Visible Difference, Audible Difference: Female Singers and Gay Male Fans in Russian Popular Music

Abstract

Studies of Soviet and post-Soviet popular musics have tended to give scant attention to the variables of gender and sexuality, often positing a tacit and de facto heterosexuality on the part of both performer and audience. In this article, I focus on the dynamic of difference—musical, visual, and discursive—in the musics of three post-Soviet, female singer/musicians (Zhanna Aguzarova, Eva Pol'na, and Zemfira Ramazanova), showing how such difference serves as a locus of attraction for many gay male listeners, and performatively questions hierarchies based on gender and sexuality. In conclusion, I posit the potency of the female voice as a variable that short-circuits the “gaze,” setting up a relationship of mutually salubrious reciprocity between artist and (gay) audience.

Notes

^[1] The guide appeared in two separate versions, one for St. Petersburg, the other for Moscow (“Gei-gid”). The covers of both, appropriately enough, featured same-sex “couples” (one version male, one female), and a small rainbow flag was printed across the spine of the magazine.

^[2] While there are other female singers/musicians currently active in Russian popular music who share many of the attributes I will discuss (i.e. Diana Arbenina of Nochnye snaipery and Svetlana Surganova of Surganova i orkestr), I have chosen these three as representative based upon their popularity with my gay, male, Russian informants and/or the prevalence of their music at sites frequented by gay men in Russia's two major urban centers, St. Petersburg and Moscow, during 2003 and 2004.

^[3] Although not all, many of my informants in fact used the words “gei” or “goluboi” (literally “light blue,” and a common euphemism for a homosexual man) to describe their sexual orientation. Almost none were aware of the Western, theoretical meaning of the word “queer,” most assuming it was another slang term for homosexual.

^[4] See also Harstock, who asks, “why is it just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic?” (qtd in Burns and LaFrance 7).

^[5] Whiteley notes exactly how such a departure from gendered musical norms is instrumental in the work of Kate Bush. In her view, Bush's music “can be characterized as both a strategy of difference and a strategy of defiance, and its otherworldly imagery and neo-gothic sound was, for years, one of the few alternatives to girl pop” (83).

^[6] In Russian, the phrase netraditsionnaia orientatsiia (non-traditional orientation) is a common euphemism for homosexuality.

^[7] Were the object male, the conjugations would be predaval and iskal.

^[8] Although not as explicit, references to same-sex erotics are encountered in some of Pol'na's other songs. For example, in the first verse of “Liubi menia po-frantsuzskii” (“Love Me in French”), the gender of the singer's object of affection is portrayed as indeterminate (“kto ty, on ili ona?”—“who are you, he or she?”).

^[9] The slang for lesbian, in terms of color, is rozovaia (pink). It is notable that such slang is prominent in the work of openly gay singer Boris Moiseev, whose songs “Golubaia luna” (“Blue Moon”) and “Golubaia zvezda” (“Blue Star”)—both of which allude more or less unambiguously to homosexuality—were among his most widely known in recent years.

^[10] Such “faux lesbianism” has been used not only by the group t.A.T.u., but by another Russian, female duo, Re-Flex.

^[11] While the soprano register is certainly used by many men in popular musics, a focus on register alone ignores the importance of timbre. While men may sing “high,” I would argue that very few are able to approximate the actual sound of a woman's soprano voice.

^[12] See, for example, the critique offered by Burns and LaFrance, especially chapter 1.

^[13] These styles include popsa, rok, rèp, tantseval'naia muzyka, shanson, romans, and èstrada. While the first four are roughly analogous, as their English-sounding names imply, to Western counterparts (respectively, pop, rock, rap, and dance music), the last three lack specific correlates to styles currently found within mass-produced and mass-mediated Anglophone popular musics.

^[14] While it is not always clear whether the Russian or Western versions of these instruments are being played, it is the overall style rather than the specific instrument that is of import for the general listener.

^[15] There are instances where the patterning is not slavishly held to, however. For example, the break/middle section returns, after the preceding chorus in G minor, to the original tonic of the song (also G minor), instead of progressing directly to the B minor implied by the pattern used throughout up until this point.

^[16] “Zhuzha,” according to some informants, is probably a diminutive of a proper name; however, none of them said it was a name they had heard before, and none were sure whether it might be masculine or feminine, although more suspected the former.

^[17] The song also produces a tension based upon the relationship between two tones a minor second apart, F and F. Although the opening “outline” of the tonic chord uses the latter, suggesting major, the bass line uses the former, suggesting minor. Additionally, although I have chosen to analyze the song with a D-minor tonic, this tonic is not firmly established; it is equally possible to hear the song with alternative tonics.

^[18] It was in fact Pol'na who was the personification of the duo for the majority of my informants, and the one to whom they related. Although Iurii Usachev, the duo's other member—serving as composer, arranger, instrumentalist, and producer—is featured in many of the duo's visual materials (CD covers, videos, their internet site, magazine articles, etc.), many of these same men did not even know his name.

^[19] The song originally appeared on the 2002 CD Eva in a pared-down, slightly “jazzy” version, making used of a strummed electric guitar as part of its accompaniment. In the same year, however, it was released in a “dance” version, with a techno-trance inspired accompaniment, and with a slightly more rapid beat. The dance version was frequently played in St. Petersburg at the gay club Kabare.

^[20] The term “popsa,” in Russia, may be used in a slightly pejorative manner in order to refer to any number of things from a pair of shoes to a jacket, suggesting that the item (including a song) is vulgar, without substance, or nekul'turnyi (uncultured). It is arguable that such connotations, encompassing variables of class, aesthetic worth, and authenticity (among others) operate in much that same way in assessments of Western pop.

^[21] I am using the term “gaze” tentatively, due mostly to its popularized meaning—an objectifying, power-laden form of viewing, often theorized as emanating from man (subject), directed toward woman (object). However, as Evans and Gamman have noted, such a usage is often a drastic oversimplification (when compared with, for example, the Lacanian conceptualization).

^[22] The spelling here reflects a literal transliteration from the Cyrillic.

^[23] The second occurrence of the chorus begins with the words “[somebody confused] and set me on fire, Arrivederci” (“[kto-to sputal] i podzhëg menia, Arividerchi”); the third and fourth return to a variation of the first, with the text, “boats in my port/we won't fly off, but swim.”

^[24] See also Drukman on the “gay gaze,” one which he defines, in part, as being characterized by the possibility of shifting ego identification (gender to gender).

^[25] My goal here is not to essentialize “the feminine” as Foster finds is often done by sexual difference theorists; rather I agree with her contention that “gender is a characteristic of an interaction, not an individual” (445), taken here to mean that gender is a construct through which social interactions and relationships are understood and ordered.

^[26] Kaplan herself notes that “[o]n the social/historical level, in addition, we are living in a period in which mothers are increasingly living alone with their children, offering the possibility for new psychic patterns to emerge” (134). She also suggests that such new patterns are related to the role of fathers, who may become increasingly involved in childrearing. A 2002 survey conducted by the Russian Academy of Sciences found that 28% of all children in the Russian Federation were born to families headed by single mothers (“So Where Are All the Men?”).

^[27] The implicit, seemingly neat splits between real/not real or actual/virtual are perhaps sites for contestation regarding Winnicott's schematization. An overview of Winnicott, as well as suggestions for further (and more nuanced) applications of his theories can be found in Wright.

^[28] All three of the terms—“good enough mothering,” “graded disillusionment,” and “transitional space”—are Winnicott's, and are discussed in his Playing and Reality.

^[29] The extent to which this is simply stereotype, rather than “reality” is, in fact, unimportant, as the idea of close personal relationships being highly important pervades the thinking of many Russians—both those who identified as homosexual and those who identified as heterosexual—with whom I spoke.

^[30] Control may also be related more generally to the musical, as well; that the musically affective is often coded as “feminine” (as opposed to the rationality of the “masculine,” a rationality that may be posited in the “scientific” study of music—here, scientific meaning both musicological and sociological), and is often likewise elided, indicates a desire to keep such dynamics at bay.

^[31] Additionally, the visual itself may take on musical properties, via editing and camera angles suggesting a listening rather than viewing subject (cf. Vernallis).

^[32] Certain singers, such as some of the aforementioned “divas” as well as others (e.g. Lolita and Ruslana, the Ukrainian winner of the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest), are often featured on gay Russian websites, in both articles and advertisements.

^[33] Many of the audience members appeared, to both me and my Russian companion, to be gay and lesbian. One female couple, for example, could easily be classified as sporting a Western-style, “butch” appearance—short hair, no make-up, jeans, boots, work shirts—while my Russian friend pointed out some of the men he considered to be “obviously gay” because of the “way they walked.” However, there were other same-sex pairs who were less “stereotypical” in their comportment, yet who nonetheless appeared to be, if not couples, then most probably homosexual.

^[34] It is notable that, while there were “cruising spots” (pleshki), clubs, saunas, and banii (public steam baths) popular with gay men, there was not any type of “gay ghetto” in either St. Petersburg or Moscow, analogous to, for example, either New York City's Chelsea or Paris's Marais district.

^[35] The “gay gaze” (see n. 24) should obviously not be seen as inherently salubrious, as hierarchies of both beauty (“body fascism”) and race are often instrumental in the valuation/devaluation of certain bodies within “the community.” On the latter, see Obendorf, who examines the stigmatization of Asian men in gay pornography, something that is “complicit in propagating negative and damaging racial stereotypes” (172).

^[36] See, for example, Kolesnikov, and Tishkov and Olcott. Kon (“Gomofobiia”) explicitly makes the connection between xenophobia and homophobia.

^[37] The recent killing of a male patron of the gay bar Full House in Volgograd—as well as both the refusal of the police to take the report of the incident seriously and the unquestionably fabricated eyewitness account (with intimations that it may have been a suicide)—is one of several examples of the type of violence against gay men and lesbians that continues in Russia (“V Volgograde”).