ABSTRACT
A visiting group of Finnish feminists have presented their activist project to an audience of about 60 in St Petersburg. After the presentation, a woman in her forties stands up to ask, in Russian, how the group could admit men to feminism, ‘since it is supposed to function as a shelter for women’. Feminists were among the first political movements to draw from the therapeutic discourse, in the 20th century. As therapy did, feminism offered a cultural resource that 'invited self-examination, the acknowledgment of past injuries, and the revelation of those injuries to others in order to make sense of oneself'. The feminist activists interviewed for this study connect their feminist politicisation with increasingly conservative state politics conducted by the Russian government in tandem with the Russian Orthodox Church. The launch of the conservative politics can be traced back to around 2005, when the government started to impose increasing regulation of sexual and reproductive rights.
