New Outcast Femininities, Post-Soviet Inequality and Work in Russian Cinema of the 1990s-2010s

This paper will mount the challenge to discover the landscape of cinematic images, which construct the specific web of femininities, re-invented in Putin’s post-socialist Russia. I am precisely interested in how the certain cinematically expressed cultural constructions of working women became considered as the ‘proper’/’appropriate’, while at the same time others were defined against them and considered clashing counter-constructions or “outcast” ones. The “outcast” or “subcultural” or “oppositional” femininities are in the limelight. What is/are the logic/s behind the power relations, which map out the web of femininities? The time period in question is the 1990s-2010s. It is characterised by the endless ruptures in all the fields of the socio-cultural reality in Russia, including its gender system, and it signifies the alarming environment of tension and insecurity for women. The historical moment has dictated the re-defined binary of “propitiate” and “inappropriate” femininities and equally masculinities. They are seen to correlate with specific qualities and patterns of behaviour, which are distinguished from the viewpoint of the ultra-patriarchal hegemonic social thinking at the defined historical moment in Russia. Standing on the position that cinema is the influential social technology, I will look at the cinematically expressed femininities as the constructed product of this technology. Cinema co-works with other social technologies, functioning at the given society at the given time period, with the digital space as such as well. They are “institutional discourses, epistemologies, and critical practices”, where the latter imply “not only academic criticism, but more broadly social and cultural practices” (de Lauretis, 1987)