The paper analyzes the opposition and adaptation of Russian patients, independent perinatal specialists, and professional human rights activists to normative regulation of obstetric care, medical authorities, and the practices of the Russian maternity hospital. During my ethnographic research, I have collected personal stories about the clashes of women in labor and their assistants (primarily doulas) with the medical system, stories of collective and individual appeals to authorities, and protest flash mobs. The article presents the history of the transformation of the Russian system of obstetrics and the development of grassroots movements by midwives and doulas. It outlines the features of human rights and perinatal protest discourses and identifies the tactics of legal and vernacular resistance and non-resistance to medical authorities encountered during fieldwork.
This research proposes sociological, linguistic, folklore (psychoanalytic and structuralsemiotic) approaches to the analysis of the contemporary anecdote about adultery. Academic interpretations of satirical texts are quite different, but they allow us to explain the popularity and cultural reproduction of anecdotes about married life, gender stereotypes, the reasons for the women demonizing and men derision, as well as the modern specifics of a joke and recreation of its laughing effect. However, the viability of such stories about female infidelity is connected not only with the communicative situation. The article also analyzes the unified structure of the plot, developing around a trick, and the connection between medieval fabulous stories about “women’s tricks” and modern jokes with a typical beginning “the husband returns from a business trip”. Such anecdotes often use the same plots with a trick, motifs and formulaic beginning, as well as anecdotal stories about women’s cheating. In a contemporary joke, there is no explicitly pronounced didactics and morals, but it has some similarities with fabulous stories – exposure of its fictional status, formulaic beginning, plotting caused by tricks and savvy of characters, comic denouement and laughing effect.
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