CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Kazakevich, Olga |
|---|---|
| Title | Makeover Television in Russia: Imagining Queer Through Post-Soviet Aphasia |
| Summary | Through the analysis of the 2012 episode of the beauty makeover program Fashion Verdict (Modnyi Prigovor), Channel One (Pervyi Kanal), that features two lesbian women as participants and makes over one of them into a conventionally feminine woman, this thesis argues against oversimplifying interpretations of this show as homophobic. Drawing, theoretically, on the concept of queer visibility, the thesis argues that the ‘queer’ makeover episode should be seen from within the post-Soviet historical, political and cultural context due to the specificities of multiple cultural forces working in the post-Soviet discursive field, including the field of sexuality. In the context of the laws prohibiting the ‘propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations’ among minors passed in several Russian regions by 2012, the airing of the episode cannot be explained without discussing the work of some key media actors on Channel One, including CEO Konstantin Ernst, as it allows to see the Fashion Verdict episode in a perspective. Through the critical discourse analysis of the episode, the thesis claims that the show is offering its queer participants strategies of survival in an increasingly homophobic environment by means of adjusting their appearance to the norms of conventional femininity. These strategies, it is argued, are embedded in the Soviet discursive fields of queer experience and thus constitute what Serguei Oushakine has called post-Soviet aphasia. Post-Soviet aphasia offers a way of understanding how the post-Soviet subjects, due to the lack of a new discourse, are making sense of the dramatically changing reality drawing on the familiar discursive tools taken from a Soviet cultural period. The show deploys Soviet visual and discursive strategies of articulating queer lived experience, and offers them as a way of survival in the Putin regime, which strives to exclude non-heterosexuals from the nation’s physical and political well-being. The show, however, redefines the nation and invites the queer subjects to join the national project through the symbolic figure of the Child, discursively framed as the lesbian participant’s future baby. |
| Supervisor | Barat, Erzsebet |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/kazakevich_olga.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University