Contesting Feminism and Media Culture in Contemporary Russia From Celebrities to Anti-war Activists

Acknowledgements; Note on translation and transliteration; Chapter 1: Celebrity feminism in Russia: media, power, and resistance (an introduction); Chapter 2: Popularisation of feminism through hashtag campaigns 2016–2020; Chapter 3: High-profile celebrity Ksenia Sobchak’s ‘illusive’ appropriation of feminism; Chapter 4: YouTuber Tatiana Mingalomova and feminist influencer culture; Chapter 5: Who can be a ‘Russian woman’? Manizha as an intersectional feminist celebrity; Chapter 6: Wonderzine: neoliberal feminist media and its confluence with Russian center-periphery dynamic; Chapter 7: Feminist Anti-War Resistance: feminist media ecology and grassroots activism; Chapter 8: FAR mediated activism: contradictions between media logic and feminist collective action; Chapter 9: Conclusions: conceptualising feminist media ecology; Index.

Biography

Saara Ratilainen is a University Lecturer in Russian Language and Culture at Tampere University, Finland. She is the PI of the Research Council of Finland funded project Mediated Feminism(s) in Contemporary Russia (FEMCORUS 2021–2025). Her field of expertise covers Russian-language media and cultural studies, especially digital networks, gender, and feminist studies. She has published numerous articles and chapters for journals and collective volumes.

Galina Miazhevich is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Journalism, Media, and Culture at Cardiff University, UK. Galina completed a 2-year Arts and Humanities Rsearch Council-funded project on media representation of non-heteronormative sexualities in Russia (2018–2020). Galina has an extensive publication record in the field of media, culture, and area studies.

Daniil Zhaivoronok is a doctoral student at Tampere University, Finland, and a researcher in the project Mediated feminism(s) in Contemporary Russia (FEMCORUS, 2021–2025). His academic interests centre on the interactions between feminist politics and the hybrid media environment in Russia.

Eeva Kuikka is a postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University, Finland, specialising in indigenous cultures and non-Russian ethnicities in the Russian Federation from a post-colonial point of view. Dr. Kuikka’s doctoral research addressed human-animal relations in indigenous literatures of the Soviet North. A book based on her doctoral dissertation is forthcoming.

"An extremely timely and brilliant investigation into the complexities, contradictions, and possibilities of mediated feminism in an increasingly authoritarian (and now war-time) contemporary Russia.  A must read for feminist and media scholars, everywhere."
- Catherine Rottenberg, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.

"This timely volume grapples with the baffling paradoxes of Russia’s neoliberal-authoritarian cultural terrain, affording insights into the conditions that produced the war, as well as resistance to it. It brings a novel angle to the topic of Russian feminisms, contributing fresh insights and analytic tools. The mediated feminisms approach widens the lens and affords a very different picture of feminism’s pre-war status -and great food for thought for theorizing what came next. The feminist media ecology conception contributes to our thinking about the hybrid media sphere and political agency within it. The book offers a fascinating window into the dynamics of political agency in Russia’s pre-war hybrid media environment, showing persuasively that neoliberal feminism paradoxically incubated/contributed to the development of anti-war activism. Engagingly written and analytically sophisticated, the volume is a must read for scholars of social movements, morphing activist forms and the intersection of digitization and authoritarianism globally."
- Julie Hemment, Professor of Anthropology at University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA