ABSTRACT
Tatiana Riabova analyzes textual and visual representations of the idea of “clash of civilizations” in Russian, Western European, and American online media focusing on gendered textual and visual discourses about Russia-Western relations. Drawing on theories of masculinity and popular geopolitics, she shows how gendered perceptions of the “other” are reshaped and reinforced in the Russian-Western dynamics. With Russia increasingly perceived as a separate civilization of “traditional values,” the West becomes a subject to pejorative descriptions as “Gayropa” and more generally as a “degenerating civilization.” In the narrative this Russian discourse produces, European tolerance for multiculturalism and unstable gender categories leads to false notions of true masculinity (or femininity) and, as a result, to a lack of societal order. The West is discursively demasculinized, while Russia is remasculinized. This is apparent in the popular and positive perception of Vladimir Putin as a muzhik, a contemporary nationalist construction of imaginary masculinity. However, the hypermasculinist discourse of Putin’s Russia is ambiguous in that it represents Russia as both distinct from the West and as truly European. Meanwhile, liberal American representations of Russia render it as a “backward civilization” precisely through its embodiment of “traditional masculinity.”
