Vladimir Putin’s camp homophobia
RUSSIAN STYLE Performing gender, power, and Putinism
JULIE A. CASSIDAY 270pp. University of Wisconsin Press. $79.95.
IN 1999 Vladimir Putin came to power as a swaggering cop. His steely gaze promised an end to the separatist war in Chechnya and a corrective to the national embarrassment of Boris Yeltsin’s second term. In the late 2000s photos of the emerging dictator hunting, fishing and tranquilizing tigers established him as the world’s most topless head of state. When Putin surged back to power after protests in 2011–12, the performance of traditional gender values became central to an increasingly oppressive regime. Pro-natalist initiatives and a law against so-called “gay propaganda” put Russia at the vanguard of global homophobia. Even as the country’s energies have now shifted towards misguided military adventurism, gender has remained a national obsession. Julie A. Cassiday’s incisive new book, Russian Style: Performing gender, power, and Putinism, asks why.
For Cassiday style is serious business, in part due to a performative shift that reaches far beyond Russia’s borders. Whereas the key factor in determining national identity used to be birthplace, she argues, in recent decades this has given way to “embodied practices” such as the language we speak, the clothes we wear, the traditions we follow and “with whom we have sex and how”. In post-Soviet Russia, too, the question of how to perform citizenship has become at least as important as what such citizenship might mean. Style has crowded out substance. Rather than construct a coherent political platform, early Putinism showed a marked preference for “glossy surfaces and stylistic flair that could effectively block ideological content”. But as the 2011–12 protests and other crises of legitimacy challenged the state’s stylistic hegemony, performance became policy. Macho posturing morphed into legislative homophobia, codified misogyny and the “phallic weapons of war [now] bombarding Ukraine”.
What Cassiday proposes is nothing less than a new political and cultural theory that shows how a militaristic ideology is created through a participatory internet culture, winking irony and an emphasis on entertainment and performance. For these reasons Russian Style is an important book. But it’s also a lot of fun. Cassiday takes us behind Russia’s relentless campaign to win the Eurovision Song Contest (in the process undermining the competition’s pro-LGBTQ values from within) and describes the rise of bitchology (stervologiia), a genre of self-help books and training courses where the dark arts of post-feminism are taught to Russian women eager to land an oligarch. We get glimpses of the Russian Fifty Shades of Grey, learn about a drag remake of a Stalinist musical and watch as a beauty pageant unfolds in separatist Done
