Russian Marital Migrants in Contemporary Film
In Foucauldian terms, students of Russian culture contribute to and/or destabilize the ‘regimes of knowledge’ governing what is meaningful, adequate and reasonable to know about this culture.1 The position from which these regimes are established is of primary importance: know­ledge positioned outside Russia, within a national framework that has experienced instances of military, religious and/or economic conflict with Russia, is likely to differ significantly from knowledge produced in Russia proper. This was a conspicuous trait of Cold War Soviet studies, which in the West favoured topics such as Stalinist terror and persecuted poets, topics deemed unsuitable by Soviet academia. Since the procla­mation of glasnost and the subsequent political changes, the range of topics researched within the Russian and post-Soviet university commu­nity has expanded significantly. However, the Cold War ceasefire has not diminished the importance of knowledge positioning. When West­ern countries are allowed to set the agenda nowadays, the focus tends to be on issues such as the illegal dissemination of nuclear technology, ecological disaster, poverty, trafficking, mail-order brides and organized crime. This preference is especially obvious in media reporting about Russia, but could also be detected among successful research grant pro­posals and thematic journal issues in the Anglophone academic world. Impregnated with ideology, this discourse is not innocent and eventu­ally turns into practices. While Cold War discourse in the West resulted in legal measures enhancing migration from the Soviet Union,2 post­war discourse often translates into restrictive immigration legislation and discriminating visa procedures.
Gender and Nation
Abstract The article outlines some of the main dimensions in which gender relations are crucial in understanding and analysing the phenomena of nations and nationalism, and the specific boundaries of inclusions and exclusions that they construct. Three major dimensions of nationalist projects that relate to citizenship, culture and origin are differentiated. In each of them gender relations play specific roles and have mobilized specific struggles. The article looks at the dualistic nature of women's citizenship, as both included and excluded from the general body of citizens. Even when there is a formal equality of women in their political rights as citizens, other modes of exclusion in the political, social and civil spheres continue to operate. The particular ways in which the entry of women into the military has been linked to struggles for women's equality as citizens are examined in this context. In relation to national cultures, both secular and religious, the article examines the ways in which wom...
Marxism and Nationalism
The conceptualisation of national phenomena presents a series of difficulties and contradictions for modern social theories. Since the emergence of both Marxism and sociology, the concern of theory has been to explain social phenomena by constantly refining a universal logic. Slowly but surely, the apparent mystery of specificities and localisms was to be unravelled by the penetrating force of logically refined and empirically tested theories. Their task was to enhance human perceptions of social realities, much in the same way as the theory of gravity and the theory of relativity enhanced tie understanding of the way in which the universe works. The Tower of Pisa and the Newtonian Apple were no longer self contained phenomena, but the result of the laws of gravity, an aprioristic condition that transcended the immediate existence of the tower and the apple. Thus, the modern concept of causality emerged in Physics, as the at times empirical, at times theoretical, ascertainable combination of conditions which is usually followed by a predictable occurrence which constitutes its effect.1