Imagining Russia

Kimberly A. Williams

Description

Co-winner of the 2009 SUNY Press Dissertation/First Book Prize in Women's and Gender Studies, Imagining Russia uses U.S.–Russian relations between the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 as a case study to examine the deployment of gendered, racialized, and heteronormative visual and narrative depictions of Russia and Russians in contemporary narratives of American nationalism and U.S. foreign policy. Through analyses of several key post-Soviet American popular and political texts, including the hit television series The West Wing, Washington D.C.'s International Spy Museum, and the legislative hearings of the Freedom Support Act and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, Williams calls attention to the production and operation of five types of "gendered Russian imaginaries" that were explicitly used to bolster support for and legitimize U.S. geopolitical unilateralism after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, demonstrating the ways that the masculinization of U.S. military, political, and financial power after 1991 paved the way for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Imagining Russia

Foundational Precepts
Implications and Interventions

1. The Geopolitical Traffic in Gendered Russian Imaginaries

Gendered Russian Nationalism
Gendered American Nationalism
Russia and Russians in a U.S. Context
U.S. Foreign Policy and the Triumphalist Mythscape

2. Freedom for Whom? Support for What?

Provisions and Objectives
Implementation
Capitalism as “Freedom”
Imaginaries at Work
Russia as Child/United States as Great, White Father
Russia as Student/United States as Tutor
Russia as Frontier/United States as Entrepreneurial Pioneer
Russia as Pathologically Ill Patient/United States as Doctor
Russia as Retrogressive Baba/United States as Responsible Superpower
Imperial Masculinity

3. Death and the Maiden

Conjuring the Ghost
Anastasia on Stage and Screen
A Reflection of U.S.-Russia Policy
Reckoning with the Ghost

4. Crime, Corruption, and Chaos

American Heroes
Russian Victims and Villains
With Impunity: The United States as Innocent Bystander
From Mother Russia to Miss Russia

5. “It’s a Cold War Mentality”

The West Wing and U.S. Political Culture
Gendered Discursive Configurations
Vassily Konanov as Boris Yeltsin: “Our Kind of Crazy”
Cold War Holdouts
Peter Chigorin as Vladimir Putin: Barlet’s Last Best Hope
Whose Cold-war Mentality?

6. Cultural Politics of Cold War

A Cold-war Museum
Atomic Secrets
The Rosenbergs as Discursive Phenomena
The Rosenbergs at the International Spy Museum
Origins of State-based Terror
Heterosexpionage
The Cold War as Cautionary Tale

Conclusion: Casualties of Cold War

Russia’s Geopolitical Resurgence
Competing Masculinities
Obama’s “Reset”

Appendix

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Gender studies
• International relations

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 15 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438439778
• Langue: English

Extrait

IMAGINING RUSSIA
Making Feminist Sense of American Nationalism in U.S.–Russian Relations
KIMBERLY A. WILLIAMS

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2012 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Kelli W. LeRoux Marketing by Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Williams, Kimberly A. (Kimberly Ann), 1975–
Imagining Russia : making feminist sense of American nationalism in U.S.-Russian relations / Kimberly A. Williams.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3975-4 (hbk. : alk. paper)
1. Feminist theory. 2. Nationalism—United States 3. Mass media and nationalism—United States. 4. Mass media and international relations 5. United States—Foreign relations—Russia (Federation) 6. United States—Foreign relations—Soviet Union. 7. National characteristics, Russian. 8. National characteristics in mass media. 9. Sex role. 10. Nationalism and feminism. I. Title.
HQ1190.W54 2012
303.48'24707309045—dc22
2011009762
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Mom and Dad, who have always encouraged and supported my curiosity .
Figures Figure 1 An advertisement for Diesel jeans http://blog.zoozoom.com/advertisers/dollsemail.jpg ; accessed October 12, 2010 Figure 2 Former President Ronald Reagan, “winner” of the cold war Original photograph by Tony Korody Figure 3 Ingrid Bergman in the 1956 Anastasia Original photograph by Bob Landry for Twentieth Century Fox Figure 4 Thirteen year-old Grand Duchess Anastasia, 1913 Figure 5 Anya's ball gown Kimberly A. Williams Figure 6 Locating the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC http://www.spymuseum.org Figure 7 President G.W. Bush as fighter pilot Associated Press/Denis Poroy Figure 8 President Putin as rugged outdoorsman Associated Press Figure 9 President G.W. Bush clearing brush Associated Press Figure 10 Presidents Obama and Medvedev eat hamburgers Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images Figure 11 Presidents Obama and Medvedev Associated Press/Charles Dharapak
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful for the generous intellectual support given this project by the Women's Studies community at the University of Maryland, particularly those feminist scholars who introduced me to literatures, perspectives, and ways of understanding the world that I would not otherwise have encountered. Most important among them have been Michelle Rowley, Katie King, Seung-kyung Kim, Ruth Zambrana, Luh Ayu Saraswati, Na Young Lee, Clare Ching Jen, Kimberlee Staking, and Laura Logie. I also wish to thank Nancy Struna and Cynthia Martin, who each provided not only invaluable advice, but also extraordinary kindness at crucial stages in my research. And to Claire Moses, who nurtured this project from the beginning, I owe perhaps the most overdue acknowledgement for her continuing support and encouragement.
I am also hugely indebted to the members of a Washington, DC-based feminist chorus now called Fortissima. They welcomed me with open arms and, for three wonderful years, provided a space where I could sing and laugh and eat and become part of the DC feminist community and not worry about all the work I had left to do on this manuscript.
I owe many thanks, too, to the resourceful and efficient librarians at the University of Maryland and the Library of Congress, as well as to Katharine Barrette, the Policy Studies and Women's Studies librarian at Mount Royal University, whose assistance in the final stages of my research was invaluable. Thanks also go to SUNY Press, particularly the anonymous readers who awarded this project the 2009 SUNY Press Dissertation/First Book Prize in Women's and Gender Studies and, in the process, provided valuable suggestions for reworking parts of the manuscript.
My deepest gratitude goes to Kristen Williams, my sister, friend, and colleague, whose willingness to read, reread, and discuss my work over and over again has been crucial not only to this project, but to my development as a feminist scholar. Without her generosity of time, energy, and intellect, this project would still be a tangled mess on my hard drive.
Chapter 4 has been previously published in its entirety as an article in the International Feminist Journal of Politics 13, no. 1 (March 2011): 1–24. Portions of Chapter 6 have appeared in The Politics of Cultural Programming in Public Spaces , ed. Robert Gehl and Victoria Watts, pp. 96–110 (London: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010) and has been published here with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Introduction
Imagining Russia
As enemies are constructed, so are nations. 1
During the fall of 2005, the fashion design company Diesel featured a jeans advertisement that ran in the United States in GQ Magazine . In this ad, a shirtless young cowboy, culturally intelligible as white, lays prostrate, sprawled in apparent contented exhaustion across a plush red and black sofa ( Figure 1 ). His rippled muscles are bronzed by the sun; his brown leather boots are adorned with spurs; his heavy metal belt buckle is unfastened; his well-worn stonewashed jeans are unbuttoned, revealing his lower torso; and his crimson hat is pulled low over his eyes. Behind him, displayed prominently on the shelf, are matryoshka dolls, arguably the most globally recognized symbol of traditional Russian national identity. 2 That the dolls seem to be fashioned, not from the customary wood hand-painted by Russian artisans, but from malleable plastic, signals the advertisement's use of a complex intertext that simultaneously relies on and reinforces its viewers' conflation of heterosexual sex with a feminized Russia: The dolls' plastic red mouths are open, hollow, and rife with heterosexualized possibility. Having ostensibly just received the fatigued cowboy's penis and ejaculate, they wait while he sleeps and will, the ad promises, be available to pleasure him again when he awakens. This advertisement for jeans, that most quintessentially American of products, seems to imply that, unlike the brazen and demanding American women the cowboy may have known, these inanimate, plastic matryoshka dolls signal the alleged virtues of traditional Russian womanhood. 3 Always already silent, they enjoy lying subserviently immobile while the cowboy, associated in the popular American nationalist mythos with notions of Manifest Destiny and nineteenth-century westward expansion, 4 achieves his orgasm—and, most conveniently, they can be deflated, folded up, and packed away when not in use.

Figure 1. An advertisement for Diesel jeans. http://blog.zoozoom.com/advertisers/dollsemail.jpg ; accessed October 12, 2010.
As an encounter between the United States and Russia, whose contentious relationship, known colloquially as the cold war, held geopolitics hostage in the latter half of the twentieth century, 5 the Deisel advertisement traffics rather problematically in a particular U.S.-based imaginary that conceptualizes Russia—represented here by the silent, malleable, plastic matryoshka doll, as not just inferior, but also female and subservient to the United States—and also signified by Diesel's obvious homage to that quintessential American icon, the virile, masculine cowboy who is so central to the myth of westward expansion. Instead of conquering the rugged, untamed American frontier, though, Diesel's cowboy encourages the heterosexual violation of a helpless, feminized Russia—the vanquished foe of what historian Ellen Schrecker calls “cold war triumphalism.” This is the hegemonic national/ist narrative that not only claims the United States “won” the cold war because it deserved to win (based on its allegedly superior economic, military, and political systems), but is also the basis for U.S. unilateralism in world affairs after 1991. 6 Additionally, the use of the matryoshka doll as a commodity to sell jeans, a classic American product, is, within the triumphalist narrative, both the ultimate proof and justification for the United States' cold war “victory.” Not only has capitalism trumped communism (as U.S. pundits and officials had promised all along), but the symbols and traditions of imperial Russia, itself, which in 1917 had been subsumed by the specter of communism, can now be freely integrated into the global capitalist marketplace.
This advertisement, then, in its efficient assemblage of the governing themes of American nationalism and U.S. foreign policy, is much more than an attempt to entice presumably elite white, young, heterosexual, male consumers to buy an expensive pair of jeans. 7 It depicts a troubling conflation of American nationalism with the commodification of racialized, heteronormative gender configurations, thereby hailing its target audience, 8 interpellating them simultaneously as both consumers and conquerors within the national governing mythology of cold war triumphalism, or what I refer to as the triumphalist mythscape, that has dominated U.S. political and popular culture for more than fifteen years. 9
By the early 1990s, American-style capit