Gender's Crooked Path: Feminism Confronts Russian Patriarchy

This contribution discusses the uneasy development of gender studies in Russia as one example of public sociology, on the basis mainly of our own experience in the Gender Studies Program at the European University in St. Petersburg. It observes how the political and academic context of the 1990s created opportunities for academic innovations that ideologically challenged Soviet patriarchy and invoked gendered criticisms of post-Soviet changes. I discuss the effects of the rapid but partial institutionalization of gender studies in the Russian academic context and how gender became the umbrella term for both feminist and anti-feminist standpoints.  Since international support for the gender studies diminished in the 2000s, the fashion and economic benefit of doing gender studies has declined, with only a small group of researchers maintaining their commitment to the feminist approach to gender. I focus on the politicization of gender in the last decade of Putin’s Russia and the role of feminist researchers in the analysis of the new conservatism, expressed in gender ideology. The problems of combining public expertise and academic work in the particular realm of gender politics are examined.