In contemporary Russia, online discourses on gender reflect the complex legacies of the Soviet and post-Soviet attitudes and approaches to masculinity and femininity. The current discourses on gender affect its digital construction. Mirroring the gendered discourses on masculine and feminine roles and patterns of behavior, digital media spaces impose similar restrictions and expectations on female users as those experienced by women in their offline activities. This chapter offers an analysis of how the World Wide Web and digital technologies influence gender identity politics in contemporary Russian society. We look at the ways Russians construct gender online, how their practices become means of resistance and activism, and how they adapt and shape digital technologies to perform their gender identities and communicate with the State in the situation of increasing surveillance and control of material and cyberspaces.
Purpose
The current paper is devoted to the analysis of the mediation of non-heteronormative masculinities within discourses on intimate partner violence (IPV) and domestic violence and abuse (DVA) in contemporary Russian media.
Methods
The article presents a discourse analysis of five samples of media texts devoted to IPV and/or DVA among LGBTQ people. The media texts were sampled through a keyword search completed on the websites of two openly pro-LGBTQ media outlets (news and entertainment portals Meduza and Takie Dela) and two media outlets catered for predominantly LGBTQ audiences (the news and entertainment portal Parni PLUS and the website of the NGO SPID-Tsentr).
Results
The interpretative qualitative analysis of the sampled texts demonstrated that the IPV/DVA survivors’ confessional narratives are framed within wider discourses on non-heteronormative masculinities, which are represented both as transgressing concepts of hegemonic masculinity and as challenging stereotypes about non-heteronormative masculinities.
Conclusions
The outcome of the analysis presented in the paper is that there is evidence of the emergence of new media discourses on IPV and DVA among LGBTQ communities. Drawing on feminist discourses on IPV and DVA in heterosexual relationships and using media strategies of LGBTQ coming-out confessional narratives, the sampled media data reveals an ongoing search for a new language of discussing the relatively new societal problem. Further research into mediation of non-heteronormative male survivors of IPV and DVA promises insightful findings concerning the evolution of discourses on non-heteronormative masculinities in contemporary Russian media.
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