Article
“It’s No Longer Taboo, is It?” Stories of Intimate Citizenship of People with Disabilities in Today’s Russian Public Sphere
This article examines how disability and sexuality are represented in today’s Russian media, and how disabled people navigate these understandings. Drawing on online storytelling and frst person stories about sexuality told by disabled people in the public sphere, the article provides a qualitative account of people with disabilities, journalists and civil rights advocates, analyzing how contemporary Russians with disabilities narrate their own lives in public forums. The focus of their stories, as well as the accounts of eyewitnesses, volunteers in the institutions, is on the constraints and limits of sexuality and intimacy spheres imposed by the professionals, families and wider society. This article also interprets the narratives behind disabled people’s sexuality circulating in contemporary Russia through digital networks, in combination with qualitative data from primary sources: disability activists and two journalists with and without disability in Moscow. It is argued that the telling of these stories in a public forum is a political act. In personal stories about sexual, bodily experiences told in the interviews or autobiographical texts, self-presentations and discussions in social networks, the voices of people are heard, permitting emancipation from previous categories. However, disability always remains with them, playing an important role in social lives of these people and in their sexual experiences and identities, becoming the cornerstone of the personal and collective re-defning of themselves. Using ideas of “visibility politics” (Arendt), queer/crip kinship and intimate citizenship (Plummer), the authors demonstrate how someone might choose to speak publicly about a topic and how this understanding develops cultural understandings of contemporary Russia.
This book brings together a diverse range of critical interventions in sexuality and gender studies, and seeks to encourage new ways of thinking about the connections and tensions between sexual politics, citizenship and belonging. The book is organized around three interlinked thematic areas, focusing on sexual citizenship, nationalism and international borders (Part 1); sexuality and "race" (Part 2); and sexuality and religion (Part 3). In revisiting notions of sexual citizenship and belonging, contributors engage with topical debates about "sexual nationalism," or the construction of western/European nations as exceptional in terms of attitudes to sexual and gender equality vis-à-vis an uncivilized, racialized "Other."
The collection explores macro-level perspectives by attending to the geopolitical and socio-legal structures within which competing claims to citizenship and belonging are played out; at the same time, micro-level perspectives are utilized to explore the interplay between sexuality and "race," nation, ethnicity and religious identities. Geographically, the collection has a prevalently European focus, yet contributions explore a range of trans-national spatial dimensions that exceed the boundaries of "Europe" and of European nation-states.
Youth are, by definition, the future. This book brings initial analyses to bear on youth in the five BRICS countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which are home to nearly half of the world's youth. Very little is known about these youth outside of their own countries since the mainstream views on "youth" and "youth culture" are derived from the available literature on youth in the industrialized West, which is home to a small part of the world's youth. This book aims to help fill in this gap.
The handbook examines the state of youth, their past, present and permits the development of insights about future. The BRICS countries have all engaged in development processes and some remarkable improvements in young people's lives over recent decades are documented. However, the chapters also show that these gains can be undermined by instabilities, poor decisions and external factors in those countries. Periods of economic growth, political progress, cultural opening up and subsequent reversals rearticulate differently in each society. The future of youth is sharply impacted by recent transformations of economic, political and social realities. As new opportunities emerge and the influence of tradition on youth's lifestyles weakens and as their norms and values change, the youth enter into conflict with dominant expectations and power structures.
The topics covered in the book include politics, education, health, employment, leisure, Internet, identities, inequalities and demographics. The chapters provide original insights into the development of the BRICS countries, and place the varied mechanisms of youth development in context. This handbook serves as a reference to those who are interested in having a better understanding of today's youth. Readers will become acquainted with many issues that are faced today by young people and understand that through fertile dialogues and cooperation, youth can play a role in shaping the future of the world.
Formation of democratic societies of the Western type presupposes appearance on the historical scene of a new strong actor - the bourgeois class: "No bourgeoisie, no democracy" (Barrington Moore). The articulation and defense of vital interests of that class creates a new social space - "the bourgeois public sphere" which helps to make up "counterbalance" to absolutism of a corporate state - a civil society, the core of which is composed by public opinion. In the confrontation between the authorities and society one of the most important roles is played by the press that provides free debate and discussion of generally valid problems, especially economic and political. The recognition of the mass media role was stamped in its characterization in XIII century as "the fourth power". Technological development of the media incredibly expanded its functions, turning journalists into creating informational analogue of reality, saturating daily life with new meanings. Methods of the representation of reality, the specific nature of political influence of journalists - key members of the reflexive elites (Helmut Shelski), are the themes of this article.
Публичная сфера, журналистика, четвертая власть, порядки знания, Повседневность, научное и повседневное знание, экспертиза, Репрезентация, public sphere, journalism, fourth estate, orders of knowledge, Everyday life, scientific and everyday knowledge, Expertise, representation
The author explores the correspondence between the system of political views and values and the system of stylistic means used in public communication. On a material of public images of the Russian politicians this article suggests possible methods of assessment of compliance between the chosen rhetoric and declared political tasks and goals.
The paper deals with the creative works of an outstanding German philosopher-anthropologist Helmut Plessner. He addresses to an existential structure of individuality as to a social existence and considers it as the carrier of roles. He proves that social identification is based on the idea of the person possessing a social role, but not defined by it. Plessner starts with the idea of a duality of the role relation in which the performer identifies himself. Such identification appears as the only condition in the basic relation of a social role and a human nature. On this basis in the structure of duality of the human existence, a role connecting the carrier and its figure, Plessner finds a constant of sociality. Plessner addresses to an ontologic structure of the person, an eccentric pozitionality, within social subject and defines it as “duality structure in which the carrier of a role and a figure of a role are connected”. Plessner believes that what we find exactly in this structure is "a constant" which is the condition of “human generalization”, and considers it in a quality of “the unique constant in the basic relation of a social role and a human nature”.
According to the given article the main basis of the present political regime’s legitimacy in Russia seems to be the absence of institutionalized citizen’s communication across differences. In the absence of effective political competition and social critically media there is not public communication. This, in turn, does not generate the collective form of political change’s internalization. A consequence is the private character of political preference formation which rationality is aimed not at improvement of own political knowledge, but on improvement of own material welfare. For this reason the public sphere institutions/political communication institutions are devaluated as a basis of preference formation in the opinion of most citizens. The exclusion of the democratic institutions from possible ways to improve one’s personal situation does not conflict with interventions of the authoritarianism.
Several approaches to the concept of fatherhood present in Western sociological tradition are analyzed and compared: biological determinism, social constructivism and biosocial theory. The problematics of fatherhood and men’s parental practices is marginalized in modern Russian social research devoted to family and this fact makes the traditional inequality in family relations, when the father’s role is considered secondary compared to that of mother, even stronger. However, in Western critical men’s studies several stages can be outlined: the development of “sex roles” paradigm (biological determinism), the emergence of the hegemonic masculinity concept, inter-disciplinary stage (biosocial theory). According to the approach of biological determinism, the role of a father is that of the patriarch, he continues the family line and serves as a model for his ascendants. Social constructivism looks into man’s functions in the family from the point of view of masculine pressure and establishing hegemony over a woman and children. Biosocial theory aims to unite the biological determinacy of fatherhood with social, cultural and personal context. It is shown that these approaches are directly connected with the level of the society development, marriage and family perceptions, the level of egality of gender order.