to take for granted.     

The US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief

This article analyses the US response under former President George W. Bush to the global HIV/AIDS epidemic at the intersection of neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism, highlighting the various ways their distinct gender logics collide to reproduce masculine privilege and gender inequalities on a global scale. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is the United States global HIV/AIDS policy and is the largest commitment made by any single nation for an international health project. My analysis is based on PEPFAR's ‘formal’ policy texts, including its authorizing legislation, five-year strategic framework and specific policy directives for recipient organizations. In addition, I examine more ‘informal’ texts like Congressional reports and Presidential speeches delivered by George W. Bush on various occasions. Drawing on a rich body of feminist ethnographic work in the fields of global governance, international political economy, organizational theory and sexuality and masculinity studies, the following article examines the various ways market-based norms and practices can legitimate the moral imperatives of neo-conservatism to promote ‘traditional’ values and institutions in the global South as leading solutions to global problems and insecurities.     

Understanding Men's Health and Illness: A Gender-relations Approach to Policy,Research, and Practice

Abstract

Men's health has emerged as an important public concern that may require new kinds of healthcare interventions and increased resources. Considerable uncertainty and confusion surround prevailing understandings of men's health, particularly those generated by media debate and public policy, and health research has often operated on oversimplified assumptions about men and masculinity. A more useful way of understanding men's health is to adopt a gender-relations approach. This means examining health concerns in the context of men's and women's interactions with each other, and their positions in the larger, multidimensional structure of gender relations. Such an approach raises the issue of differences among men, which is a key issue in recent research on masculinity and an important health issue. The gender-relations approach offers new ways of addressing practical issues of healthcare for men in college environments.     

The self in the other: Aleksandr Griboedov’s Orient

While scholars of Russian orientalism have diverged somewhat in their interpretation of Aleksandr Griboedov, they have in the main viewed him as a supporter of Russian expansion and seen in his works a justification of Russia’s conquests in the East. This essay seeks to complicate that view. By taking a comprehensive look at Griboedov’s Eastern-themed works (including his poems “There, Where Flows the Alazani”, “Kal'ianchi”, and “Predators on the Chegem”, the play Georgian Night and a series of editorials, letters, and travel notes written from the Caucasus and Persia) and situating them in the context of contemporary literary and political debates, the author argues that Griboedov undercuts rather than supports the orientalist conception of the East’s alterity. By portraying “Eastern” ways as possibilities latent within all humans and by pointing out the Russian past in the Persian present, Griboedov is able to question Russia’s role in the Caucasus and to explore the costs of Russia’s progress towards European-style civilization.     

Avant-Garde Militarism and a Post-Hip-Hop President

Feminist global politics scholars have long investigated militarized masculinities to demonstrate the toxic and mutually constitutive relationship between war, militarism and masculinity. This article investigates this relationship in the political sphere by analysing the embodiment, performance and construction of presidential masculinities. In particular, I compare and contrast the presidential masculinities of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Through a multimodal discursive analysis of online presidential photo galleries, I demonstrate that Obama has recast US presidential and African American masculinities in contradictory but significant ways. I argue that Obama constructs and performs a hybrid presidential masculinity that is contemporary, demilitarized and characterized by a post-hip-hop ghetto-style cool. This presidential masculinity and the avant-garde militarism that accompanies it stands in stark contrast to Bush and cleverly camouflages, even reinvigorates, ongoing US militarism across the globe. After all, Obama further institutionalized the ‘War on Terror’, but has a Nobel Peace Prize amongst his accolades. Throughout, I elucidate the concept of presidential masculinities, noting their relationship to hegemonic masculinities. I conclude that Obama's hybrid presidential masculinity may very well be a more sophisticated deployment and embodiment of US hegemonic masculinity in the twenty-first century.     

Doing drag

Academic and public interpretations of drag performance have been bound by the argument that drag queens reveal the non‐essential nature of gender but still reinforce the hegemonic gender order through portrayals of emphasized femininity. I offer a fresh perspective on professional drag queen performance by examining how it intersects with the gay masculinity of an accomplished performer. By incorporating visual research methods, life‐history analysis, and field observations, I find that drag performance is a salient way to reify aspects of gay masculinity that are otherwise rejected by the hegemonic gender order. When alternative masculinities are met with acceptance the hegemonic gender order is subverted and masculinity can be expanded in lasting ways. Researchers would do well to treat sexuality as a key component of gender in drag performances and the audience as an active participant.     

From Christianity to paganism: The new middle ages and the values of ‘medieval’ masculinity

Abstract

In the context of the upsurge of interest in all things medieval, this essay examines the promotion in popular culture of ‘medieval’ masculine role models. It begins with an assessment of the 19th century's creation of a version of medieval masculinity which was essentially Christian and chivalric. It traces the transfer of this image from literature to cinema in the 20th century. It argues that the image remained dominant until the 1960s when it was eclipsed by a new version of medieval masculinity, a violent pagan ‘Dark Age’ model. This new image triumphed because of changes in society and in the structure and strategies of the cinema industry and its audience. The essay concludes by examining possible medieval alternatives to the pagan ‘Dark Age’ image: the revived chivalric knight, the eco‐warrior and the transplanted modern rationalist. The evidence suggests that they have not yet dented the dominance of the pagan image.     

Elena Andreevna Shvarts (17 May 1948–11 March 2010)

Abstract

A critical exploration is provided of the path and building metaphors used in the speeches of the former Russian president Vladimir Putin. We use the concepts of 'discourse metaphor' and 'frame' in our analysis of a corpus of Putin's speeches written and delivered between 2000 and 2007 in order to reveal the rhetorical strategies employed in them, and establish the ideological patterns of metaphor use. The metaphors are identified, analysed according to source domains, and then explored for their contribution to the overall project of the Russian president. Our findings suggest that, although the metaphorical expressions used by Putin are conventional and have a strong experiential grounding, in pragmatic terms, the choice of them appears to be in line with the legitimization and delegitimization strategies adopted by the former Russian president during his two terms in office.     

From critical sociology to public intellectual: Pierre Bourdieu and politics

By the late 1990s, Pierre Bourdieu had become the primary public intellectual of major social scientific status at the head of the anti-globalization movement that emerged in France and in other Western European countries. This article discusses how Bourdieu became a leading public intellectual, a role that seems to contrast with his early years as a professional sociologist. It explores what seemed to change in Bourdieu’s activities and outlook as sociologist and what seems to have remained constant. It identifies several institutional conditions that seemed necessary for Bourdieu to be able to play the kind of public intellectual role he did in his later years. Bourdieu’s movement from a peripheral position to a central location in the French intellectual field, the changing character of the field itself, the growing influence of the mass media in French political and cultural life, the failures of the French Socialists in power, a cultural legacy of leading critical intellectuals in France, a unifying national issue of globalization, and the political conjuncture in 1995 all intersected in ways that opened a path for Bourdieu to choose new and more frequent forms of political action. His responses to that combination of factors at different moments reveal both a striking continuity in desire to preserve the autonomy of intellectual life and a change in view and strategy on how best to do that. The article concludes with a brief evaluation of Bourdieu’s public intellectual role.     

War and security,women and gender: an overview of the issues

This article addresses the gender division of war and the significance of men and masculinity in processes of militarisation. Three phases of the continuum of war are considered. In periods of war-readiness, societies see a diversion of spending from social provision to the armed forces, accompanied by an increase in patriarchal ideology and authority. The actual waging of wars calls for the delivery of extreme but disciplined violence, and combat training shapes masculinity to this purpose. Armed conflict often involves a massive sexual assault on women. Women have recently intervened internationally to argue that if peace is to be more than a mere cessation of hostilities, ‘security’ must be redefined to mean the satisfaction of human needs, including comprehensive safety for women. Women's peace movements, worldwide, are theorising that gender power relations are significant among the causes of war, and transformative change in how we ‘live’ gender can be a significnt resource for peace.     

The terrorist,the artist and the citizen: Oscar Wilde and Vera

This article links Oscar Wilde’s prose writings with his earliest drama Vera, or The Nihilists (1880, rev., 1883) and suggests how the idea of terrorism and political violence was a spectacle and threat that Wilde acknowledged and encompassed in his writing and thought. I discuss Wilde’s adoption of a Hegelian view of the development of civilisation and suggest that during his 1895 trials he cast himself self-consciously as at once agitator and scapegoat, finding that his own life had come to imitate his art though not in the ways with which we are commonly familiar. Modern terrorism from its roots in 1870s Russian political unrest is recognised as both a new force and a familiar fantasy which shapes literature.     

Emotion Work,Shame, and Post-Soviet Women Entrepreneurs: Negotiating Ideals of Gender and Labor in a Global Economy

Drawing on ethnographic research among Russian women traders or “shuttle traders” (chelnoki), I examine discourses on shame as a type of emotion work and consider links to ideal gender roles among Russian women entrepreneurs. In a post-Soviet era increasingly shaped by transnational mobility, as well as by a persistent legacy of Soviet sensibilities, a focus on emotion among women traders provides an ideal lens for considering what travels between eras marked by distinct ideologies, between nation-states, and between public and domestic spaces. A discourse of shame links Soviet sensibilities of proper labor and contemporary gender sensibilities that continue to elevate men as breadwinners; thus, a focus on shame enables us to see the contradictory ways in which women are positioned in local and global economies in the 2000s. This case shows how Russian women's insertion into the global economy beginning in the early 1990s has required emotion work that is similar to that required in other locations where global capitalism has brought about reconfigurations of work lives and required people to renegotiate gender roles, expressions of power, and the meaning of labor in their lives.