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

ABSTRACT

In this article I analyze the recurring representations of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin in US liberal online news media and in political comedy 2013–2019. I take a closer look at these representations in terms of their types, political aims and effects, using critical image and discourse analysis. Arguably, the depictions of Putin focus on his masculinity, thereby rendering the Russian president Other, as backwards, undemocratic, and as a threat to the US. Such imagery is utilized to create a contrast to the US that, in turn, appears as a united, modern and progressive nation. Images of Putin are also frequently used to criticize US president Donald Trump and his populism, which suggest that he is a puppet of Russia. I argue that the media’s focus on Putin, and specifically on his masculinity in criticizing the US president and his politics, however, exaggerates the threat ‘of Russia’ and thus not only runs the risk of affirming a hierarchical binary gender model of power, but also of participating in a tacit populism. Lastly, and paradoxically, many of these images rely on anti-gay sentiments in the name of western values and liberal democracy to make assessments of the political relationship between the US and Russia.

KEYWORDS:

• USA
• Russia
• Putin
• Trump
• homosexuality
• anti-gay propaganda
• masculinity
• populism
• New Cold War

Introduction: masculinity and New Cold War culture

In this article, I analyze some of the most popular representations of the Russian president Vladimir Putin in US online news media as well as popular culture, such as political comedy, photomontages, comics etc., between 2013 and 2019 from a queer-feminist perspective. Building on works that analyze the construction of the political as masculine (e.g. Starck & Luyt, 2019; Starck & Sauer, 2014; Williams, 2012) and the utilization of masculinity to make politics (e.g. Katz, 2016; Messerschmidt, 2010, 2016), I am interested in the ideas and meanings concerning representations of Putin’s masculinity within the US context. Taking up the findings of political scientists Valery Sperling (2014) and Andrew Foxall (2013), media scholar Helene Goscilo (2013) and others, who have thoroughly analyzed the Russian president’s gender performance as an important aspect of his populist politics, I am interested in the ways US media, especially liberal media and popular culture reflect upon, perpetuate or challenge Putin’s populist masculinity.

Using the methodology of ‘feminist critical discourse analysis’ (Lazar, 2007) that includes an examination of visual representations through images, I study two different, yet arguably mutually influencing sets of data that both speak to Putin’s masculinity in the context of New Cold War politics and the rivalry between the US (or the Western world in more general terms) and Russia; the first corpus of data are articles and their accompanying images from online liberal mass media news sources, such as The Washington Post, CNN, The Huffington Post, political journalism sites online, such as TalkingPointsMemo and BuzzFeed as well as images and articles from liberal magazines, such as The Atlantic or The New York Review of Books. The second corpus of data contains humorous images from satirical news sites such as The Daily Squat, the comedy TV shows The Late Show and Saturday Night Live, and the caricatural drawings by the artist Ant the Artist. Analyzing all these sites’ representations of Putin, I aim to show that both sets of data reinstate Putin’s masculinity as a politically potent tool, although through different visual and textual strategies. I will show that while liberal news media emphasize Putin’s masculinity as aggressive and dangerous to warn against the Russian threat, satire mocks Putin, using homophobic imagery that implicitly confirms traditional masculinity – the very masculinity Putin promotes as politically viable – as normative. In doing so, I further argue, liberal media and satire bring forward a ‘tacit populism’ that utilizes toxic masculinity and homophobia to promote liberal values.

The gendered logic of American New Cold War politics

The feminist scholar Kimberly Williams (2012) shows in her work on American post-Cold War culture and politics between 1990 and 2010 that US nationalist discourses employed a binary gender model to signify the US–Russian relationship, wherein power was ascribed to masculinity. US national unity, cultural and political superiority were constructed through discourses that feminized Russia and thereby signified ‘her’ inferiority, weakness, and underdevelopment. Current discourses on US-Russian relations, as I will show in my examples, follow the same gendered logic. Earlier discourses, however, portrayed Russia as a defeated/effeminate has-been world power in order to legitimize the US’s active interference in Russian national matters (Williams, 2012). Current discourses rather underscore Putin’s masculinity to create awareness for the alleged threat that Russia poses to US security and liberal values. Importantly, depicting Russia as a threat to the US using images of its ‘powerful masculine’ leader implicitly calls for an equally strong, i.e. masculine, US leader. Some media use feminization as a political strategy to undermine this strong masculine threat. This seemingly subversive strategy, which is particularly prevalent in liberal political comedy, confirms that power is connected to masculinity.

Scholars such as James Messerschmidt (2010, 2016) and Dana D. Nelson (2008) have pointed out that US culture is particularly invested in equating national power and responsibility with one single male individual; Nelson terms this phenomenon ‘presidentialism’ (2008). I argue that the transferal of images of Putin (as powerful, masculine) from Russian sources to US media that seek to cast him as an enemy instantiates the fundamentally undemocratic idea that democracy depends on a powerful presidential leader capable of fighting off its enemies. Moreover, I read the peculiar emphasis on Putin’s white masculinity in the context of discourses that analyze contemporary America as in a crisis of white American masculinity (Murray, 2012; Putnam, 2015). Considering the work on sexuality and citizenship by Lauren Berlant (1997), Liam Kennedy (1996), or Duggan and Hunter (2006), who all attest to discourses of the link between a crisis of masculinity and the proclaimed disintegration of the gender order, and consequently of American society, I suggest that the media’s evocation of a powerful white masculine enemy (Putin), and its call for a strong US counterpower, could be understood as a promoting aggressive white masculinity through the liberal media’s use of this discourse.

Moreover, in their current iterations, discourses on US – Russian relations in liberal media bring forward the basic elements and cornerstones of populist politics: a dichotomous conception of the world, where ‘us’ in the US means freedom and righteousness with its polar opposite (the Other), which is notoriously signified as a foreign threat (historically, but not exclusively, Russia). Here, representations of masculinity are the point where these populist politics crystalize.

My thinking about the utilization of (toxic) masculinity within populist politics corresponds to the scholarly work of others, such as Michael Hauser (2018), Peter Pomerantsev (2014) or Naomi Klein (2017), who also understand contemporary populist iterations of power as not only bound to masculinity, but also to whiteness. Following Hauser, I understand populism as spanning contemporary political phenomena, which are fragmented, address heterogeneous and segmented populations or individuals, and present heterogeneous and inconsistent messages. They do not follow one coherent doctrine, but rather unsettle people’s sense of reality. Populist discourses, including what I call the ‘tacit populism’ of liberal online news media and political comedy aim to build national unity by creating difference, rendering it abject, and generating affects, such as fear or disgust. Tacit populism, like other forms of populism draws on preexisting ideas of masculinity as politically potent and viral and confirms them. Although it does so more implicit or subtle than other forms of populism, tacit populism confirms (heterosexual white) men that perform aggressive masculinity as single bearers of true political power.

Putin shirtless: white male masculinity as a national threat

The abundance of images and mentions of Putin in online news strongly suggest a power status; between 2001 and 2017, Time Magazine alone featured Putin on at least ten covers, The Atlantic presented Putin as an ‘Action Man’ in no less than 35 pictures (Taylor, 2011), and CNN created an online photo gallery dedicated to ‘The Cult of Putin’, to name but a few. The majority of these and other representations of the Russian president underscore his masculinity, by portraying him in particularly masculine poses. CNN (McKenzie, 2013) and The Huffington Post (Braswell, 2015), as well as academic books (Sperling, 2014), have featured Putin (often shirtless) performing manly activities like hunting, fishing, fighting, or operating military equipment.

Most of these photographs are either reprints of, or responses to, images already in circulation in Russian media. Part of an ongoing PR campaign that started in 2007, the images aim to construct the Russian president as a powerful virile man in charge of a strong country home to the Russian people (Goscilo, 2013). Within Russia, Putin’s masculinity has come to signify a demonstration of power, economic advancement, family values (heterosexuality), military potency, and patriotic nationalism (Foxall, 2013, p. 151; Sperling, 2014, p. 3). While the consistent recurrence of images of the president’s performance of masculinity within Russian media was arguably orchestrated by so-called spin doctors, however, the ‘transmission’ of this ‘reminder of how a real man is supposed to look’ (Kondakov, 2018, p. 72) in the US can hardly be traced back to any Russian influence.

An explanation for the popularity of images of Putin within contemporary US online news media is that their sensationalist quality makes it easy for them to be instrumentalized by populist discourses. Their unmitigated display and celebration of white masculinity makes it especially easy for liberal media to identify Russia as the Other in contrast to liberal values and progressive gender models. Particularly during the Obama administration – not only a time when these images first gained major attention in the US, but also when progressive ideas concerning gender and sexuality were normalized within state discourses – identifying the Russian as the Other functioned as a national unifier that also supported notions of US superiority.

Putin’s political self-representation as an aggressive male figure, and the increase of Russia’s political power over the last fifteen years, enabled liberal media to locate US unity in opposition to (what became perceived as) Russia’s backward values and morals, its antiquated gender models, and as a danger to the US nation. Although these liberal discourses of US superiority evoke liberal values and progressive gender models, they depend on a binary gendered logic and a bipolar world view just as heavily as prior (Post-)Cold War nationalisms (Williams, 2012) did.

The stark difference between the gender performances of former president Obama and Putin gave rise to discourses that also designated Russia as backward, since previous US presidents, such as George W. Bush, performed a ‘hegemonic masculine heroic protector[s]’ (Messerschmidt, 2010, p. 112) that was indeed close to Putin’s. In comparison, Obama seemed cosmopolitan and sophisticated, and fundamentally different from Putin. Rightly identifying ‘machismo, homophobia and gay-baiting’ as well as misogyny (Sperling, 2014, p. 4) as part of a toxic masculinity that arranges genders within a rigidly hierarchically binary order, US liberal media was able to claim to embrace a more liberal understanding of gender and sexuality as national unifier, and ignoring defenders of toxic masculinity within the US by relegating such proponents to the imaginary Russian Other (Boot, 2016; Simonyi, 2015).

Ironically, these representations not only criticized (or mocked) Putin’s masculinity as toxic by portraying them as a (heightened) threat, they also confirmed his gender representation and performance as powerful (Kondakov, 2018, p. 72). Moreover, the image of a shirtless, fit and physically active Putin defines political power not only as male, but also as able-bodied (ibid.).

This implicit confirmation of the power of hegemonic masculinity becomes even more problematic when US online news media and political comedy use the image of Putin’s threatening masculinity to address and unite a segment of the American audience that opposes the current sexist, racist, and anti-democratic president Donald Trump. By offering an endless assemblage of images of Putin and honoring him with the title of the ‘West’s Public Enemy Number One’ (Newsweek, 1 August 2014, cover page), liberal media implicitly promote the same masculinity as a powerful asset of a male protector over a vulnerable feminine nation.

The end of white male hegemony and other fears

Around 2014, and the annexation of the Crimean peninsula, the representations of the masculine president Putin and his country further escalated. In addition to the previously described images of Putin (bare-chested), doing archaic manly things, new images depicted him as a spy (ibid.), gangster and/or hacker (Newsweek, 9 September 2016, cover page), despotic czar (Time, May issue 2014, cover page), or as a blood-sucking vampire (Satter, 2016). These images and the ensuing reports further underscored the idea of a renewed geopolitical clash between Russia and the US, which not only ascribed great power to Russia, but also legitimized the idea that the US should be a world power. They portrayed a bipolar world that ignored or even obscured that ‘the security architecture of the world, [has shifted] from a bipolar to a multipolar security structure’ (Basulto, 2016). In July 2015, Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford publicly announced that Russia presented the greatest threat to US national security at that moment in time. Reporting that appeared in the online news site Reuters (Stewart & Alexander, 2015) and The Washington Post (Kramer, 2015), among others, gave the media yet another reason to circulate more images of Putin as a masculine threat to the US.

At that time, the historic memory of the Russian threat (Field, 2005; Williams, 2012), had already successfully been transported into the present for a broad range of the US population, and also became amalgamated with critiques of Putin’s homophobic and misogynist rhetoric (Sperling, 2014, p. 78; Vikhrest, 2014). Most importantly, both Cold War sentiments against Russia and liberal critique were projected onto his able-bodied, heterosexual masculinity as signifiers of male dominance. This allowed liberals and conservatives alike to be able to easily identify and reject his overtly masculine and foreign dominance. Additionally, rejecting Putin and putting him in the role of the enemy does not violate any visible racial boundaries, because he embodies white masculinity, as the act of rendering him Other (as a Russian or Slavic man) can quickly be dismissed or ignored. In other words, demonizing and ridiculing Putin does not run the risk of being accused as racist. As such, Putin embodies the ideal opponent for US Americans (especially other white men), because he is only distinguishable from them in terms of values, and not in terms skin color or religion (Russian Orthodoxy is arguably perceived as one variety of Christianity).

I suggest that through creating a white masculine enemy (power), Putin needs to be analyzed in relation to discourses that proclaim the decline of white hegemonic masculinity or white male hegemony (Murray, 2012; Putnam, 2015; Savran, 1996). Political analysts argue that white US citizens feel disadvantaged or threatened by diversity and liberalism (Levine, 2016; Stern, 2016). The emergence of alternative models and ideals of male gender identities and the fear of the consequences of the economic recession following the financial collapse in 2008 seems to have prompted a ‘white male paranoia’ (Savran, 1996, p. 128). Although there is no factual evidence that speaks to a real loss of economic and cultural power among white men, various progressive discourses have openly and audibly criticized their hegemony. Most recently, the Black Lives Matter and the #metoo movements have created significant awareness about white men’s anti-black racism, sexism and misogyny; and transgender advocates have created discourses that question the binary gender system in general.

It exceeds the scope of this article to determine exactly what created the panic that eventually made white Americans vote for a misogynist, sexist, racist, and anti-immigrant president in 2016. However, in hindsight, the Trump era could be seen as reaction to the increasing institutionalization of liberal and progressive gender models, ideas around sexuality, and the increasing visibility of racial justice discourses during Barack Obama’s presidency. Hence, I relate the current trend to the work of feminist scholars, such as Berlant (1997), Kennedy (1996), Savran (1996), Duggan and Hunter (2006), who analyzed the sexual and racial panics of the 1990s, which emerged simultaneously with the relative sexual freedom and gender equality, which was equally (or maybe more) a result of the neoliberal economy and social change. I suggest that the re-emergence of Russia as enemy number one, embodied by president Putin, the declaration of a ‘crisis’ for white America, and especially white male America (Macgillis, 2016; Marshall, 2015; Murray, 2012; Putnam, 2015) and the significant political support for gender and sexual diversity (the legalization of gay marriage and the abandoning of don’t-ask-don’t-tell policies), as well as racial equality, need to be understood through their intersection.

Media discourses that identify white less-privileged males as the biggest losers of the economic and cultural crisis did not directly reference Putin. Yet, their exclusive focus on the rise of male unemployment, which ignored research showing that non-white females had to bare the greatest burden of economic decline after 2008, followed by non-white men and white women (Seguino & Heintz, 2012, p. 603), coincided with the increasing hysteria about the threat of masculinity that Putin embodies. Both discourses rally on behalf of white male power – the first in terms of the economy, and the second in terms of military power – and comfortably fit within the framework of a populism that seeks to stabilize white male hegemony.

White bare-chested masculinity as the punch line

Arguments favoring a re-masculinization within the US and as world power, which imagine Putin as the enemy, might have been expected among conservatives and the right-wing (Diamond, 2016; Gettys, 2017; Sperling, 2015). Yet, it was liberal sources, such as Politico magazine (Kirchick, 2017), which spearheaded the proliferation of populist discourses. With Donald Trump’s election, the liberal media increased its circulation of photographs and drawings depicting Putin as manly in order to draw attention to Trump’s alleged ties to the Russian president, and to delegitimize Trump’s power. News, political magazines, and comedy all exploited the accusations that Russian hackers facilitated Trump’s election along with the alleged financial ties between Trump and Putin (and other Russian agencies), again drawing attention to the idea that Russia was out to harm the US. Political comedy especially, but not exclusively, offered satirical renditions of the Trump-Putin ‘collusion’ (Graham, 2019), manipulating photos or creating cartoon versions of Putin shirtless that exposed or exaggerated his muscular upper body.

The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon ‘zoomed in’ on a photo of ‘Vladimir Putin Riding a Horse’ on 14 April 2016. The political satire site Daily Squat published a photomontage of ‘Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin enjoy riding bareback together’ (Marrs, 2016). The Simpsons’ episode ‘Homer Votes 2016’ picks up the hacking allegations during the 2016 election, showing a horse-riding Russian president entering the voting booth in Springfield. Other satirical half-naked versions of Putin appeared on Colbert’s Late Show on CBS, where cartoon versions of Putin and Trump kissed passionately on 16 November 2016; and Beck Bennett regularly takes off his shirt to impersonate the Russian president in season 42 of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. The depiction of a shirtless Putin committing morally corrupt or illegal acts, and influencing the US president, suggests that Putin is a threat to liberal and democratic values. His exaggerated masculinity mocks Putin and underlines the threat of amorality and corruption to a point where toxic masculinity, amorality and corruption become inseparable.

Of course, political satire is not the same as political commentary, and allows for a multitude of readings, including ironic interpretations. However, the focus on the figure of Putin and its frequency within a range of diverse media support the idea that he poses a threat to the US, contributing to an increase in anti-Russian sentiments. Today, ‘[m]ore than half of Americans believe Russia poses a critical threat to the United States’ and ‘a record-high 73 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of Russia’ (Lardieri, 2019) according to recent polls. Furthermore, ‘[d]emocrats are more likely to view the country’s power as a critical threat to the U.S. than Republicans – 65 percent compared to 46 percent’ (ibid.).

Focusing on president Putin rather than on the Russian government, state or nation, and connecting his performance of masculinity to the ascription of power, US online media and (print) magazines thereby reinforce what Nelson calls ‘presidentialism’ (2008). The logic of presidentialism shapes citizen’s ideas and feelings about the US president as well as democratic practices. ‘Unexamined, these trained feelings can pull [citizens] in powerfully anti democratic directions’ (Nelson, 2008, p. 5). Nelson argues that presidentialism can limit citizens’ agency in moments of ‘legitimate and pressing questions about the democratic ethics of presidential behavior or about the devaluation of citizen power within [the] government. By keeping [the] democratic hopes oriented toward the salvific and powerful [sitting or future] president’ (ibid.).

Arguably, the media’s allocation of seemingly unrestricted presidential power to Putin confirms the idea that presidents do indeed have such power and that the sitting US president should have and exercise such power for the benefit of their citizens. The emphasis on Putin’s white, able, masculine body, his strong will, and assertiveness suggests that a (powerful) president needs to represent this kind of white masculinity. By juxtaposing Putin and Trump, the images do not only suggest ‘collusion’, but they also present Trump as a weak imposter, and as a puppet of the Russian strongman. Ironically, the idea that Trump is a weak president, because he allows Putin to influence US politics, is based on the same ideas about potent white presidential masculinity that actually led to Trump’s election in the first place (Chira, 2017; Katz, 2016).

This idea does not simply support any form of presidentialism, but, referring to Nelson (2008), calls for a president who acts as the male hero. Past presidents have often attempted to create discourses of presidential heroism, national victimization, and foreign villains themselves. Masculinities studies scholar, Messerschmidt, shows that both President Obama and President Bush portrayed themselves in their speeches as masculine and powerful men/heroes, capable of protecting the innocent, vulnerable, and needy from foreign, and often racialized dangers, such as Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein (Messerschmidt, 2016, p. 147). Although not all of their attempts to fashion themselves as masculine protectors succeeded, they were deeply rooted in and evoked conservative notions of heterosexual kinship, with the presidents as the patriarchal leaders and women and children as the citizens. Implementing military actions against terrorism, which involved killing and torture, these presidents further ‘reproduce[d] and reinforce[d] male dominance/unequal gender relations not only in military forces but also in society’ (Shen, 2017, p. 139). Although Obama continued to promote notions of hegemonic masculinity in connection with and through military actions, during his presidency the same hegemonic masculinity became partially challenged and alternative versions of masculinity have become increasingly normalized within the sphere of the public. Especially the gay white man became increasingly visible and normalized, along with urban phenomena such as metrosexuality that allow men to explore markets and body treatments that were previously seen as strictly feminine.

While hegemonic masculinity seemed to have somewhat receded from view within US media only a view years ago, returning the focus to aggressive masculinities like Putin’s in the New Cold War, encourages US Americans to reembrace equally aggressive forms of masculinity within otherwise liberal political discourses. Within the realm of popular entertainment, for example in the form of political comedy, white heterosexual male liberals, such as Alec Baldwin, Beck Bennet, or Steven Colbert, can now return to center stage at a time when the dominant presence of white males is contested by people of color, women, and gender non-conforming people. That is, when threatened by a white hyper-masculine enemy, a (white) masculine heterosexual hero may become reinstated for the good of the nation and without any real resistance. In particular, the comic versions of Putin make it clear that an explicit compliance to female beauty standards and male ‘posing’ are still seen as non-normative and grounds for ridicule.

Making Putin queer, or making homosexuality bad again

Many of the satirical images of Putin mentioned above used different strategies to make the Russian president queer. 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-ask-don’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.). Notwithstanding the effort to raise awareness about violence against minorities, the frequent appearance of photographs of violated Russian gays needs to be seen critically. When the Obama administration introduced some pro-gay legislation shortly before 2013, the media constructed the USA as united through the (presumably nationally) shared values of tolerance and appreciation for diversity. This, however, only reduced tolerance and diversity to the narrow social and political inclusion of some (white) gays (and lesbians), and in comparison, rendered Russia distinctly and decidedly different. This binary conception discounts queer-, homo- and transphobic violence within the US as well as queer resistance against violence within Russia.

US media limited its attention to young white men who are brave enough and arguably privileged enough to participate in visibility-oriented LGBTIQ+ activism such as pride parades. Empirical research, however, shows that violence against LGBTIQ+ identified people has many different forms and often neither happens publicly nor results in visible physical wounds (Hylton et al., 2017; Russian LGBT Network, 2014). While lesbians often suffer from domestic violence (Stella, 2015, p. 22), transgender and intersex people (Berezkin, 2016; Kirey-Sitnikova, 2016) experience various forms of pathologization and medical violence from professionals and institutions. The social stigma all these people have to bear prevents them from public outings and involvement.

Next to victimized young gay men as symbols of Russian backwardness, the following image of Putin (Figure 1) with rainbow-colored make-up and fake eyelashes was frequently used to illustrate the homophobia behind the anti-homosexual propaganda law as well as the surge of violence and hate crimes against LGBTIQ+ within Russia.

Figure 1. ‘Gay Clown Putin’ from https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/gay-clown-putin.

This first version of such images, which later became derogatorily dubbed as ‘gay clown memes’ (Ilyshina & Lister, 2017), first appeared in US media in 2013 (ibid.). It was introduced by the presumably Russian and now defunct Tumblr blog Putin A Rainbow (Caldwell, 2017). Since then, it has been frequently spotted at public protests (Mele, 2017).

Ironically, this strategy is homonationalist as well as homophobic. It is homonationalist, since it suggests that homosexual bodies are already included in the idea of the US nation state (Puar, 2013, p. 337), and that these even protect homosexual bodies. At the same time the ‘Putin in drag’ image uses transphobic visual cues, feminization and gender transgression as a means of denigration, as transgender and queer-feminist activists have pointed out. The TransAdvocate and DemocraticUnderground argued that the meme uses ‘trans expression to shame and mock Putin, thereby degrading the trans experience’ (Williams, 2014). They use queer regalia, such as the rainbow flag and rainbow colored make up ‘to mock someone who hates queers’ (Saviolo, 2017), thereby rather than empowering LGBTQ people, they are ‘mocking them, too’ (ibid.). Moreover, the meme ‘is making a joke out of femininity’ (Williams, 2014), circulating the notion that it is ‘degrading’ or ‘weak’ and ‘shameful […] to look like a woman’ (ibid.).

Notwithstanding this criticism, CNN (Ilyshina & Lister, 2017), The Washington Post (Selk & Filipov, 2017), The Huffington Post (Herreria, 2017), and The New York Times (Mele, 2017) republished these images of Putin in drag after the Russian Justice Ministry in Moscow banned ‘images that depict President Vladimir Putin wearing makeup and implying he is gay’ (ibid.) in 2017. The ban certainly had a homophobic basis, which needs to be challenged. However, mocking Vladimir Putin through homophobic, misogynist, and transphobic references must be interpreted as a ‘leveraged pedagogy’ (Kulpa, 2014) by the US media towards Russia. This kind of pedagogy presents the US as the land of total freedom and democracy, and pits it against an authoritarian unfree Russia. The Washington Post, for example, published four different versions of the meme to exercise freedom of speech in the US and to protest against the ‘crack […] down on both sexual liberties and online speech in recent years’ (ibid.). The Huffington Post made a similar statement by reposting and positively commenting upon Stephen Colbert’s ‘Gay Icon’ video that presented a shirtless comic Putin, in tight hot-pants and make-up, dancing to disco music for The Late Show (Herreria, 2017). They also emphasized Colbert’s introductory words before screening the video during The Late Show: ‘Because this is America, for now, and we can do anything we want’ (ibid.).

Neither The Huffington Post nor The Washington Post nor any other of the mentioned articles made connections between the ‘gay clown meme,’ Russian homo- and transphobia and the recent protests and bans implemented by conservatives against transgender rights within the US (Chen, 2018). Such media discourses frame the ban of the memes, as well as ‘Russia’s anti-gay legislation, as evidence of Russian authoritarianism’ (Rivkin-Fish & Hartblay, 2014, p. 98). Moreover, they ignore ‘the collaborations between U.S. Evangelicals and Russian conservatives’ in creating the anti-homosexual propaganda law (ibid.). Instead, they portray ‘Putin as a rogue despot, exceptional among contemporary political leaders’ (ibid.). Rather than an evil act of the overly powerful Putin, Michelle Rivkin-Fish and Cassandra Hartblay understand ‘Russia’s gay politics as yet another example of global cultural politics between religious fundamentalism and secular morality that plays out every day in the West’ (ibid.).

Western media’s insistence on the ‘gay clown meme’ and the ignorance of protest against its usage by transgender people, women, and others, shows that western media reproduces its knowledge of liberal values, tolerance, and free speech using the same cultural paradigms as Russian authorities do when banning the memes. They understand homosexuality, transgenderism, femininity, and campness as something abnormal, something that can be used to mock people. However, the articles suggest that because the west is progressive and liberal, it accepts and uses humor, whereas Russia is so backward, old-fashioned and anti-modern that it is not able to laugh about itself.

The double standard of western leveraged pedagogy with regards to homotolerance is especially notable in political satire that suggests a homosexual relationship between the Russian president and Trump. During Trump’s presidential campaign in 2015, critics of all political flavors started connecting Putin to Trump within news media and political commentary as well as political comedy. ‘[T]he old Cold War neocons reliving the 1980s and the disappointed liberal supporters of Hillary Clinton’ (Basulto, 2016) united in a bipartisan creation of ‘a geopolitical villain to justify their actions’, to delegitimize his intelligibility and emphasize his presidency as a danger to the USA. One of the first media examples suggesting that Putin was Trump’s running mate in the election was a video ad posted by the republican politician John Kasich. The perhaps involuntarily comical video arranged past video material of Putin and Trump saying favorable things about each other (Trump-Putin, 2016). News media from The New York Times (Kerlow, 2018) to The Washington Post (Cavna, 2017) as well as political comedy such as Saturday Night Live or the Simpsons began to embrace this ‘conspiracy-toned’ (Trudolyubov, 2016) Trump-Putin narrative.

Social media (Rahman, 2018) and news outlets, such as The New York Times (Kerlow, 2018), or The Washington Post (Cavna, 2017), published images that suggested depictions of a homosocial or even homosexual relationship between November 2016 and August 2018. The images often used BDSM imagery (Botticelli, 2018; Rowley, 2017), depicting Trump in submissive poses, dominated by Putin to emphasize the idea of a weak corrupt US under a powerful Russian influence. When Trump traveled to Helsinki to meet Putin in July 2018, despite the still ongoing investigation of Russian meddling with the 2016 election as well as other allegations of collusions, the idea that Trump and Putin ‘were in bed together’ had long been established as common cultural trope (e.g. Kerlow, 2018). These images were of course highly ironic, protesting not only foreign influence in US political matters, but also criticizing the two presidents’ racist, misogynist, and homophobic attitudes.

One image that mocks the presidents through the suggestion of a homosexual relationship and simultaneously references the Cold War mindset went viral in May 2016 (versions of this continue to circulate today) is a mural by Lithuanian street artists Dominykas Čečkauskas and Mindaugas Bonanu entitled Make Everything Great Again. The graffiti was commissioned by a restaurant owner in Vilnius and various pictures of it were distributed via social as well as global news media – Buzzfeed News (Nashrulla, 2016), Huffington Post (Olsen, 2016), the Washington Post (Taylor, 2016), and many others. The picture alludes to a famous 1979 photograph of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev kissing Erich Honecker, the then communist leader of East Germany, on the mouth, as it was customary for Soviet men at that time. Their ‘fraternal kiss’ was immortalized through a still graffiti on the East Side Gallery of the Berlin Wall that still exists today. The image of Trump and Putin draws on this historic representation, which was symbolically central to the remembrance of the Cold War, thus evoking Cold War sentiments. It insists on a gendered logic derived from the Cold War, which presents the US as a feminized nation (Williams, 2012, p. 31) that is threatened by the toxic masculinity of the Russian leader. Moreover, it uses the Cold War strategy of ridiculing the Russian masculine threat by suggesting gay desire (Johnson, 2004).²

This derogatory homophobic strategy is excessively employed by US American liberal art and culture. One recent example was a sketch on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert called ‘Cartoon Trump And Cartoon Putin Make First Joint Public Appearance’ (2016). In the clip, Colbert talks to the cartoon version of president-elect Donald Trump about his ties to Russia, while all the answers are whispered into Trump’s ear by the cartoon version of Putin. In the end, he rips off his shirt and hypnotizes Trump with his ‘d-cup man-bosom’ before they passionately make out.

Other examples are the paintings by the US American painter Ant the Artist that show Trump ducking his lips and snuggling up to Putin in front of the White House and a tree that has the line ‘Trump and Putin sittin’ in a tree … ’ carved into his trunk (www.ant-the-artist.com), or the ‘Make Everything Great Again’ stickers showing Bonanu’s image of the Putin-Trump kiss (Botticelli, 2018). All these artists and comedians are known for their liberal progressive values and art. All of them use homosexuality to mock and criticize the patriarchal employment of masculine economic and military power.

In her discussion of the images showing Putin and Trump in erotic or sexual encounters, which first surfaced around 2016, Alison Rowley (2017) argues that such depictions show

the extent to which homosexuality has become part of the mainstream [even though it] is likely that those producing the items […] know that homosexuality continues to make many people who actually voted for Donald Trump extremely uncomfortable, and that fact increases the shock value of their critiques of him. (Rowley, 2017, p. 382)

I disagree with Rowley with regard to the notion that the appearance of a homosexual Trump-Putin is proof that homosexuality has become part of popular culture or politics. On the contrary, this very particular usage of accusations, albeit ironically, of homosexuality has always been a part of Cold War culture and politics (Friedman, 2005; Johnson, 2004, etc.). The recycling of this strategy, accordingly, is not so much a sign of homonormativity within mainstream society, but of the persistence of homophobia within the area of liberal progress.

Conclusion

In this article I analyzed examples of liberal US online media and political satire that discussed the Russian president Putin’s gender performance in connection to issues of New Cold War politics and the political rivalry between the US and Russia, especially in connection with ideas about liberal values, such as gender and sexual equality. Using the methodology of critical discourse analysis that included a thorough image analysis, I was able to show that in focusing on the Russian president’s performance of masculinity the analyzed media rearticulate masculinity not only as political, but confirm Putin’s particular version of toxic and populist masculinity as virile, powerful, and dangerous. In connecting his representations of masculine aggression to misogyny, sexism, and homophobia, especially liberal news media and political commentary, portray the Russian president as a threat to US sovereignty and thereby, implicitly, call for an equally masculine political leader (savior) to eliminate this threat. Taking Putin’s self-representation of dangerous masculinity (Goscilo, 2013; Sperling, 2014) seriously and reiterating it as a threat – or the US’s ‘enemy number one’ (Osnos, Remnick, & Yaffa, 2017) – journalists and political commentators confirm the gender binary at the heart of populist politics that understands political power as masculine and chauvinistic. They not only affirm and exaggerate the connection between white aggressive masculinity and world power, but they simultaneously paradoxically underpin Putin’s own populism, as well as contemporary US populist tendencies, in particular Donald Trump’s. By doing so, the liberal media engages in a tacit populism, which utilizes images of and references to Putin as a negative signifier in order to delegitimize Donald Trump.

Political satire equally takes up Putin’s populist performance of masculinity, albeit through mockery. Maybe more than liberal news media, political satire criticizes Putin’s social politics, rather than warning against his military power. Rejecting his homophobic and misogynist laws and policies, these media often render Putin ‘queer.’ They employ techniques and use LGBTIQ+ symbols, such as drag make up or rainbow colors, to feminize Putin. In the attempt to criticize the Russian as well as American presidents as well as their alleged collaborations, these media suggest that Putin and Trump have a homosexual relationship. Although these strategies initially set out to be subversive, they end up doing the complete opposite, as they arguably utilize the same strategies of conservative and oppressive politics that seek to render masculine femininity, homosexuality and queerness as abnormal, abject and ridiculous. In other words, images that make the Russian president ‘queer’ run the risk of reaffirming gay desire and femininity as abnormal and inferior, and thus remain a far cry from exposing the misogyny and homophobia of the populist masculinity on which Putin’s political performances are based.

My analysis raises some important further questions. For instance, which visual and discursive tools are available for criticizing President Trump, other than suggesting he is Putin’s puppet? How might comedy be used to address ways that both presidents’ abuse power, including their homophobia and misogyny without perpetuating this by simply representing both men as ‘queer?’ More broadly speaking, how can we dismantle white male power without reaffirming it? How can masses be reached and convinced to support liberal ideas without resorting to populist tactics?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Katharina Wiedlack is a Post-Doc Researcher at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna. Previously, she was Post-Doc Fellow at the Humboldt University, Berlin and Visiting Professor at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research fields are queer and feminist theory, popular culture, postsocialist, decolonial and disability studies. Currently, she is finishing research focused on the construction of Russia, LGBTIQ+ issues and dis/ability within Western media. Her new project focuses on historic encounters between Americans and Russia from the 18th to the beginning of the twentieth century, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). She has published in Feminist Media Studies, Somatechnics, EJES and Popular Music and Society etc. http://katharinawiedlack.com

ORCID

Katharina Wiedlack http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9236-8819

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Austrian Science Fund (FWF): [grant number T767-G28].

Notes

1 The Russian federal law ‘On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development’ forbids the ‘propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships’ among minors was introduced in summer 2013, and has been circulated in US media discourse as the ‘Russian anti-gay law’ or ‘anti-homosexual propaganda law’.

2 Within the Russian-speaking context this image also has a strong class component, since the Adidas tracksuits allude to the gopnik culture. Gopnik is a slang Russian derogatory term used to describe a young, white male member of the lower class in Russia (https://russiapedia.rt.com/of-russian-origin/gopnik/). It is also refers to asocial behavior and minor criminality. In the US American context, this class reference has not been discussed.