Contesting Feminism and Media Culture in Contemporary Russia

"An extremely timely and brilliant investigation into the complexities, contradictions, and possibilities of mediated feminism in an increasingly authoritarian (and now war-time) contemporary Russia. A must read for feminist and media scholars, everywhere."
- Catherine Rottenberg, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.

"This timely volume grapples with the baffling paradoxes of Russia’s neoliberal-authoritarian cultural terrain, affording insights into the conditions that produced the war, as well as resistance to it. It brings a novel angle to the topic of Russian feminisms, contributing fresh insights and analytic tools. The mediated feminisms approach widens the lens and affords a very different picture of feminism’s pre-war status -and great food for thought for theorizing what came next. The feminist media ecology conception contributes to our thinking about the hybrid media sphere and political agency within it. The book offers a fascinating window into the dynamics of political agency in Russia’s pre-war hybrid media environment, showing persuasively that neoliberal feminism paradoxically incubated/contributed to the development of anti-war activism. Engagingly written and analytically sophisticated, the volume is a must read for scholars of social movements, morphing activist forms and the intersection of digitization and authoritarianism globally."
- Julie Hemment, Professor of Anthropology at University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA