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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · 9d

Short thread on the findings:

bsky.app/profile/lisa...

Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Jul 29

🚨 Publication alert 🚨

I went to the depths of despair and analyZed Russian pro-war poetry with Alsu Buiting:

"Teaching to Love the Mother(land):
Russian Z-poetry, Gendered Rhetoric
and the Legitimization of War" in link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

A quick 🧵 on our main findings

Language, Gender and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe

This volume is the first book-length collection of research on language, gender and sexuality in the societies of Central and Eastern Europe.

link.springer.com

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · 9d

Always a surreal feeling to hold the printed words in your hands.

#propaganda #war

Cover of the book «Language, gender and politics in Central and Eastern Europe” edited by Ksenija Bogetic

First page of the chapter “teaching to love the mother(land): Russian z-poetry, gendered rhetoric and the legitimation of war”

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · 28d

Had a blast synergising @deconspirator.bsky.social and ARM project with @mariellew.bsky.social at the @clingendael.bsky.social REKA conference. Discussed current approaches to #FIMI and the challenges European democracies face. Despite our happy faces, we were not always optimistic...

woman in a black blazer gesturing at a yellow screen

woman in a blue shirt standing next to a yellow screen

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Sep 4

There used to be a great course on comparative children’s literature in our program at RUG, but it was cut because of the budget cuts… I can try asking the colleague who used to teach it!

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Sep 4

Don’t know about different languages, but here is a fun article about foxes in Russian folkloric tales www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Chasing foxes in Russian folk tales

This paper examines the representation of foxes in Russian folk tales (narodnye skazki). It explores the frequency of the word “fox” (lisa) in the titles of folk tales, the number of single occurre...

www.tandfonline.com

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Sep 4

Fox is also a she, so she gets to be this stereotypical “female” cunning character who uses her “feminine” wiles. Some researchers even argued a fox in eastern Slavic mythologies can even be representative of a “vagina dentata” myths

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Sep 4

Oh big time! For the most part because the languages are gendered so the animal gets a gender (like dog is a she, bear is a he). Translations are funny: for instance Owl in Winnie the Pooh is a female character in Russian because owl and birds in general are “female”

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Sep 4

Slavic languages will have a totally different diagram!

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Jul 31

oh, gotta read this!!!

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Jul 29

Bedankt, Tony! Beterschap!

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Jul 29

Special thanks to our editor Ksenija Bogetic for her tireless work and check out the other fascinating (but also a little depressing) chapters in the volume link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Language, Gender and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe

This volume is the first book-length collection of research on language, gender and sexuality in the societies of Central and Eastern Europe.

link.springer.com

2

Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Jul 29

It was not the worst one if you can believe it!

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Jul 29

Anyway, if you want to lose appetite, here is the pre-print drive.google.com/file/d/1e2Q8...

06 Gaufman-Buiting-Chap6-REVISED.pdf

drive.google.com

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Jul 29

The authors in this collection tend to build a very clear gender hierarchy in their poems, with devalued femininity serving as an
important metaphor in constructing conflict roles and conflict necessity.

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Jul 29

The "poetry" suggests that the discursive power of gendered
representations comes from their inherent power to evoke affects of pity, disgust, or anger, which helps to naturalize discourses of Russo-Ukrainian conflict as aspects of the ‘moral’ and ‘normal’ duty.

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Jul 29

Most authors from the collection employed rather crude devices to get their messages across: dead children, girls with pouty lips, gaunt old ladies, and "real" men fighting for the truth. The authors tried to intentionally offend, humiliate, and degrade their opponents by ‘feminizing’ them.

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Jul 29

Coca-cola? Gendered. Lattes? Gendered. Mangoes and cookies? Ditto. We show in our analysis that the aggressive masculinization is prompted by different social dynamics, and used to mask emerging anxieties over pacifism and resistance to warfare among different classes and subcultures.

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Jul 29

We found a suitable corpus: "The Poetry of Russian summer" and with lyrics like "I selflessly love my Motherland just like I love the plump breasts of the Komisar woman" we knew we would find plenty of gendered representations of, well, anything.

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Jul 29

Ever since my Damsels in Distress article, I knew I would have to look into the full-scale invasion gendered rhetoric. I knew there would be a lot of it, beyond the "loose woman Ukraine sleeping with Western men" narrative

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

journals.sagepub.com

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Jul 29

🚨 Publication alert 🚨

I went to the depths of despair and analyZed Russian pro-war poetry with Alsu Buiting:

"Teaching to Love the Mother(land):
Russian Z-poetry, Gendered Rhetoric
and the Legitimization of War" in link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

A quick 🧵 on our main findings

Language, Gender and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe

This volume is the first book-length collection of research on language, gender and sexuality in the societies of Central and Eastern Europe.

link.springer.com

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Jul 21

I can show you a contemporary analogue!

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Jul 18

Is it what American TV is going to look like too? #Colbert

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Jul 18

If you want to watch NTV today, you will not find anything even remotely resembling anti-government satire. Same with the rest of Russian TV. Authoritarians can't stand being made fun of. They need to be praised and that's what Russian TV does all day long.

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Jul 18

Somehow, out of nowhere, the TV channel broadcasting Kukly started experiencing problems. Many critical journalists (including Shenderovich and Kiselyov) left. Kukly disappeared, then reappeared with a different writers team and then cancelled.

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Lisa Gaufman @lisares.bsky.social · Jul 18

Then Putin came to power. So in February 2000 his rise was depicted as the "Little Tsakhes" fairy tale, where Putin was presented as an ugly dwarf, whom, by the magic of the "television fairy" (Berezovsky), everyone perceives as a handsome man

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