When Women Speak Phallocentric Positionalities: Biopolitics of Female Loneliness in the Russian Cinemascape

Abstract

This article approaches an emerging archipelago of visual biopolitics from two grounds: ontological security studies, and black feminist existentialism. The first perspective deals with visual representations that encapsulate (hu)man anxiety about the imaginary loss of a stable, unique and complete identity. And secondly, feminist existentialism provides an apparatus to reveal how these representations are underpinned by a (hu)man desire to avoid loneliness. The first part of the article unites in a single theoretical framework literature on phallocentric positionalities, political narcissism, but adds two new components—gender hierarchies, and the politics of “female loneliness.” The second part explores empirically how cinema mirrors the “war gaze” that started to dominate Russian society and has led to a militarized virility in both domestic and foreign affairs. The article shows in examples from the twenty-first-century Russian cinemascape how silenced machismo is transforming Russian “vertical” biopolitics of loneliness for “home use” into a masculine “geopolitics of loneliness” in international relations. Both are based on the commodification of womanhood, and a consequent replacement of women’s voice with phallocentric intonations.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The author acknowledges the insightful comments provided by the anonymous reviewers and by Paul Hockings, Andrey Makarychev, Thomas Risse, Anastassia de la Fortelle, Semyon Goldin, colleagues from Tartu University, the Free University (SCRIPTS), University of Lausanne, Kathy Rousselet and Vera Ageeva (Sciences Po, Paris) and Valery Kossov (University Grenoble Alpes), as well as friendly comments of colleagues from ANS and ISA.

Notes

1 An interview with Alexander Sokurov in ‘Nepozner’: “War and Peace.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLj25waqSaE

2 For more on propaganda in Russian war cinema see Voisin, Pozner, and Cherneva (2018, 14).

3 Interestingly, soon after 24 February 2022 World of Tanks was withdrawn from the Russian market.

4 Translated from Russian by the author. (Leonid Golovanov (1946). “Kak nevestu Rodinu my lyubim, berezhem kak laskovuyu mat’” Moscow, USSR: Iskusstvo.)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sergei Akopov

SERGEI AKOPOV, Doctor of Political Science, was born in St. Petersburg, and did advanced studies in Sweden, Denmark and Hungary. He is the author of over 100 publications in Russian, English, Hungarian and Spanish, as well as four books. His interests include Russia’s identity and ontological security, gendered nationalism, transnational intellectuals, visual political anthropology, and “politics of loneliness.” E-mail: [email protected]