“Everything New That Life Gives Birth To”: Family Values and Kinship Practices in Russian Orthodox Antiabortion Activism

Abstract

Russia is gaining a reputation for rigid gender stereotypes, ranging from hypersexualized political performance to images of deeply religious women enforcing conservative moral standards. This article argues that we can look beyond this binary by recognizing that even the conservatives work with a set of kinship-gender arrangements that are far removed from patriarchal ideals. Based on interviews with self-identified Orthodox Christian psychologists who provide pregnancy counseling as part of a church-based pronatalist movement, I examine the difference between the ideal kinship models espoused by these counselors and the actual kinship scenarios they assume when narrating interactions with clients. While expressing patriarchal ideals of male providership in a heterosexual marriage, these female counselors assume that intergenerational ties between women are more likely to provide stable support for the pregnant woman and her children. Drawing on feminist anthropological approaches to kinship as a malleable framework for the reproduction of life, I argue that the church, while promoting father-centered nuclear families, often provides support to people who live in household forms that were common during the Soviet period but have become precarious in post-Soviet Russia. Valuing single-mother and female-focused households, along with other nonconforming family models, would be a step toward supporting locally comprehensible forms of gender equality.