Twenty-First-Century Feminisms under Repression: Gender Regime Change and the Women’s Crisis Center Movement in Russia

Entrepreneurial Women and the Business of Self-Development in Global Russia

“…Nor was Russia’s political climate conducive to establishing publicly visible, formalized organizations, as Janet Elise Johnson’s article in this cluster illustrates (Johnson 2013). As part of my effort to recruit informants in 2007, I made numerous attempts to phone organizations of local businesswomen that I had found on the Internet and to stop by the addresses they listed.…”

National Pride and Individual-Choice Attitudes in Ten Post-Soviet Countries

“…Гендерный вопрос на постсоветском пространстве в последние десятилетия часто характеризуется такими терминами, как «консервативный поворот», «возврат к семейным ценностям» или «матернализм» . В постсоветском пространстве его версии варьируются от национального возрождения в Центральной Азии, где ключевым элементом идеологии стала религия , до усиления маскулинности в России и Белоруссии (Johnson, Saarinen 2013). Все постсоветские государства, за исключением стран Балтии, демонстрируют меньший уровень гендерного равноправия, чем другие общества с сопоставимыми уровнями благосостояния и образования .…”

Women's human rights in Russia: outmoded battlegrounds, or new sites of contentious politics?

“…There has been significant progress in Russia during the post-Soviet period in terms of raising awareness of violence against women and in the development of a crisis centre network for female victims of domestic violence. However, as Johnson and Saarinen (2013) point out, there are significant cultural, material, and legal barriers facing women attempting to escape intimate partner violence.…”

“…This is most clearly illustrated in the development of crisis centres for domestic violence during the 1990s (cf. Johnson and Saarinen 2013). However, Temkina and Zravomyslova (2014) argue that a noticeable shift in state responses to feminist and women's human rights activism occurred in the 2000s that coincided with Putin's concerns over state sovereignty and the need to form a new national identity and cohesion.…”

“…This has most visibly damaged women's human rights in relation to reproductive rights as public discourse shifts to a focus on the provision of care in pregnancy and support for maternity leave (as well as incentives for giving birth), at the expense of programmes that facilitate women's reproductive choice and bodily autonomy (Erofeeva 2013;Rivkin-Fish 2013). Thus, feminist work exploring women's experiences of structural gender discrimination and questions of choice occurring within women's organisations during the 1990s has been subverted and depoliticised to legitimise pro-natalist politics aimed at supporting women in their reproductive capacity (Johnson and Saarinen 2013;Rivkin-Fish 2013). This coincides with a renewed negative stereotyping of feminism, which is now viewed not only as irrelevant, but increasingly as posing a threat to the family and as a result, destabilising the nation (Kostritsky 2012).…”