Sexuality, Citizenship and Belonging

Trans-National and Intersectional Perspectives

Francesca Stella, Yvette Taylor, Tracey Reynolds, Antoine Rogers, Francesca Stella, Yvette Taylor, Tracey Reynolds, Antoine Rogers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317618522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Part I

Sexual Nationalisms and the Boundaries of Sexual Citizenship

1 Sexual Citizenship, Nationalism and Biopolitics in Putin’s Russia

Francesca Stella and Nadya Nartova

Introduction

Since the mid-2000s, sexual and reproductive rights have become increasingly politicised in Russian society (Zdravomyslova 2009; Rivkin-Fisch 2006, 2013; Stella 2007, 2013; Temikina 2013). This politicisation has occurred both from above, as a result of the introduction of new legislation and social policy restricting sexual and reproductive rights and from below, as laws and policies are debated and contested by activists and ordinary citizens. A substantial amount of international media coverage and academic analysis has focused on the introduction of the infamous ‘gay propaganda’ laws and discussed the ambiguous impact of global LGBT solidarities on the Russian domestic context (Stella 2013; Kondakov 2014; Wilkinson 2014). However, an exclusive focus on LGBT rights overlooks the fact that recent restrictions on sexual and reproductive rights affect other social groups (particularly women). This chapter explores the relationship between sexuality and nationalism in the Russian context. We consider how restrictions on citizens’ sexual and reproductive rights are justified in the name of the national interest and how family and demographic policies are deployed in the construction of ideals of nation and national belonging, which are both sexualised and gendered. We draw on Foucault’s concept of biopower as a technology of power specific to modern nation-states, which is concerned with the control of social and biological processes at the level of the population (Foucault 1978/1998, 1997/2004).

Our discussion of sexual nationalism in Russia is based on discourse analysis of official documents and media sources. Official documents comprise the text of new laws concerning sexual and reproductive rights introduced in 2011–2013, as well as official commentaries on the rationale and intended effects of the legislation. Media sources include articles and opinion pieces published in the Russian daily newspaper Rossiiskaia Gazeta (RG) from January 2011 until December 2013, a period marked by heated political debate on new legislation and policy concerning sexual and reproductive rights (notably restriction on access to abortion and the introduction of the ‘gay propaganda’ laws) and a heightened politicisation of sexuality in the public sphere. RG is the official mouthpiece of the Russian government. As well as articles and opinion pieces, RG publishes official statements and documents issued by the government and state bodies, including the text of newly approved federal laws and presidential decrees.¹ Relevant articles were retrieved through keyword searches on RG’s online archive.²

Sexuality, Biopolitics and the ‘National Interest’ in Russia

A substantial body of recently published work has explored the links between sexuality, normativity and nationalism (Puar 2007; Fassin 2010; Kulpa 2011; Farris 2012). Puar’s concept of homonationalism has been particularly influential in work focused on societies where non-heterosexual citizens, traditionally cast as outlaws and perverts, have been recently more fully included into the citizenry as worthy of legal protection from discrimination and violence. Puar and others have argued that this inclusion is selective and often reinforces new social divisions, as the new legitimisation of same-sex relations is often paralleled by the othering and demonisation of racialised ethnic communities, assumed to come from deeply homophobic cultures and to be unable to embrace sexual diversity and respect for LGBT rights as a newly shared national value (Puar 2007; Fassin 2010). Drawing explicitly on Puar’s work, Farris (2012) argues that in Western societies—increasingly dependent on a migrant workforce to perform domestic and care work—migrant women are portrayed as oppressed ‘victims of their own culture’, in need of being rescued. Amidst demands that migrants should integrate and adopt the national cultural values of the host society, gender equality is mobilised as a distinctive ‘national’ value by an odd coalition of (sometimes accidental) bedfellows, ranging from feminist movements, to neo-liberal government, to nationalist and overtly xenophobic parties. Internationally, gender and LGBT equality are increasingly upheld as a paradigmatic ‘European’ value by some states and supranational institutions such as the EU and have been instrumentally used to reinforce notions of a ‘progressive’ west and a ‘conservative’ east (Binnie 2004; Fassin 2010; Farris 2012).

Less attention, however, has been given in recent work to other articulations of sexuality and nationalism, which, unlike homonationalism or femonationalism, do not hinge on liberal attitudes towards sexual and reproductive rights as a defining feature of national identity but emphasise ‘traditional’ family values, gender roles and sexual norms. In this chapter, we seek to understand how discourses about the national interest, national identity and patriotism in contemporary Russia promote a specific brand of sexual conservativism as a shared value, as well as specific sexual and gender normativities which are constructed as ‘traditionally Russian’. As Billig (1995) argues, the pervasive yet taken for granted and hidden nature of everyday, ‘banal nationalism’ makes it a very powerful ideology. It should be pointed out, however, that soul-searching over national identity has been very prominent in the Russian Federation as a nationalising state, which emerged in 1991 from the breakup of the Soviet Union and the demise of state socialism. Indeed, as Gal and Kligman (2000) point out, debates on gender relations and sexuality have been central to the renegotiation of national identity across the postsocialist region more generally. It is common for analyses of Russian nationalism to focus on its most extreme manifestations (the ‘red-brown’ threat), or to brand Kremlin-backed patriotism as fascist. As Laruelle (2009) perceptively notes, however, nationalist rhetoric has become prominent across the political spectrum in contemporary Russia and is used by extremist movements, populist protest parties and mainstream political parties alike, albeit with different nuances and aims. Indeed, Laruelle (2009) argues that nationalism is the ideological matrix of United Russia, the current ruling party closely associated with three-time president Vladimir Putin. Ever since the late1990s, the ruling political elites have sought to appropriate the narrative of national unity and national interest in order to create order, build consensus and strengthen their dwindling legitimacy in a deeply divided society, fraught with gaping social inequalities and interethnic tensions, and United Russia has promoted itself as the party of national reconciliation. We understand nationalism as a strategy deployed to deal with symbolic conflicts of interests and to establish and naturalise a normative set of beliefs and values around sexuality, family and intimate life; through our analysis of legislation and government media sources, we focus on the hegemonic sexual nationalism of the political elites. It should be noted that political pluralism has been systematically eroded in Russia over the last 15 years,³ and in this context, politically hegemonic discourses about national values and sexual morality have a particularly strong normative force.

Concerns about national population decline and strategies to reverse this trend have featured prominently in Russian political discourse, significantly impacting on debates on sexual and reproductive rights. Since the mid-2000s, ‘national priority projects’ became prominent in the agenda of the ruling party and of expert think tanks such as the Institute of Contemporary Development (INSOR) (Laruelle 2009: 137–138).⁴ INSOR currently lists five national priorities, including health, education, housing, agriculture and demographic sustainability. Indeed, demographic sustainability has been considered a priority policy area by the Russian government since the mid-2000s. Deep anxieties about Russia’s demographic crisis and its impact on the nation’s future stemmed from the steep population decline experienced by the newly independent country as the population fell from 148.5 million in 1993 to 142 in 2007; very high mortality rates (particularly among working-age men) consistently exceeded falling birth rates and could not be offset by net migration (United Nations Development Programme Russia 2008).⁵ As Yuval-Davis (1997: 29) points out, in some forms of nationalist discourse, population is seen as a source of collective wealth and power, and the future of ‘nation’ is seen as dependent on its continuous growth. The discourse of ‘people as power’ is dominant in contemporary Russia, amidst concerns about the implications of Russia’s demographic crisis for the country’s economic development and international geopolitical standing (Snarskaia 2009). The problem of population as an object of political economy and state administration is, according to Foucault, central to modern forms of government:

[…] population comes to appear above all else as the ultimate end of government. In contrast to sovereignty, government has as its purpose not the act of government itself, but the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, and so on; and the means the government uses to attain these ends are themselves all, in some sense, immanent to the population; it is the population itself on which government will act either directly, through large-scale campaigns, or indirectly, through techniques that will make possible, without the full awareness of the people, the stimulation of birth rates, the directing of the flow of population into certain regions or activities, and so on.

(Foucault 1978/2001: 216–217)

Foucault’s notions of biopower and biopolitics are helpful in trying to unpack the relationship between power/knowledge, sexuality and the nation as an imagined community (Anderson 1983). Foucault defines biopower as the power over life exercised at the level of the (nation) state: with the onset of modernity, the realm of the biological and of the sexual, once the domain of religious morality in feudal societies, ‘came under state control’ (Foucault 1997/2004: 240). This reflects a more general process of rationalisation and centralisation, as the state became an instrument of national unification. Biopower is, according to Foucault, a technology of power specific to modern nation-states; whereas in feudal societies sovereign power translated into the king or queen’s right to make die or let live, biopower concerns social and biological processes at the level of the population, and its essence can be encapsulated in the right to make live or let die. A related concept used by Foucault is biopolitics, or a mode of governance that ‘deals with the population as a political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as a power’s problem’ (Foucault 1997/2004: 245). Biopolitics finds expression in ‘an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations’ (Foucault 1978/1998: 140) and is concerned with issues such as the birth rate, reproduction, the mortality rate, public hygiene, social medicine and the urban environment. Although Foucault was writing about biopolitics as a phenomenon and a mode of governance specific to Western modernity, we draw on some of his insights to reflect on how, in contemporary Russia, policies and legislation restricting sexual and reproductive rights are justified in the name of national values and of the national interest, thereby naturalising normative discourses about sexual morality, family and intimate life. Indeed, population growth and the well-being of the nation are explicitly linked to fertility and family values in two white papers [Russian: Kontseptsii, literally ‘Concepts’] issued by the Russian government, the Concept on the Demographic Policy of the Russian Federation until 2025 (CDP 2007) and the Concept on State Family Policy (CFP 2013). The two white papers set out government policy priorities and preferences, which are reflected in new policies and legislation in the areas of reproductive health and family policy. Two of the six key aims of CDP concerned support for families and for ‘traditional’ family values: the growth of the birth rate on account of the birth of a second child or subsequent children in families, and the strengthening of the family as an institution (CDP 2007). The notion that family policies are key to the success of demographic policies and that both hinge on the preservation of ‘traditional’ family values is articulated even more explicitly in the Concept on Family Policy (CFP 2013), which explicitly references CDP and defines the family as ‘the foundation of Russian society’.

Among family values worthy of state protection, CFP explicitly mentions marriage, understood ‘solely as the union between a man and a woman […] and undertaken by the spouses with the aim of perpetuating their kin, birth and joint upbringing of children’ (CFP 2013), although Russian law does not explicitly define ‘marriage’ or ‘family’ as the union between two differently gendered heterosexual individuals (Gorbachev 2014: 91). The case made in CFP for traditional family values is both pragmatic and ideological. Pragmatically, heterosexual nuclear families are presented as both more fertile and as a better environment for children’s upbringing than other types of households. CFP notes that divorce and birth outside of wedlock are very common in Russia and estimates that one out of every third child is born into a single-parent family. However the document emphasises that birth rates among married women are higher and that children from single-parent families lack a model of ‘harmonious relations between a man and a woman on which they can orient themselves in future’ (CFP 2013). Ideologically, CFP states that ‘for almost a thousand years’, a family with many children and with different generations living under the same roof has been a part of Russia’s traditions; however, the ‘social engineering’ that followed the 1917 Russian Revolution dealt a blow to Russia’s traditional family values by giving legal recognition to de facto relationships and by legalising abortion. CFP emphasises the biological and symbolic continuity between kin and nation and explicitly advocates a return to spiritual and family values grounded in Russia’s prerevolutionary past:

Russian Orthodoxy strengthens the spiritual maintenance of kin and family. The family is not only the communion of two spouses, parents and children, but also a spiritual unit, a ‘little church’. This approach to the institution of the family allows us to emphasise not the private side of family problems, but rather to see family in the context of the society out of which it grows.

(CFP 2013)

The reference to Russian Orthodoxy reflects its growing influence in Russian political and social life and its symbolic use as a marker of national identity by the political elites. Indeed, prominent politicians such as Elena Mizulina, head of the Committee on Family, Women and Children and main author of CFP; Dmitrii Medvedev, former president and current prime minister of the Russian Federation; and Vitalii Milonov, the author of the 2012 ‘gay propaganda law’ for the city of Saint Petersburg have publicly declared their orthodox faith and advocated a greater role for religious values in Russian society.

In the reminder of the article, we explore how moral discourses about sexual and reproductive behaviour are legitimised in the name of the nation and naturalised through references to the biologising ideas of the nation as an extension of blood-based kinship (Anderson 1983; Rivkin-Fish 2006). We analyse legislation restricting sexual and reproductive rights and coverage of related issues in the government newspaper Rossiiskaia Gazeta. We aim to tease out how the naturalisation of values rooted in an imagined national tradition produces new normativities which are deeply gendered...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Sexual Nationalisms and the Boundaries of Sexual Citizenship
• Part II Racialised Subjects and Feminist/Queer Solidarities
• Part III Sexuality, Religion and Belonging
• Contributors
• Index