Rebecca Kay

Men in crisis or in critical need of support? insights from Russia and the UK

The idea that men are ‘in crisis’ has become popular in many societies. Yet the provision of targeted, gender-aware services for men is relatively underdeveloped. Negative trends in male health and employment offer the clearest evidence of crisis among men in Russia and the UK. These are occurring in the context of socio-economic change and a backlash against womens ‘emancipation’, both of which have particular implications for men. The shoring up of rigid expectations of male and female roles and behaviour, combined with increased economic insecurity, has contributed to a view of men as ‘failures’. In the Altai Region of Western Siberia, a system of social support for working-age men has been developed. Unique in Russia, the Altai Regional Crisis Centre for Men is part of a small but growing international phenomenon of support projects for men and may have potential as a model for similar developments in other parts of the world.

Emotional Engagements with the Field: A View from Area Studies

Abstract This article underlines the potential for multi-disciplinary area studies to provide a stimulating context within which to advance our understanding of the role that emotions play within the research process. The article seeks to argue for the relevance of emotional work with respect to research activity and, drawing from the experiences of the two authors, highlights some of the ways in which sensitivity to such matters can assist in making sense of our research experiences and findings. The article does not make any claim to introduce new ideas regarding the challenges involved in confronting the ‘emotional’ and ‘subjective’ in social science research; rather it is a response to a perceived lack of debate concerning such issues within the multi-disciplinary field of area studies, and particularly its published output, in spite of the vigorous discussions going on within many areas of the social sciences.

‘In our society it’s as if the man is just some kind of stud’: Men’s Experiences of Fatherhood and Fathers’ Rights in Contemporary Russia

The Russian Family Law, passed in December 1995, uses deliberately gender-neutral language to describe the rights and duties of spouses and parents. Article 62 states explicitly that parents enjoy equal rights and bear equal responsibilities in so far as the care, upbringing and education of their children are concerned.1 By contrast, Soviet family legislation and social provision were constructed overwhelmingly around the mother–child relationship and focused on enabling women to combine work and motherhood. Parental leave, access to state-funded childcare and benefit payments were aimed at supporting women as working mothers, and fathers were relegated to what has been described as an ‘assistant role’ within the family.2 It was not until 1990 that fathers were first mentioned, alongside grandparents and other relatives and guardians, in draft legislation allowing them to take leave to look after a child until the age of three and to claim allowances and payments which had been previously allocated to mothers only. By the time this bill was finally passed into law in April 1992, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and new economic priorities held sway. Feminist observers, concerned about rising levels of female unemployment, which were widely believed to be linked to women’s maternal rights and responsibilities, pointed out that changing the letter of the law only overcame one of the barriers to a fairer division of labour and the sharing of rights and duties between the sexes:

Working with Single Fathers in Western Siberia: A New Departure in Russian Social Provision

SINCE THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET SYSTEM considerable emphasis has been placed in both academic studies and media reporting on the loss of welfare and social provision and what have been termed the ‘torn safety nets’ of the post-Soviet era. Processes of change which began before the demise of the USSR have severely disrupted previous securities and have raised a range of social policy issues and concerns. Since the early 1990s numerous studies have examined the failings of Soviet provision and yet have repeatedly pointed out that, whatever its shortcomings, there was at least some sort of coherent system in the past. Much of this work has led to assertions that, with the Soviet system gone, no viable replacement has been established in the intervening decade. This in turn has been interpreted in some studies as contributing to a loss of social cohesion and damage to the social fabric, resulting in a generalised picture of Russian society foundering in the grip of an apparently interminable and ever-deepening crisis. A more positive picture has emerged out of research focused on the development of informal networks and strategies at the local level, where numerous examples of resilience, ingenuity and the development of innovative forms of formal and informal support and security have been found. However, it has been argued elsewhere that informal approaches and horizontal networks are not necessarily conducive to interaction with administrative bodies and policy makers and therefore have little impact on the development of government-led social policy at the local, regional and national levels. In making such arguments some authors have resorted both to rather simplistic and perhaps over-optimistic models of policy making and consultancy processes in the ‘democratic West’ and to essentialist notions about the ‘nature’ of Russian society, questioning its capacity for progressive change and the sort of flexible and innovative thinking deemed crucial for the development of a ‘modern’ and ‘democratic’ society. In keeping with such representations of Russia, the stance of many international policy-making and funding bodies throughout the period since 1991 has appeared to be based on an assumption that this situation can only be rectified by the import and implementation of Western models of good practice. This view of Russia has been questioned by academic researchers and practitioners in the field, who have called for a more culturally sensitive approach to the study of

Languages in migratory settings: place, politics and aesthetics

Research on migration has often focused on push and pull factors; and on the mobilities which drive migration. What has often received less attention, and what this book recognises, is the importance of the creative activities which occur when strangers meet and settle for long periods of time in new places. Contributions consider case studies in Italy, Kyrgyzstan, France, Portugal and Australia, as well as taking a careful look at the Commonwealth City of Glasgow. They explore the making and use of literature (for adults and children) of art installations; translation processes in immigration law; education materials; and intercultural understanding. The research reveals the extent to which migration takes a place, and takes different forms, as life is made anew out of intercultural encounters which have a geographical specificity. This shift in focus allows a different lens to be placed on languages, intercultural communication and the activities of migration, and enables the settings themselves to come under scrutiny.

‘She's Like a Daughter to Me’: Insights into Care, Work and Kinship from Rural Russia

This article draws on ethnographic research into a state-funded homecare service in rural Russia. The article discusses intersections between care, work and kinship in the relationships between homecare workers and their elderly wards and explores the ways in which references to kinship, as a means of authenticating paid care and explaining its emotional content, reinforce public and private oppositions while doing little to relieve the tensions and conflicts of care work. The discussion brings together detailed empirical insights into local ideologies and practices as a way of generating new theoretical perspectives, which will be of relevance beyond the particular context of study.

Introduction: gender, equality and the state from Socialism to Democracy

Gender has long been recognised by sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists and historians (amongst others) as a crucial structure influencing the organisation of societies and the positioning of women and men in relation to both public and private divisions of power and authority. The socially constructed and culturally defined understandings of femininity and masculinity upon which the gender order1 of any society is founded, affect the roles and responsibilities attributed to women and men, both in the private sphere of home and family and in the public domains of economic, political and social interaction, and, indeed, in intersections between the two. Dominant discourses and understandings of gender, propagated through media and cultural representations of women and men, public rhetoric and popular debate, prioritise equality and difference to varying degrees, both drawing on and feeding into state-led ideologies and policies. These in turn play an important role in determining the extent to which gender impacts upon the opportunities, rights, entitlements and duties of male and female citizens. Indeed, as Connell has pointed out, the state is ‘not just a regulatory agency, it is a creative force in the dynamic of gender’, one which ‘creates new categories and new historical possibilities’.2

Perceptions of poverty in small-town Russia

The paper reviews some of the perceptions and categorizations of poverty found through a study of participatory approaches to poverty reduction in provincial Russia. It draws on theorizations of poverty as a subjective reality which is socially constructed and maybe differently perceived by different subsections of the population. The paper argues that perceptions of poverty matter, because they feed into both formal categorizations of need and entitlement to assistance or support and more informal, cultural understandings of impoverishment which may be morally and emotionally inflected.

Soviet and Post-Soviet Gender Climates

The term ‘gender’ has no direct translation in the Russian language, and those limited circles of Russian academics and activists who have now begun to speak of gender simply use a russified version of the English word: gender, pronounced with a hard ‘g’. For the majority of the Russian population however, gender has no meaning and has to be explained as ‘social sex’ (sotsial’nyi pol). In west-European societies, by contrast, gender as a concept has gained both academic and popular currency over the past thirty to forty years. Since the turn of the century, the study of sex roles and sex differences has received steadily increasing academic attention, initially as a marginal issue within various other disciplines. Then, in the 1970s, when the radical political consciousness which had focused on issues of race, class and sexuality in the late 1960s spilled over into a growing popular interest in ‘the problem of women’, the study of gender became a field of interest in its own right.

Challenging Inequality: Legislative Approaches versus Women’s Activism

The gender climate which developed in the immediate post-Soviet period was not favourable to women’s equality. It promoted theories of predetermined and non-negotiable differences between women and men in terms of character, personality and ability. On this basis simplistic solutions justified as a return to ‘the laws of nature’ and an ideal of heterosexual bliss were expected to overcome a myriad of economic, social and political problems despite glaringly obvious inconsistencies between the proposed ideals and the realities of daily life for Russian women and their families. Yet in spite of this tendency the situation of women was not regarded as unproblematic in the first five years of Russian independence. Numerous articles, commentaries and reports were published in the Russian media during that period discussing the terrible poverty faced by large, and predominantly female, sections of Russian society, bemoaning high levels of maternal and infant mortality and even commenting on the disproportionately high numbers of women amongst the unemployed and the low representation of women in public and political life. Frequently these articles appeared alongside those promoting the ‘easy answers’ of the gender climate: a family wage for men and full-time domesticity for women. Indeed many of the same articles which raised problematic issues offered just such solutions.