ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the discursive complexities of Russian micro-celebrity feminism developing at the intersection of Russia’s conservative authoritarianism and platform-driven popular media culture. It detects what discourses of feminism are possible and determines the key issues and upcoming topics of feminist transformation. The analysis focuses on Tat’iana Mingalimova’s YouTube channel ‘Tender editor’ (Nezhnyi redaktor), which was one of the last landmark projects of mediated feminism before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. One of the most striking features of Mingalimova’s channel is that it engaged with a network of feminist influencers and micro-celebrities who are now visibly taking part in anti-war resistance. The chapter first identifies the key discursive strategies that the younger generation of journalists – with Mingalimova at the forefront – have honed to promote feminism as a useful value system, while avoiding appearing hostile to the state’s conservative rhetoric. Then, it pinpoints the shortcomings of these strategies, which relate to the counterproductive nature of the hyper-emphasised use of postfeminist and neoliberal frameworks to underline their disengagement from political feminist activism. This chapter highlights the processes of the discursive hybridisation of state-conservative, liberal, and radical feminist discourses, which is key to understanding the dynamic between online-driven media culture and Russian feminism.
