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This article examines the therapeutic self-transformation process in a self-help group in Russia. Drawing on participant observation and interviews, and engaging with debates on therapeutic technologies and the transformation of gender relations, it explores how the self-help group shapes how participants come to understand and act upon themselves. It shows that the process of self-transformation is profoundly gendered, problematising femininity and identifying it as an object of therapeutic intervention. Rather than collectively contesting gendered power and disadvantage, participants are invited to cultivate traditional notions of femininity and masculinity and learn to draw pleasure from them. We argue that this message may be appealing to women because it speaks to their lived experience of exhaustion and precarity, and offers them the prospect of overcoming it through a mythologised heteronormative order. It offers solace and a potential escape route where room for political agency is limited and feminist discourse heavily vilified. Yet the article also shows that participants do not merely internalise the ideological messages of the group, but engage with them in contradictory and ambivalent ways.

In this chapter the author brings together the main threads of resistance in its manifold forms and the resources on which it draws, and defines the ‘resourceful feminist’. Some key issues are uncovered relating to the movement’s internal struggles, and whether solidarity between the different schools of feminism might be strategically useful. The author also observes the role of the internet and its ambivalence in allowing individuals to engage with feminism while also helping to produce hierarchy inside the movement. Furthermore, contributions connected with challenging the hegemony of Western feminism, and construing more local and context-specific feminism(s) are discussed. In the final part of the book the author turns to look at more recent developments connected with feminist activism in Russia, and new limitations targeted at independent activists in this context.