Deadline: September 5, 2019
Call For Papers:
10th World Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies (ICCEES), “Bridging National and Global Perspectives”
Gender and Digital Subjectivities in Russia
From LGBTQ discussion groups to self-help programs aimed at cultivating femininity, from anti-abortion activism to anti-rape consciousness raising, the Russian-language internet hosts multiple fora for practicing and reflecting on gender. Meanwhile, the state’s appeals to “traditional values” cast gender as a matter of national security: an aspect of Russian cultural sovereignty under attack from the West. Resulting policies restrict citizens to narrowly defined gender norms and victimize them for diverging. This situation has justifiably drawn scholarly attention to Russian “family values,” as well as to grassroots feminist and LGBTQ activism in the country. In addition to these strongly politicized discourses, the internet enables gender-related practices that shape available forms of subjectivization: the patterns of being, acting and becoming online. In Russia, as elsewhere around the world, people use the internet to figure out what it means to be a social, and therefore gendered, subject. The medium offers spaces for projects of discursive production, community building and self-construction around the issue of gender. These projects can be troubled or uniform, stagnant or changing, varied in their intensity and functions, and implicated in global processes in unexpected ways.The proposed panel will host a conversation about gender expressions and experimentations that occur within, alongside or beyond large-scale ideological battles. To that end, we invite papers in different disciplines that attend to contemporary practices of the gendered self on the Russian internet.
Please submit a 200 word abstract of your paper (including name, home or work address, phone number, email), whether you will need AV equipment, and a 1-page CV by September 5, 2019.
Panel Coordinators:
Jill Martiniuk, University of South Florida: jmmartiniuk@usf.edu
Irina Sadovina, University of Tartu: irina.sadovina@ut.ee