Gays vs. Russia: media representations, vulnerable bodies and the construction of a (post)modern West

Abstract

This essay analyses the recent focus on Russian human rights violations in Anglophone media, scrutinising the ideological agenda of the visual politics which strategically foreground victimised bodies of Russian dissidents. Notwithstanding the importance of a critique on human rights violations, the article points to the unwanted but very real side effects the current mediatisations of violence have, from structural victimisation and the creation of ‘gay martyrs’ to the resignification of the West as progressive and ‘gay’ and Russia as backward and heterosexual. A close reading of popular press photographs of wounded Russian gay youth and the textual context – arguably representative for the Western media focus on the ‘Eastern’ violation of human rights between 2012 and 2014 – serves to illustrate how an image of Russian nation and Russian state politics is forged within Anglophone media discourses meant to reinforce the positive identity of the self-same by evoking pity, empathy and a responsible helpful attitude toward the endangered othered. The essay argues that Anglophone media’s focus on the vulnerability of Russian LGBTIQ+ bodies, consciously or unconsciously, reduces the subjects to this vulnerability, confirming feelings of moral superiority within the enlightened audience. The study highlights the important role that Russia’s vulnerable citizens play not only in the construction of values such as ‘tolerance’ and ‘acceptance’ and evaluations like ‘progressive’ and ‘modern’, but also in perceptions of the nation and its people and the reaffirmation of the dualistic divide between ‘The East’ and ‘The West’.

“You Cannot Oppress Those Who Do Not Exist”

“…LGBT identity politics entails certain scripts for queer visibility which appear to structure much media coverage of Chechen queers, offering a limited range of possible subject positions. Thus, many Western and critical Russian media representations of the Chechen purge offer conventional depictions of "queer martyrs" which Wiedlack (2017) argues is an archetype of gay representation, simplistically represented as opressed victims being unable to live an openly gay life in the home country, and therefore in need of being saved by the West (see also Ritchie 2010). For example, some of the initial reports in Western LGBT media, speaking of "gay concentration camps", "the likes of which haven't been seen since the Holocaust" (Reynolds 2017) clearly followed this pattern.…”

“…In the words of Kuntsman: "the same image can become an object of shifting feelings: it appears once as truthful and heartbreaking evidence, and once as a skillful and evil deception; once as an outcry and once as entertainment" (2012,4). If images and stories of violence and death propose to media audiences specific ways of engaging with "distant sufferers", producing a "politics of pity" through their emotional resonance (Chouliaraki 2008;; see also Wiedlack 2017), in this highly suspicious age, images are not treated as neutral, but always as allowing for the possibility of their having been staged or manipulated. This represents a qualitative shift from how Roland Barthes (1993) described the effects of the photographic image as having an authenticating function, as a powerful proof that something has actually taken place, for example in the way a photo of a former slave constituted "extended, loaded evidence" (ibid., p.115) that slavery indeed existed.…”

Enemy number one or gay clown? The Russian president, masculinity and populism in US media

“…The first of these images emerged when Russia passed the so-called 'anti-homosexual propaganda law' 1 and appeared alongside US liberal online news media discourses decrying the law and the rise of violence against LGBTIQs. These discourses often took the new homophobic legislation as a sign of Russia's backward values, which by contrast made the US appear to be a model of progress and modernity with its recent legalization of gay marriage and removal of the so-called don't-askdon't-tell rule in the military (Wiedlack, 2017). In addition to images that make Putin appear queer, media often showed photographs of beaten and frightened young Russian gays photographed after attacks on pride parades or other queer events (ibid.).…”

Eastern others: Homonationalism in the Flemish press

“…Beside Uganda, Altman and Symons (2016) also refer to a 'new Cold War around homosexuality' (p. 8) which became most prominent during the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 and which opposed Obama to Putin: 'Both governments use queer rights as a weapon to mobilize international opinion, Obama using the language of human rights as against Putin's invocation of traditional cultural values' (p. 11). Indeed, as discussed by Wiedlack (2017), after the introduction of the so-called anti-homosexual propaganda law in 2013 and throughout the Sochi Winter Olympics, a media discourse was developed 'where Russia is positioned in-between the enlightened and civilised North/West and the backward and racialised Orient', representing Russia as backward, authoritarian and antimodern. Persson (2015) explains how the 2013 law was part of a longer Russian tradition of regulating sexual deviance in relation to Western modernity, adding: 'Importantly, the increased public visibility of homosexuality in the mid-2000s coincided with a strong anti-Western narrative, which would turn out to have sinister consequences for LGBT rights' (p. 257).…”