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

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 undiferstood. In addition, it examines what forms contestation can take and what its effects may be. Advancing theoretical undiferstanding 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 gendifer and sexuality politics, bordifers, citizenship, nationalism, migration and ethnic relations."--Provided by publisher Cover 1 Half Title 4 Title Page 6 Copyright Page 7 Table of Contents 8 List of figures 10 Acknowledgements 11 Introduction 12 Tverskaya Ulitsa, Moscow, May 2006 12 Projects of belonging in contemporary Russia 13 The concerns of the book 14 Contributions 16 Starting points: media, belonging, visibility 19 Research design and methods 23 Structure of the book 29 1. Politics of belonging: From speech to visibility 32 Politics of belonging: the issues at stake 32 Politics of belonging as speech: (counter)narratives and (counter)publics 38 Politics of belonging as visibility contestations 45 2. Russian media as a space of appearance 59 A historical overview of media in Russia 61 Containing, amplifying and contesting visibility in Russia 69 Revisiting the audience(s) 79 Conclusion 82 3. “Homosexual propaganda”: Regulating queer visibility 87 Queer visibility, belonging and geopolitics 88 Regulating queerness in Russian history 91 The dominant interpretation of the propaganda law 92 Tensions in the narrative 106 Conclusion 109 4. Sochi: The nation on display 117 Politics of belonging and the spectacular 118 Contexts and controversies around the Sochi Games 121 Sochi-2014 as a project of belonging 123 Contesting the Sochi spectacle 139 Conclusion 149 5. Ukraine: Spectacles and specters of war 159 War, (in)visibility and belonging 161 Part one: satire and violent cartographies 164 Part two: spectacular and spectral homecomings 179 Conclusion 194 Conclusion: Nothing more to see? 201 The limits of speech 202 Arrangements of visibility and the production of belonging 203 Visibility, invisibility and resistance 205 Russian politics, belonging and visibility 206 Seeing ahead 209 Index 211 In this volume, Edenborg studies contemporary conflicts of community as enacted in Russian media, from the ‘homosexual propaganda’ laws to the Ukraine war, and explores the role of visibility in the production and contestation of belonging to a political community.