Since his rise to power in 1999, Vladimir Putin has crafted a public persona whose appeal relies on a clearly constructed larger-than-life masculinity. Perceived by some as the return of charismatic leadership to post-Soviet Russia and by others as pure camp, Putin’s masculinity functions as the cornerstone of a gender order that paradoxically seeks to naturalize the binary opposition between male and female through artifice and exaggeration. This talk investigates the modes of gender performance that have become available due to Putin’s own performance of hypermasculinity and been propagated in Russia’s popular culture. Once we understand the relationship among the different modes of gender performativity circulating in the Russian media—from the seemingly universal charisma, camp, and kitsch, to Russia’s own stiob, poshlost’, glamur, and travesty — we can recognize the biopolitical stakes of Putinism’s preference for style over substance.
Julie Cassiday is the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts in the United States. At Williams, she teaches Russian language, literature, and culture in the Department of German and Russian, as well as courses in Comparative Literature and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research focuses on performance − in the broadest sense of this word − in Russian culture. She is author of the book The Enemy on Trial: Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen (published by Northern Illinois University Press), as well as articles on topics ranging from gender performance in early nineteenth-century Russian theater to Stalinist film, the Eurovision Song contest, and the so-called cult of personality surrounding Vladimir Putin. She is co-editor of a new volume of essays devoted to performance in modern Russian culture, which will be published by the University of Wisconsin Press later this year.
Photo: Vladimir Putin. Tyva.