In Georgia, a law enacted on January 1, 2011 mandated that all foreign language films possess either Georgian dubbing or subtitling for public film showings. This legal measure was targeted at removing Russian presence in film language, as part of then‐President Saakashvili's shift away from alignments with Russia and Russianness in Georgian public cultural life. This article investigates the ideological and institutional dimensions of the creation of a new film dubbing industry in Tbilisi for an audience that was critical of it. Russian technical and artistic expression remained the rubric against which Georgian dubbing was compared. Soviet and Russian forms, which continue to permeate the Georgian social world, have structured expectations about “quality” or “art” in dubbing. Additionally, evaluations of dubbing as a form of linguistic mediation described Georgian language as in a relationship of inferiority with respect to Russian, which has long been linked to high‐culture forms of sociotechnical mediation. The emergence of a new film dubbing industry in Georgia draws out a number of contradictions in the ways that the institutional calibration of foreignness inheres in labor, aesthetics, and technical forms.
A B S T R A C TAt the Georgian Weightlifting Federation in Tbilisi, Georgia, a mainstay of coaching is the training cue, a shouted word or phrase that coaches use to prompt weightlifters to perform in a certain psychological, physical, or technical way. In this practice, coaches cultivate and naturalize dimensions of physiology and psychology, aligning masculinity with animality, lack of restraint, and emotional surfeit, and femininity with gracefulness, control, and good technique. Although Olympic weightlifting remains stereotypically hypermasculine, coaches compliment female weightlifters' technique as superior to men's and train their athletes to integrate masculine "nature" and feminine "culture" in the expression of physical strength. In doing so, coaches do not instill fully formed subjectivities but manage embodied forms, using exclamatory cues to disaggregate the athlete into action, affect, and anatomy.
In July 2015, I met the urban planner Vladimir (Lado) Vardosanidze in front of the Tbilisi Concert Hall, a round, glass-plated building located at the convergence of a bewildering traffic pattern where two multilane one-way streets combine in a swirl of traffic to form a bidirectional road that becomes the main drag in Tbilisi's downtown. Lado, a spry seventy-year-old professor with specializations in urban planning, architecture, and culture, greeted me with a smile and told me that he had selected this location to meet because he wanted to point out some features of the urban landscape that were indicative of larger trends in the development of Georgia's capital city. This area, he told me, was nicknamed the Bermuda Triangle because of the erratic traffic patterns that render it particularly dangerous for pedestrians. As we walked toward his home office nearby, Lado drew my attention to a variety of sidewalk hazards: a set of plastic bollards that had been cut off at the base to allow cars to park on the sidewalk, loose and missing bricks in the pavement that made walking treacherous and wheelchair travel impossible, and a kiosk situated so close to the curb by a bus stop that it forced riders to wait on the street rather than the sidewalk, with the sharp edge of its exterior metal counter positioned at eye-level overhanging the ramp from sidewalk to street. 1 Cars were parked on the sidewalks, and pedestrians dodged
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.