Politics of Visibility and Belonging From Russia´s “Homosexual Propaganda” Laws to the Ukraine War Interventions Series

In this book, Edenborg studies contemporary conflicts of community as enacted in Russian media, from the ?homosexual propaganda? laws to the Sochi Olympics and the Ukraine war, and explores the role of visibility in the production and contestation of belonging to a political community.

The book examines what it is that determines which subjects and narratives become visible and which are occluded in public spheres; how they are seen and made intelligible; and how those processes are involved in the imagination of communities. Investigating the differentiated consequences of visibility, Edenborg discusses what forms of visibility make belonging possible and what forms of visibility may be related to exclusion or violence. The book maps and analyses the practices and mechanisms whereby a state seeks to produce and shape belonging through controlling what becomes visible in public, and how that which becomes visible is seen and understood. In addition, it examines what forms contestation can take and what its effects may be.

Advancing theoretical understanding and offering a useful way to analytically conceptualize the role of visibility in the production and contestation of political communities, this work will be of interest to students and scholars of gender and sexuality politics, borders, citizenship, nationalism, migration and ethnic relations.

Introduction

Tverskaya Ulitsa, Moscow, May 2006

Projects of belonging in contemporary Russia

1: Politics of belonging: from speech to visibility

Politics of belonging: the issues at stake

Politics of belonging as speech: (counter)narratives and (counter)publics

Politics of belonging as visibility contestations

2: Russian media as a space of appearance

A historical overview of media in Russia

Containing, amplifying and contesting visibility in Russia

Revisiting the audience(s)

Conclusion

3: "Homosexual propaganda": regulating queer visibility

Queer visibility, belonging and geopolitics

Regulating queerness in Russian history

The dominant interpretation of the propaganda law

Tensions in the narrative

Conclusion

4: Sochi: the nation on display

Politics of belonging and the spectacular

Contexts and controversies around the Sochi Games

Sochi-2014 as a project of belonging

Contesting the Sochi spectacle

Conclusion

5: Ukraine: spectacles and specters of war

War, (in)visibility and belonging

Part one: satire and violent cartographies

Part two: spectacular and spectral homecomings

Conclusion

Conclusion: nothing more to see?

The limits of speech

Arrangements of visibility and the production of belonging

Visibility, invisibility and resistance

Russian politics, belonging and visibility

Seeing ahead

Emil Edenborg is Postdoctoral Researcher at Södertörn University, Sweden.