Suvi Salmenniemi

Civic Activity – Feminine Activity? Gender, Civil Society and Citizenship in Post-Soviet Russia

The article examines the interconnections between gender, civil society and political citizenship in contemporary Russia. It asks how masculinity, femininity and their interrelationships are represented in the context of socio-political activity and what kind of gendered agency these representations construct. The analysis is based on interviews with socially and politically active persons in Central Russia. The main argument in the article is that political space, agency and citizenship in Russia tend to be polarized along gender lines: civic activity is associated with femininity, while institutional politics is considered a masculine territory, and these spheres are represented as quite distinct from each other.

New Heroines of Labour: Domesticating Post-feminism and Neoliberal Capitalism in Russia.

In recent years, post-feminism has become an important element of popular media culture and the object of feminist cultural critique. This article explores how post-feminism is domesticated in Russia through popular self-help literature aimed at a female audience. Drawing on a close reading of self-help texts by three best-selling Russian authors, the article examines how post-feminism is made intelligible to the Russian audience and how it articulates with other symbolic frameworks. It identifies labour as a key trope through which post-feminism is domesticated and argues that the texts invite women to invest time and energy in the labour of personality, the labour of femininity and the labour of sexuality in order to become ‘valuable subjects’. The article demonstrates that the domestication of post-feminism also involves the domestication of neoliberal capitalism in Russia, and highlights how popular psychology, neoliberal capitalism and post-feminism are symbiotically related.

Reading self-help literature in Russia: governmentality, psychology and subjectivity

Self-help has become a booming business over the past decades and an increasingly visible part of popular media culture worldwide. The paper analyzes the arrival and effects of this cultural technology in post-Soviet Russia after more than seventy years of socialism. It examines how Russians are engaging with popular psychology self-help as a technology of the self and how they are making it meaningful in their lives. Drawing on a set of one-to-one and focus group interviews conducted with self-help readers, it examines how these individuals negotiate the new ethics and the normative models of personhood put forward by the self-help genre. It argues that popular psychology has offered a new language for making sense of the self and the social world, and highlights how the readers critically engage with the normalizing power of popular psychology by drawing on a number of local historically sedimented discourses.

Between Business and Byt: Experiences of Women Entrepreneurs in Contemporary Russia

Abstract This article contributes to the study of womens entrepreneurship in transition economies by examining Russian self-employed womens experiences and interpretations of gender in the context of entrepreneurship. It traces how gender articulates the opportunities for and the constraints on entrepreneurial activities in Russian society. As such, this article engages in the theoretical discussion of gendered patterns of entrepreneurship. The article employs a qualitative methodology and analyses semi-structured interviews with women entrepreneurs conducted in St Petersburg and in two towns in the Republic of Karelia during the period 2005–2006. The respondents represent small and medium-sized enterprises mainly in production, retail trade and services.

Use of complementary and alternative medicine in Europe: Health-related and sociodemographic determinants:

Aims: The aim of this research was to study health-related and sociodemographic determinants of the use of different complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) treatments in Europe and differences in CAM use in various European countries. Methods: The study was based on a design-based logistic regression analysis of the European Social Survey (ESS), Round 7. We distinguished four CAM modalities: manual therapies, alternative medicinal systems, traditional Asian medical systems and mind-body therapies. Results: In total, 25.9% of the general population had used CAM during the last 12 months. Typically, only one CAM treatment had been used, and it was used more often as complementary rather than alternative treatment. The use of CAM varied greatly by country, from 10% in Hungary to almost 40% in Germany. Compared to those in good health, the use of CAM was two to fourfold greater among those with health problems. The health profiles of users of different CAM modalities varied. For example, back or neck pain was associated with all types of CAM, whereas depression was associated only with the use of mind-body therapies. Individuals with difficult to diagnose health conditions were more inclined to utilize CAM, and CAM use was more common among women and those with a higher education. Lower income was associated with the use of mind-body therapies, whereas the other three CAM modalities were associated with higher income. Conclusions: Help-seeking differed according to the health problem, something that should be acknowledged by clinical professionals to ensure safe care. The findings also point towards possible socioeconomic inequalities in health service use.

The biopolitics of precarity and the self

This Special Issue explores the biopolitics of precarity and the self. In so doing, its aim is to critically examine the changing landscape of technologies of the self and techniques of domination in late capitalism. It brings Foucault’s work on biopolitics into conversation with recent feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, disability and queer scholarship on precarity. In a feminist tradition of thinking through relationality and ethics, this Special Issue engages with those moments when technologies of regulation, surveillance and normalization do not quite work. ‘The Biopolitics of Precarity and the Self’ analyzes recent debates on precarity and precariousness in relation to migration and labour, health and illness, and the formation of the self and collectivities. It identifies temporality and care of both the self and others as key dimensions of precarity and explores how biopolitical structures of neoliberal capitalism institutionalize precarity that exacerbates existing global and local inequalities. We therefore raise questions around what it means to live, endure, survive and make life and labour possible without doing harm to the self or others. In this sense, this Special Issue brings to the fore the temporalities, politics and ethics of what is not always recognized in biomedical practices, labour migrations, media representations, labour of the self and everyday agency.

‘The Bottom Line Is That the Problem Is You’: Aesthetic Labour, Postfeminism and Subjectivity in Russian Self-Help Literature

This chapter explores the ways in which women are called upon to work on and manage their body, personality and sexuality in bestselling Russian self-help literature targeting a female audience. We argue that the aesthetic labour promoted in this literature needs to be understood as intrinsically embedded in the cultural and economic context where it is performed. Growing job insecurity, widespread gender discrimination, insufficient social protection and decreasing employment quality characterise the everyday life of a great number of women in Russia (Adamson and Kispeter 2017; Kozina and Zhidkova 2006). At the same time, the rise of the service sector and the demand for ‘aestheticised’ forms of labour (Walker 2015) have been accompanied by a growing rhetoric concerning the importance of self-presentation and ‘image’ (Cohen 2013) and an increasing emphasis on beauty practices as a crucial part of successful femininity (Porteous 2013). As we show in this chapter, women are encouraged to invest time and energy in aesthetic labour in the hope that mastering ‘the art of femininity’ will allow them upward mobility in a context where channels for mobility are increasingly constrained. We suggest that aesthetic labour is mobilised as a form of tactical agency (de Certeau 1984) to combat social and economic precarity. Through unpacking the elements of this labour we also suggest that this aesthetic makeover entails a profound transformation of subjectivity.

Decolonizing knowledge: neoliberalism beyond the three worlds

ABSTRACT This article argues that critiques of neoliberalism tend to rely on and reproduce the coloniality of knowledge. It analyzes how recent academic scholarship has mobilized the notion of neoliberalism to make sense of postsocialist transformations and identifies in it an epistemological meta-geography that reproduces the three-worlds scheme, a specific Cold War era articulation of the colonial matrix of power. The article traces various ways in which this meta-geography has structured academic debates on postsocialist neoliberalism. It emphasizes the importance of moving beyond the spatial and temporal infrastructure of the three worlds, and identifies a set of epistemological alternatives that would enable decentering this infrastructure. In conclusion, the paper argues that although postsocialism has received relatively little attention in attempts to decolonize knowledge, it has potential to serve as a critical form of thought in destabilizing Eurocentric assumptions in theorizing neoliberalism and opening up spaces for imagining the world differently.

The making of civil society in Russia: A Bourdieuan approach:

This article addresses the logic of the civic field in Russia as it unfolded during the 1990s and early 2000s. It engages with Bourdieu’s theory of practice to explain how and why this field came to be symbolically associated with a particular notion of femininity, and how and why educated women came to occupy a particularly seminal position in it. By drawing on extensive fieldwork on civic activism and a rich body of secondary literature the article unpacks the complex interplay between symbolic and material practices that gave shape to this specific classed and gendered logic.

‘We can’t live without beliefs’: Self and society in therapeutic engagements

Therapeutic technologies of happiness, emotional wellbeing and self-improvement are a highly influential cultural phenomenon and a rapidly growing business worldwide; yet little is known of the motivations for engaging with these technologies. This article addresses this gap by investigating how therapeutic engagements are experienced and what participants hope to gain from them. Therapeutic technologies are conceived as psychologically informed regimes of knowledge and practice which aim to transform one’s relationship to oneself and shape the ways in which one makes sense of and acts upon oneself and the social world. Drawing on a set of interviews with consumers of therapeutic technologies in Russia, the article identifies three key motivations for engaging with such technologies: searching for new blueprints for ethical work on the self after a profound transformation of the ideological field; coming to terms with new mechanisms of inequality, particularly in the field of labour; and mobilizing therapeutic technologies as a response to inadequacies in the field of health. By unpacking these motivations and subjective experiences of therapeutic engagements, the article seeks to shed light on the growing popularity of therapeutic technologies under contemporary capitalism.