Misogyny, solidarity and postfeminism on social media: The work of being Diana Shurygina, survivor-celebrity

Abstract

In a disclosure on Russian talk television in January 2017, 16-year-old Diana Shurygina shared with a national audience the traumatic details of her rape by Sergei Semenov. Using Shurygina’s performances on television and her subsequent participation on social media as a case study, this article analyses the emergence of empathic publics and the construction of celebrity at the intersection of digital media, popular misogyny and postfeminism in Russia. By setting up a vlog, support groups, fan and personal pages on VKontakte (a popular Russian social networking site), Shurygina is able to counter vicious pillorizing by creating a network of empathy and support. The celebrity that Shurygina sculpts in these spaces, however, is postfeminist in its emphasis on individual choice and self-esteem as strategies to overcome all societal ills, in its celebration of hyperfemininity and in its eschewal of radical politics. This article thus considers how digital platforms shape voice, public affect and solidarity on digital platforms but also how complicit that emergent voice is in the neoliberal ‘retraditionalisation’ of gender roles in post-Soviet Russia.