This article centres on two East German museums exclusively dedicatedto the storage and display of everyday items produced in the German DemocraticRepublic between 1949 and 1989, locating both in the context of similar ‘memorymuseums’ of East German history, as well as history museums more generally. Examining these sites, the text investigates the types of relationships established with theseartefacts of the past, analysing their function as mediators between the inner and outerworld, and between memory and history. Taking nostalgia theory and specificallyOstalgie as a starting point for the analysis, it reflects on how the museums serve ascontainers for a multitude of objects both fantasmatic and material. The aim is to injectnostalgia theory, especially in its focus on materiality, with more distinctly psychosocialideas and concepts. In order to understand whether there is a finality to the psychic andpolitical transitions that took place after 1989, nostalgia’s link to a utopian politics ofthe future, rather than to a contested past, is addressed throughout.

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.

When cynical distance and ironic posturing have become the prevalent means of relating to public life, political humour is no longer considered subversive. It has been argued that both in Russia and the United States, ideology has co-opted satire, meaning that citizens can consume outrage passively through various satirical media products, thereby displacing outrage and abstaining from more active forms of resistance. This articles explores the twenty-first century potential of irony and cynicism to disrupt and subvert through parody, be it in the form of political satire or ironic protest, examining how similar paradigms are expressed across different geographical contexts. 

While a ‘return of the repressed’ is commonly linked to neurotic symptoms, the title of this chapter reflects the argument that there can be a return of the repressed in and through discourse. The discussion is based on a reading of reactions to the performance and subsequent imprisonment of Russian feminist punk collective Pussy Riot in 2012. The strongly negative reactions to the group in Russia featured not only discursive reenactments of gendered fantasmatic violence; the language also frequently called to mind the linguistic repertoire of Stalinism. This – linguistic and other – violence was symptomatic of a collective unease with the ambiguity inherent in the multiple meanings of the group’s name and the nature of their performances, as they evoked a return to instability and chaos. It may seem self-evident that societal antagonisms are revealed by such ‘spontaneous’ linguistic outbursts, but it is worth paying attention to the language employed in order to understand which elements of the past are conjured by it, and why. When language is uprooted and retrieved from a previous historical context, it can retain a violent charge that comes back to haunt the speaking subject and its discourse. This chapter assumes a psychosocial perspective in order to reflect on the relationship between language and history, with the aim of finding a means of speaking of the social so as to understand the relationship between violent language and ‘unfinished history.’

This article represents a critical overview of strategies to examine subjectivity in discourse, highlighting a series of methodological approaches, which seek to manage the tension between discourse studies' focus on social and cultural structures, and psychoanalysis' interest in unconscious motivations. One aim is to trouble the supposed opposition between discourse analysis and the psychosocial approach and to regard the latter as a possible extension of insights established by the former. It is argued here that psychosocial readings in general, and Lacanian approaches more specifically, offer a cautious, nuanced way of introducing psychoanalytic ideas into the analysis of texts. The first part of this article offers examples of discourse analytic approaches, which have explicitly sought to incorporate psychoanalytic notions, followed by a discussion of Lacanian discourse analysis – a method shaped directly by this psychoanalytic school's concern with language. The article concludes with a series of methodological injunctions for conducting a psychosocial form of textual analysis.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Both nostalgia and melancholia have been portrayed as psychological inabilities orrefusals to mourn, coming to denote a common failure to having adapted tosituations of social and political change. Both concepts have been used to eithercondemn the conditions they diagnose, or, alternatively, to hail them for theiremancipatory potential. In this regard, both nostalgia and melancholia have beenused effectively, separately and alongside one another, as instruments for politicalcritique. However, with this mutual opposition to mourning, melancholia andnostalgia have also been used in ways that make them almost interchangeable. Inthe absence of a detailed and direct comparison of these two concepts, this articleexplores the differences and overlaps between melancholia and nostalgia, as well asthe different kinds of analyses of posttransition societies they enable. This isachieved through the juxtaposition of a particular regularity in post-apartheid SouthAfrican popular culture, Afrikaner self-parody, which is characterized as melancholic, with what has frequently been called Ostalgie, nostalgia for the formerGerman Democratic Republic.

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 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.