This study examines the social, political, and fantasmatic logics involved in the production of contemporary discourses about Scandinavia as a symbolic site and imagined place of sexual and moral decay and as a gender dysphoric dystopia by actors in the global anti-gender movement. Empirically, we draw on a rich digital archive of multi-modal media texts from an ongoing research project on anti-gender movements in Russia and Germany – two countries which provide particularly poignant examples of sites in which this mode of anti-gender propaganda is currently on the rise. In the analysis, we explore the discursive workings of a particularly prominent node in the material – that of the vulnerable child – and show how this figure is construed and instrumentalised to add urgency and fuel outrage among domestic audiences in Russia and Germany.

This article examines the role of national screen agencies in the realisation of an equitable screen sector. Publicly funded screen agencies like Ffilm Cymru Wales, Screen Ireland, Det Danske Filminstitut (Danish Film Institute) and Hrvatski Audiovizualni Centar (Croatian Audiovisual Centre) directly shape the sector, both on screen and behind the camera. Using interviews with senior decision-makers within several European screen agencies, we critically analyse the logics and practices of these cultural intermediaries in relation to gender equality. We chart how the issue is mediated by screen agencies, including their (in)actions. Alongside formal measures, we observe some staff working in quotidian ways to deliver change through positively leveraging their relationships with the sector. Our research highlights that while most of sampled agencies advocate for gender equality, few recognise ethnicity, socioeconomics, disability or age in their larger policy frameworks, and therefore, questions of intersectionality are rarely addressed formally in institutional approaches. We conclude that for screen agencies to become effective intermediaries for equality, a paradigmatic shift in their logics and working practices would be required. However, this would only represent a first step as wider policy and industrial reform is necessary to redress the exclusionary frames of the screen sector.

Konsträren Andjeas Ejiksson samtalar med forskaren Maria Brock omvem som entligen bryr sig om barnen och vad som ses som barnets intresse, frän 1960-talet till dagens kulturkrig. Här ställs ocksa fragan om vad den sovjetiska barnteve-karaktären Tjeburasjka, som på svenska fick heta Drutten, har för plats i ett samtida samhälle.

This article examines the post-Soviet transformations of Russian popular music culture (Estrada), arguing that its aesthetics can be analysed from the perspective of camp, by looking at two cult music performers bridging the Soviet and post-Soviet realm - Valery Leontiev and Filipp Kirkorov. The analysis is grounded in a close reading of the artists' career trajectories, selected videos and - to a lesser extent - textual analysis of their lyrics and public statements. The article argues that their performative personas are rooted in a particular version of camp with differing modalities of subversiveness - each responding both to their respective cultural and political climates, audience expectations, and also in accordance with their individual embodiments of (post)-Soviet camp. While Leontiev demonstrates a more earnest commitment to high drama, Kirkorov continues his ironic experimentation with transgression, ambiguity and excess, thereby participating in the queering of post-Soviet popular culture. The article concludes that their appropriation of camp is strategic, as it responds to the temporal, national and global trends such as global gay culture and neo-camp in Russia.

This article argues that child protection rhetoric rarely applies to all children and that it, in fact, often contains decisions over whose lives are worthy of protection, and whose are not. In Russia, “traditional (family) values” have effectively become state policy, the 2013 federal law “for the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values” being the most prominent example of this. The fixation of such “traditional values” discourses on protecting children from “early sexualization” by barring them from access to LGBTQ-inclusive education and care demonstrates that the child on whose behalf this protection is demanded is deemed to be straight, while further examples of child protection discourses also show that innocence is often viewed as the exlusive property of white, middle-class children. Responding to the recent escalation of Russia’s war on Ukraine, this text discusses how the trauma, displacement and death of children in Ukraine reveals the biopolitical core of traditional values discourses. 

I want to encourage academics to conceptualize our work as a series of social relationships. This involves envisioning a model that goes beyond the idea of academic “impact” as a series of mutually beneficial and, crucially, measurable transactions and towards a new definition of the term as the transformative effect of personal encounters. This is a good time to ask these questions: the role of scholarly work is changing and there is renewed interest in the meanings of impact beyond citation indices, but the pressure to publish is still growing and more temporary forms of employment and fragmented relationships with institutions remain a widespread reality. In the words of Mohira Suyarkulova: “How can we engage in a more responsible intellectual labour under the conditions of permanent crises and precarity?”

Examining the numerous meanings and symbolic incarnations of VladimirIlich Lenin after his death in 1924, this chapter examines how icons maybe used to articulate political positions, and how in processes of contest-ing and re-negotiating history, icons function in relation to collectiveremembrance. It will do so by examining artistic representations of Leninin film and art, as well as how the fall and destruction of icons does notstop them from re-emerging as spectral, haunting presences. It is arguedthat in order to study the icon as a material site of both projection andcollective fantasy, the complex functioning of the icon within a specifichistorical and political context needs to be considered, as well as the wayits manifestation transcends the spatial and the psychical.

Reports in April 2017 regarding a state-initiated wave of homophobic persecution in Chechnya attracted worldwide outrage. Numerous witnesses spoke of arrests, abuse, and murders of gay men in the republic. In response, a spokesman of Chechnya’s president, Ramzan Kadyrov, claimed that “you cannot … oppress those who simply do not exist.” In this article, with the antigay purge in Chechnya and in particular the denial of queer existence as their starting point, Brock and Edenborg examine more deeply processes of erasure and disclosure of queer populations in relation to state violence and projects of national belonging. They discuss (1) what the events in Chechnya tell us about visibility and invisibility as sites of queer liberation, in light of recent discussions in LGBT visibility politics; (2) what the episodes tell us about the epistemological value of queer visibility, given widespread media cynicism and disbelief in the authenticity of images as evidence; and (3) what role the (discursive and physical) elimination of queers plays in relation to spectacular performances of nationhood. Taken together, the authors’ findings contribute to a more multifaceted understanding of the workings of visibility and invisibility and their various, sometimes contradictory, functions in both political homophobia and queer liberation.