Inherent complexities of gender and sexuality in Russia: emotional communities in women’s online activism

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to dramatic social changes in Russia. The decriminalization of homosexuality and the emergence of the first grassroots movements for women’s rights, as well as for gay and lesbian rights, led to the rise of feminist and LGBTQ-rights movements in the 2000s and 2010s and discursive shifts in the gender order;¹ that is, societal attitudes to gender roles and societal views and opinions on sexuality.² Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, largely because of economic hardships and the ‘feminization of poverty’, women started to resent the traditional ‘double burden’ pattern of gendered labour inherited from the Soviet era – the pattern that entailed women being expected to combine the roles of full-time workers and full-time mothers and primary carers.³ The ‘gender contract’ of the Soviet era, typified by the ‘working mother’, was contested by a new post-Soviet gender identity of the self-made career woman, which appealed to many women under the circumstances of growing economic freedom and business opportunities.⁴ There was a negative attitude to Soviet-style gender equality, which Francesca Stella and Nadya Nartova argue:

distorted men and women’s ‘natural’ gender roles by ‘emasculating’ men (by reducing their authority in the private sphere of the family) and ‘masculinising’ women (by granting them access to ‘male’ occupations and diverting their energies from their ‘natural’ calling as mothers and carers).⁵

Similar to the expansion of the range of gender contracts, societal attitudes to sexuality in post-Soviet Russia were also evolving, leading to a higher visibility of non-heteronormative individuals or so-called ‘sexual minorities’ (seksual’nye menshinstva). Laurie Essig pointed out that the discursive implications of the Soviet and post-Soviet Russian term ‘sexual minorities’ is broader and more complex than the hetero/homo binary opposition: it denotes a similar range of identities, behaviours and images for which the umbrella term of ‘queer’ is normally used.⁶ Since the 1990s, the discursive context of naming and reference of non-heteronormative identities in which contemporary Russian activism for LGBTQ rights is operating has evolved considerably. As I have discussed elsewhere, current public discourses on LGBTQ issues in Russia are characterized by the intermittent use of the terms linked to the Soviet past and discourses of medicalization and criminalization of non-heteronormativity (e.g. homosexualism/gomoseksualizm; non-traditional sexual orientation/netraditsionnaia seksual’naia orientatsiia), as well as of the LGBTQ-inclusive terms related to identity politics (e.g. gay/gei; homosexual/gomoseksual).⁷ LGBTQ-catered initiatives, activist groups and media outlets have been contributing to further diversity of terminology related to non-heteronormativity and non-cisnormativity: thus, among younger LGBTQ Russians the trend of using the term ‘queer’ as an equivalent of ‘gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender’ has become popular in recent years.⁸

The failure of queer grassroots movements to gain momentum after the dissolution of the USSR and the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1993, coupled with an overall neo-conservative political turn towards the state-promoted discourse of institutionalized heteronormativity and ‘traditional’ values, resulted in a strong societal backlash against feminist and LGBTQ-rights movements. In 2013, this neo-conservative backlash manifested itself in the introduction of article 6.21 of Federal Law 135-FZ (the legislation that aims to protect children from harmful information): similarly to the UK Section 28, the added article banned promotion of non-traditional sexual relationships among minors. In particular, it prohibited the mediation of non-traditional sexuality in a positive, attractive and favourable light.⁹ In 2017, restrictive medical procedures for obtaining permission for gender transition were introduced,¹⁰ and in the same year certain forms of domestic violence were decriminalized in Russia.¹¹ These legislative attacks on LGBTQ and women’s rights significantly complicated the work of feminist and LGBTQ-rights activists. Another piece of legislation restricting such activism (as well as any offline street activism) in contemporary Russia is the notorious article 7 of the Federal Law 54-FZ, requiring any street action which has more than one participant to be authorized and officially permitted by local governments. This effectively means that local governments have the power to stop any oppositional protest, while participation in an unauthorized protest is classified as an administrative offence.

In the patriarchal, heteronormative and sexist culture promoted by the Russian neo-conservative political and media elites since Vladimir Putin’s first presidency, the increasing infringement of the rights of both heterosexual and LBT (lesbian, bisexual, transgender) women,¹² as well as the legislation restricting activism, the work of NGOs¹³ and digital media, created a complex and difficult environment for feminist and LBT-rights activists to operate in. One of the responses to this conservative pressure was the consolidation of LBT-rights and feminist movements, in particular in the form of online activism on social media platforms. Social networking sites have become a valuable tool of participatory media cultures because of the vast opportunities they offer for ‘bridging social capital’ by linking various communities, and ‘linking social capital’ by facilitating communication between different social classes.¹⁴ Lacking such crucial resources as funding, legal support and human resources, feminist and LBT-rights activists have turned to social media platforms as digital activist spaces, where they rely heavily on their individual capital – and in particular on their emotional capital.

The current chapter investigates the ways in which Russian female activists for bisexual and transgender rights can use their ‘gendered emotions’ to promote their respective agendas, to transgress binary monosexist and cis-normative discourses and to produce mediations and self-mediations of non-binary gender and sexual identities. The choice of bisexual and transgender rights activism is prompted by the fact that these marginalized social groups are minorities within minorities, in the sense that they suffer from double discrimination on the part of LGBTQ communities and of society as a whole.¹⁵ I particularly focus on bisexual and transgender women who, on top of the double stigma on the grounds of their position within LGBTQ communities, as women suffer from further discrimination because of the ubiquity of Russian sexism, as well as from exclusionary rhetoric and policies of some of the factions of the feminist movement.¹⁶

For the purposes of the current analysis, emotions are interpreted, on the one hand, as a biological and universal aptitude for feeling and the expression of feelings and, on the other, as learned, socially constructed practices, a kind of gendered performance.¹⁷ Social media is known to influence emotions and gender, having a ‘distinctive relation to emotion within and across social groups’.¹⁸ The axes of social media and gender are particularly crucial to this research, which aims to identify how women’s online activism strategies challenge or support gender-emotion stereotypes existing in contemporary Russia.

Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of capital as accumulated labour¹⁹ which can be exchanged for various benefits (such as services or esteem),²⁰ I understand ‘emotional capital’ as a concept composed of ‘emotion-based knowledge, management skills, and capacities to feel that links self-processes and resources to group membership and social location’.²¹ Building on the idea that activist networks ‘act as a link to emotional community while promoting further political activity’,²² I perceive activists’ emotional capital as one of the most significant tools in their creation of, and operation within, activist groups as emotional communities.

For the purpose of this analysis, the concept of ‘emotional communities’ is understood as ‘groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value – or devalue – the same or related emotions’.²³ I conceptualize the work of feminist bisexual and transgender activists (performed at the intersection of feminist and LGBTQ-rights movements) as emotional communities themselves. Scholarship on networked activism has highlighted how ‘networks of activism … emerge from the interaction of activists, in shared physical and/or emotional spaces’.²⁴ I understand contemporary Russian LGBTQ activism as creating and maintaining emotional spaces where marginalized LGBTQ people can feel safe, welcome, and accepted. These emotional spaces are as significant for activists as the physical spaces they create or occupy, and are central to the emergence of emotional communities where freedom of expression is provided and respect for all individual experiences is observed. Digital emotional spaces allow activists, among other things, to share personal confessional narratives which help challenge harmful stereotypes, educate audiences on important issues related to sexuality and gender, deal with sensitive and tabooed topics and, in general, serve as an identity-building tool.²⁵ Ultimately, such emotional communities provide a basis and support network for further activism.

I am particularly interested in how the intersection of these two emotional communities affects bisexual and transgender women’s online activism, what challenges this intersection poses and what opportunities it offers. In order to address this research objective, I apply a tripartite approach to activists’ work within emotional communities: I look at the ways in which activists use their own emotional capital in their activist work (e.g. whether they opt for expressing or suppressing certain emotions; whether they choose to invest their emotional resources in others or not). Another aspect I study is how online activism affects activists’ own emotional states (i.e. their emotional experience). Finally, I look at how wider communities regulate activists’ expression of certain emotions: whether activists testify to any form of censorship and control or whether there is unconditional support of whatever emotions are expressed.

Women’s activism as a gendered discourse of ‘unruly’ emotions

From the 2012 Pussy Riot ‘Punk Prayer’ in Moscow to the opening of the first women-only coffee shop ‘Simona’ in Saint Petersburg in 2019, Russian female activists have transgressed and appropriated public spaces as a locus of the fight for gender equality and women’s rights. Throughout the 2010s, a similar battle has been taking place in Russian digital spaces, in particular on the global social networking website Facebook (www.facebook.com), its Russian counterpart VKontakte (www.vk.com) and most recently on social media platforms Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Telegram messenger, the latter being popular among activists because of its extra security and full protection of all shared content from government surveillance.²⁶ Internet-based activism has become vital for such marginalized and discriminated social groups as bisexual and transgender women, representatives of ‘minorities within minorities’,²⁷ and as a result the number of Russian feminist and bisexual and transgender rights activists relying on digital activism has been constantly growing.²⁸

The internet as a gendered digital space reflects the gendered discourse of technology as technical objects and machines initially monopolized by men, as part of gendered masculine capital.²⁹ Computer programming and, in a wider sense, anything related to IT tended to be seen by contemporary societies as predominantly male activities.³⁰ However, recently, with the gradual closing of a gendered digital divide and with more and more women gaining access to IT, scholars have started conceptualizing the internet and in particular social media platforms as spaces where the transgression and transformation of social institutions are facilitated.³¹

For example, the 2016 campaign #IamNotafraidToTell (IaNeboiusSkazat’), a local equivalent of the global #MeToo movement which took place both on the Russophone Facebook and on the Russian social networking site VKontakte, prompted wide debates over whether it is acceptable for women to share such personal, intimate, emotionally charged stories online.³² Another example of societal debates on how women should express their emotions online is the case of the 2019 ‘Lushgate’ campaign in support of Bella Rapoport, a Russian journalist, gender studies scholar and prominent lesbian feminist activist. In March 2019, in an Instagram story, Rapoport expressed her disappointment in the pro-feminist brand Lush which chose not to support her with a collaboration. This confession made Rapoport a subject of trolling and hate mail from users of Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, and the cyberbullying was further continued by multiple online media and mainstream media.³³ The emotions shared in the Instagram story were interpreted as a transgression of socially acceptable feminine emotional boundaries by an overdemanding and self-absorbed feminist: a ‘good’ woman does not use her emotions to demand benefits for herself but uses them to benefit others. In the autumn of 2019, a similar case of cyberbullying evolved around Nika Vodvud, one of Russia’s most popular and well-known feminist activists and blogger who identifies as a bisexual woman.³⁴ Vodvud confessed in the media that she had been a victim of cyberbullying for a long time. The media coverage following her confession was far from supportive: the long interview with the activist carried out by Russia’s prominent liberally biased media outlet meduza.io³⁵ portrayed Vodvud as an overly emotional, overreacting woman, whereas Vodvud’s detractors, predominantly male, were quoted and represented as rational and sensible individuals.³⁶

The examples mentioned above are only a few of the numerous cases where female activists have faced a backlash of complex societal responses to their transgressive emotional expression and gendered behaviour online. Such responses, on the one hand, lead to attempts by female activists to create digital safe spaces for mutual support. On the other hand, they result in the fragmentation of female online activist networks and their respective audiences. Such fragmentation can potentially occur if there are differences in the audiences’ attitudes to emotional outbursts online: in other words, if there are dissimilarities in the views on acceptable ‘modes of feeling, and ways to express those feelings’ and on ‘important norms concerning the emotions that they value and deplore and the modes of expressing them’.³⁷ The two case studies discussed here, of Saint Petersburg-based female activists for bisexual and transgender rights, demonstrate how the complexities and challenges posed by digital activist spaces affect specific online activist practices.

I first met these two female activists in 2015 when I joined one of Russia’s largest LGBTQ communities on Facebook – ‘LGBT Discussion Board’ (LGBT-diskussionnaia ploshchadka, www.facebook.com/groups/lgbt.discussion, accessed 14 June 2023; in May 2022 the group counted 9,800 members). It did not take me long to identify that Olga Masina was at that time almost solely responsible for raising awareness of bi-visibility, bi-erasure, bi-phobia and other problems and topics crucial for bisexual communities in Russia and beyond. I also noted a significant contribution made to online discussions by Ekaterina Messorosh, one of the group administrators, who acted as the most prominent advocate for transgender people’s rights in the LGBT Discussion Board group.

Between November 2017 and January 2018, I closely monitored the women’s own social media pages which they used for their activism,³⁸ and I approached Olga and Ekaterina with a request to participate in research interviews, to which they eagerly agreed, allowing me to use their real names for the project. In Ekaterina’s case, at the time of the project the social media platform she tended to use was her personal Facebook account. In Olga’s case, the online activist tools included two public communities she administered: the Facebook community ‘Bisexual rights movement “LuBI”’ (www.facebook.com/groups/1453792034842926, accessed 14 June 2023; the group had 340 members in May 2022) and the public group ‘Bisexuality // Biseksual’nost’ on telegram.org (https://t.me/bisexuality_Lubi, accessed 27 June 2023; the community had 509 members in June 2023). The monitoring of these three media pages consisted of daily observations of all media content (own posts, reposted posts, shared links to external websites, memes, photos, videos, comments) published by the activists, which was saved in the form of screengrabs for further analysis.³⁹

At the time the research interviews were conducted, Ekaterina Messorosh primarily used her personal Facebook account for online activism. However, when I took brief follow-up interviews with both the respondents in 2019, Ekaterina informed me that she had changed her preferences and was now more active on her personal account on VKontakte, which had subsequently become her primary activist platform. In the respective follow-up interview, Olga informed me of having minimized her involvement in activism for personal and health reasons. Because of these changes in online activism practices that had taken place between the media data collection and the completion of this chapter, I have excluded the media content analysis aspect from the current research as out of date. Thus, the current chapter draws fully on the data obtained during the two research interviews I took from the activists in December 2017 – that is, on first-hand narratives of the activists’ experiences of applying their emotional capital while operating in intersecting emotional communities of feminist and LGBTQ-rights movements.

The in-depth semi-structured interviews with Olga and Ekaterina centred on the following topics: what factors influenced the women’s decision to take up activism; what forms of offline activism, if any, they used; what online platforms they preferred and why; what kind of activities they considered to be their most important contribution; and how their identities as feminists and representatives of the LGBTQ community intersected. When processing the obtained data for the purpose of the current chapter, I focused on how the activists conceptualized their work in terms of the use of emotions and emotional capital, as well as in terms of emotional responses to their activism on the part of wider activist communities and the general public.

Emotions and acceptance: the challenges of invisibility and bisexual rights activism

At the start of the interview, Olga Masina stated that it was the 2013 Federal Law banning promotion of positive opinions and views about non-traditional sexual relations that brought her to LGBTQ-rights activism: she was ‘horrified and outraged’ (uzhasnulas’ i vozmutilas’) when the legislation was passed. Olga said that she joined the already existing bisexual rights initiative ‘LuBI’ (the name contains a pun: it sounds like the second-person singular form of the verb ‘love’ in the imperative mood – liubi, and it also contains the word ‘bi’, which in Russian is pronounced as ‘bee’). Olga explained that she was soon left alone to oversee the VKontakte and Facebook pages linked to the initiative. Despite other activists leaving the group because of burnout or relocation, Olga took part in as many activist events devoted to bisexual rights as she could. Olga quoted one particular event as her most memorable and successful because of the overwhelming support of the benevolent, friendly general public and because of the overall feelings of ‘solemnity’ (torzhestvennost’) she experienced when participating in it. A street action called ‘The Zoo’ was organized by the Alliance of Heterosexuals for LGBT-rights and took place on the bisexual visibility day, 23 September 2017. Olga was handing out leaflets and suggesting the passers-by talk to her female colleague, who was sitting nearby, wearing a costume of a fantasy creature and carrying a placard saying ‘Common Bisexual’ (Biseksualka obyknovennaia). When asked how she felt about being part of the wider LGBTQ community, Olga replied it was a ‘striped’ (polosatoe) feeling: at times she felt included, but sometimes she felt as if she were not exactly unwelcome but rather ‘not taken into account, ignored’ (ne vosprinimaiut). As an illustration of how such ignoring and exclusion on the part of the wider community tends to unfold, Olga narrated her experience of collaboration with Russia’s biggest LGBTQ film festival Side-by-Side (Bok-o-bok; https://bok-o-bok.com/en, accessed 14 June 2023).

The incident evolved around a brochure on how to write about LGBTQ people correctly, which is published by the Side-by-Side organizers to be distributed amongst media professionals during the annual film festival. Having initially joined Side-by-Side as a volunteer, Olga noted that the first 2013 edition of the brochure contained special sections on inclusive language depicting gays, lesbians and transgender people but had nothing on bisexuals and other non-monosexual people. Since in 2017 a new edition of the brochure was planned, Olga offered to write such a section and the organizers agreed. Although Olga did produce the text and then amended it several times in accordance with all the corrections and suggestions on the part of the editors, her text on bi-inclusive language was not published in the 2017 edition of the brochure. In Olga’s own words, she felt ‘indignant, resentful’ (vosmushchena), and it felt as if it were all for naught, as if she were banging her head against a wall (b’ius’ golovoi ob stenu).

When she approached the editors and organizers for an explanation, Olga was informed that her text was not suitable. At our interview she read aloud from her phone the response from the editors: according to them, the text was too ‘oppressive’ (tekst davit); it did not make it clear to the editors why they ‘should bother with and keep in mind yet another group’ within the community (pochemu ia dolzhna zamorachivat’sia i pomnit’ o drugoi gruppe). The suggestions on bi-inclusive language which Olga mentioned as desirable were branded ‘aggressive’ (agressivnye zamechaniia) and ‘far-fetched’ (iskustvenno pridumannye), and the overall tone of the text was said to be marked by ‘pretentiousness and weakness of argumentation’ (pretentsioznost’ i neubeditel’nost’). It was recommended that Olga should make the text and the argumentation ‘less emotional’ (menee emotsional’nym).⁴⁰

According to Olga, such an exclusion of bisexual people on the grounds of excess emotionality, lack of argumentation and aggression is not rare in the Russian LGBTQ community. As a social group suffering from double discrimination (stigmatized within the LGBTQ community and by heteronormative society), bisexual people face extreme difficulties in trying to get their message across and in fighting for visibility and inclusion. The exclusion of bisexual people from public discourses, especially media, contributes to the invisibility of this ‘minority within minority’.⁴¹ However, bi-activists’ insistence on the use of bi-inclusive language in LGBTQ-catered digital and offline spaces and in relevant media texts tends to be perceived by monosexual members of the LGBTQ community as transgressive, threatening or overstepping the boundaries.

The case with the Side-by-Side brochure demonstrated that, as an emotional community, LGBTQ-rights activists can regulate which members of the group are allowed to express emotions and what kind of emotions these should be, and they can also decide whose emotional capital is valid and desirable. An activist whose emotional capital is invalidated, devalued – whose emotional investment in activism is not appreciated – cannot but suffer from such exclusionary policies on the part of the aspired and desired emotional community.

When it comes to feminist communities, bisexual women face certain challenges too. Thus, Olga testified that, although she identifies as a feminist, she cannot always find common grounds with feminist communities: not all sections of the feminist movement in Russia demonstrate acceptance of bisexual people. According to Olga, she encountered the highest level of biphobia when communicating with radical feminists; it was with radical feminists that Olga most often found herself in emotional confrontations while exploring digital spaces. The reasons for the confrontations were primarily related to the gender versus sex debates and misandry, the radical feminist communities tending to discard the concept of gender and demonstrating misandrist rhetoric, which Olga challenged in respective social media threads (chasche vsego rugaius’ v setiakh iz-za etogo). Queer feminists, on the other hand, as Olga vouched, were generally bi-friendly, largely due to both queer feminists and the Russian bi-community’s shared views on fights against binarism and binary approaches to gender and sexuality.

As the interview with Olga Masina demonstrated, the challenges faced by bisexual communities beyond Russia, such as the erasure of bisexual people from and their invisibility in public and media discourses,⁴² and the outright or undercurrent biphobia on the part of LGBTQ communities and heteronormative society,⁴³ are acute problems for Russian bisexual people too. On top of that, the interview also revealed that Russian bisexual female activists identifying as feminist face specific challenges characteristic of the contemporary Russian feminist movement. Apart from consistently strong societal backlashes against the feminist movement in general, these challenges include competition for available resources (especially media and digital spatial resources) amongst various factions, which leads to the problem of hierarchies within the movement.⁴⁴ In these circumstances, acceptance by the desired emotional community, and the opportunity that such acceptance establishes to use one’s own emotional capital for achieving activist goals and other benefits, becomes crucial for bisexual rights female activists.

Emotions and empowerment: transgender rights activism as a means of activist identity-building

At the beginning of the interview, while discussing the origins of and driving factors behind her activism, Ekaterina Messorosh shared that her transition and the start of her transgender rights activism served as a turning point for her and led to significant changes in her behaviour, emotional expression and communication style. Ekaterina explained that prior to her transition she had considered herself an introvert, but afterwards it turned out she is actually an extrovert: ‘I used to think of myself as a misanthrope but it turned out I am very empathetic, I love socializing. … Now, apart from really odious individuals, I do not feel any enmity for anyone’ (Ia schitala sebia mizantropom; okazalos’, chto ia ochen’ empatichnaia, mne nravitsia obshchat’sia s liud’mi. … Seichas u menia net, krome sovsem odioznykh lichnostei, kakoi-to nepriiazni). As Ekaterina pointed out, her transition resulted not only in the appearance of a keen interest in online activism but also in a consistent necessity for self-advocacy online, which made it easier for her to process the ongoing changes related to her transition.

Soon after starting her transition in 2015, Ekaterina changed her social media accounts accordingly to reflect these changes, which soon led her to realize she was ‘an odd duck’ (belaia vorona) among her friends on social media. Ekaterina explained that for her, stealth (passing as a woman and breaking contact with whoever knew of her previous gendered experience) was never on the cards, and this fact helped her realize that social media gave her an opportunity to promote transgender rights and to raise awareness of transgender issues via the creation, posting and sharing of relevant media content on her personal account pages.

Apart from these educational goals, from the very beginning Ekaterina’s online activism was aimed at developing and refining her rhetoric, self-advocacy and argumentation techniques. For example, the activist admitted that she used to intentionally generate debates and confrontations with TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist) activists. As Ekaterina explained, getting emotionally triggered in those discussions with transphobic opponents helped her to learn how to manage her own emotions and enabled her to develop a habit of relying on logical unemotional argumentation when discussing transgender issues online. As Ekaterina put it, one needs to ‘dive headfirst and deep into that swamp’ (zanyrnut’ v boloto s golovoi) and thus to expose oneself to all the possible transphobic stereotypes. Exposure to TERF hatred, and the need to formulate anti-transphobic arguments, eventually enabled her to fully accept her own identity as a transgender woman. As she confessed, at first the hatred used to ‘hurt her immensely’ (ochen’ sil’no ranilo): identifying as a feminist and perceiving feminism as a movement for gender equality, it was difficult for her to consider TERFs, whose rhetoric rejects the concept of gender and therefore of transgenderism, as feminist. Soon enough, though, she learned to manage her emotions and to resist transphobic attacks. Quoting Ekaterina, ‘sometimes a trigger is necessary – a change is impossible without pain’ (inogda trigger nuzhen, nevozmozhno chto-to meniat’ bez boli).

The experience of confrontations with TERFs helped Ekaterina later on to deal with transphobia in fora and virtual communities for transgender people. According to Ekaterina, ‘it is hard to find non-transphobic transfora’ (slozhno naiti netransfobnye forumy) because as soon as transgender transition is mentioned by the forum and virtual community members, the question of ‘trueness/genuineness’ (tuiiovost’) is invariably raised. This issue relates to being a ‘true’ transgender; that is, someone ‘who had it the hardest with the medical evaluation committee’ (u kogo bylo bol’she zhesti na komissii).

As Ekaterina testified, when challenging biologized and essentialist ideas of gender and sex widespread among Russian transgender people, as well as while fighting to challenge the gender binary in heated debates on binary versus non-binary concepts of gender with other transgender rights activists, she always applied the skills of logical unemotional argumentation and reliance on facts and accurate scientific terminology, which she had developed in confrontations with TERFs. Thus, for example, Ekaterina would point to the fact that since in the Russian language there is no distinction between male/female and man/woman (for each semantic pair the words muzhchina/man and zhenshchina/woman are used), discussions among transitioning transgender people about becoming ‘true men’ or ‘true women’ in the biological meaning of those words made little sense: it would be more appropriate to use the terms applied when talking about male and female species of animals (samets and samka, respectively). Or, when challenging the use of incorrect expressions like ‘he/she changed sex’, Ekaterina would confront the opponent by enumerating various aspects comprising the notion of ‘sex’ (sex hormones; chromosomal, gonadal, morphological, endocrinologic and assigned sex) and would question which of those aspects can actually ‘change’ during a gender transition and whether it is possible at all to talk about ‘sex change’ at the current stage of medical advancements.

At the end of the interview, when talking about how her online activism had evolved since 2015, Ekaterina admitted that her activist goals on social media platforms had changed: the primary focus was now on reaching out to wider audiences, whereas before ‘the primary goal was to learn to get my arguments across in the right way, avoiding personal attacks, blocking all emotions’ (ran’she osnovnaia tsel’ byla nauchit’sia pravil’no argumentirovat’, ne perekhodit’ na lichnosti, ne ispytyvat’ emotsii). One of the means Ekaterina used to attract new supporters consisted of juxtaposing her unemotional argumentation with the emotional attacks of her opponents. As she confessed, oftentimes she would consciously provoke or manipulate the opponent to make them lose their temper and resort to emotional rhetoric, which conveniently contrasted with Ekaterina’s own strong logical argumentation.

The above case study reveals that transgender women’s emotional capital can be affected significantly and crucially both by the experience of transitioning and their involvement in activism, with these two factors intersecting. Thus, Ekaterina’s transition affected her personality in terms of how she managed emotion-based knowledge, and in her emotion management skills: not only did she develop extroverted features and realize her own potential for empathy, she also acquired valuable skills in controlling and holding her emotions (i.e. withholding, keeping her emotional capital) in order to achieve activist goals. Recognizing that online emotional communities perceive emotional outbursts during heated debates as an undesirable sign of weakness, Ekaterina perfected the skills of both keeping calm under transphobic attacks (as a manifestation of her opinions and views being well grounded) and provoking transphobic opponents for said emotional outbursts (to highlight the weakness of transphobic attitudes and views). The case study of Ekaterina Messorosh’s online activism demonstrates how the experience of transgender rights activism performed online in intersecting emotional communities of feminist and LGBTQ activists can serve as a tool for the empowerment and liberation of a transgender woman.

Reflections and suggestions for further study

The two case studies demonstrated the significance of emotions, emotional capital and emotional communities for women’s online activism. The adoption of certain practices of using emotional capital (investing emotions in the activist work, as in Olga Masina’s case, or holding back emotions while educating social media audiences on transgender issues, as in Ekaterina Messorosh’s case) can both offer advantages and pose challenges to Russian female activists for bisexual and transgender rights who operate under the circumstances of double stigmatization, as minorities within minorities. The use of only two case studies makes it difficult to declare with confidence whether the activist strategies and trends presented in this chapter are intrinsic solely to the respondents of the study or whether they are shared by other bisexual and transgender activists across Russia. Nevertheless, the two case studies reveal that transgressive online social activism of this kind is discursively linked to the creation of ‘emotional communities’ by like-minded bisexual and transgender (feminist) women.

As for the scope of this study, it is important to recognize the inherent limitations of women’s and LGBTQ-rights activism in Russia that existed at the time of this project being completed and which still persist at the time of this chapter being written. In contemporary Russia, even more so after the Russian invasion of Ukraine which took place in February 2022 and led to a further crackdown on civil rights and activist groups, activism often becomes a privilege. Participation in street protests can result in being detained and fined, or brought to trial; participation in online activism also presents risks, as social media are being monitored by the Russian police and there have been numerous cases when activists were persecuted for their online publications. There is a practice in Russia that any charges or detainments made by the police can be reported to one’s workplace, potentially resulting in a dismissal, and there are cases in which civil rights activists have lost their jobs because of their activism.

Both my respondents at the time of the interviews were in relatively secure jobs, which allowed some freedom or flexibility because of their work. In 2017–18, Olga was working on a PhD in philosophy and carrying out some teaching activities at the university as a postgraduate student, and had a regular salary. She could not be photographed during street protests, but other than that she enjoyed a certain freedom of action and expression. Ekaterina, in her own words, is ‘from a university environment’: she obtained a university degree in sciences and at the time of the interview was employed in a high-skilled job, where colleagues were accepting of her gender transition. Thus, a secure job and working alongside people with a higher education background can sometimes act as a social support for a female activist, while not having enough social support can potentially prevent women from openly and freely participating in activist groups and initiatives. Another privilege which both my respondents enjoyed is living in Saint Petersburg as a big urban space with a well-developed infrastructure and access to various activist projects and initiatives. LGBTQ-rights and feminist activism are far more problematic for those who live in smaller regional centres or provincial towns. Finally, feminist and LGBTQ-rights activism in contemporary Russia is complicated by Eurocentric and Russocentric discourses promoted by conservative elites and leading activists alike. These discourses permeate the public spheres, impacting societal attitudes to non-Russian, non-white, non-Christian (i.e. Muslim or Jewish) identities,⁴⁵ and are also replicated both by Russian and Western media covering feminist and LGBTQ-related events in Russia.⁴⁶ This tendency turns Russian LGBTQ-rights and feminist activism into a discursive space of contested ‘whiteness’.

In view of the above limitations, further inquiry into the evolvement of and the practices applied by a wider range of Russian emotional communities of bisexual and transgender rights activists in digital spaces would offer opportunities for insightful and innovative findings. An approach which utilizes the concepts of emotional capital and emotional community proves to be an efficient means of investigation into contemporary Russian online activism for women’s and LGBTQ rights.

Notes

1. 1.  S. Ashwin, ‘The Influence of the Soviet Gender Order on Employment Behavior in Contemporary Russia’, Sociological Research, 41 (2002), 21–37.

2. 2.  S. Ashwin (ed.), Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (London: Routledge, 2000).

3. 3.  F. Stella, Lesbian Lives in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia: Post/Socialism and Gendered Sexualities (Basingstoke: Springer, 2014).

4. 4.  Set of implicit and explicit rules governing gender relations, and which allocate different work, value, responsibilities and obligations to women and men. From 100 Words for Equality: A Glossary of Terms on Equality between Women and Men (European Commission, 1998).

5. 5.  F. Stella, and N. Nartova, ‘Sexuality, Nationalism and Biopolitics in Putin’s Russia’, in F. Stella, Y. Taylor, T. Reynolds and A. Rogers (eds.), Sexuality, Citizenship and Belonging: Trans/National and Intersectional Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 37.

6. 6.  L. Essig, Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self and the Other (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 56–82.

7. 7.  O. Andreevskikh, ‘Queering #MeToo: Russian Media Discourse on Same-Sex Sexual Harassment in the Context of a Global Anti-Harassment Movement’, in G. Miazhevich (ed.), Queering Russian Media and Culture (London: Routledge, 2022).

8. 8.  O. Andreevskikh, ‘Russian Queer (Counter-)Revolution? The Appropriation of Western Queer Discourses by Russian LGBT Communities: A Media Case Study’, Queer Asia Blog Series ‘Queer’ + Decoloniality in Post-Socialist States (2021), https://queerasia.com/2021-blog-russian-queer-revolution (accessed 8 July 2022).

9. 9.  A. Kondakov (ed.), Na Pereput’ie. Metodologiia, Teoriia i Praktika LGBT i Kvir-Issledovanii. Sbornik Stat’ei (Saint Petersburg: Center for Independent Social Research, 2014).

10. 10.  Y. Kirey-Sitnikova, ‘Who Rejects Depathologization? Attitudes of Russian-Speaking Trans People toward Revision of the International Classification of Diseases’, International Journal of Transgenderism, 18 (2017), 79–90.

11. 11.  E. Couch, ‘Engines of Change: The Politicization of the Private Sphere and the Rise of Women’s Political Activism in Russia’, Kennan Cable, 49 (2020).

12. 12.  In the Russian language, the word gei (gay) tends to be used almost solely in reference to homosexual men, and not women; in this chapter, I therefore use the abbreviation ‘LBT’ to denote a reference to people who identify as women.

13. 13.  Non-governmental organizations; that is, non-profit organizations supporting a socio-political cause.

14. 14.  T. Flew (ed.), New Media (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 66–78.

15. 15.  W.B. Hagen, S.M. Hoover and S.L. Morrow, ‘A Grounded Theory of Sexual Minority Women and Transgender Individuals’ Social Justice Activism’, Journal of Homosexuality, 65 (2017), 833–59.

16. 16.  J. Serano, Excluded: Making Feminism and Queer Movements More Inclusive (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2013).

17. 17.  K. Dővling, C. von Scheve and E.A. Konijn (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Emotions and Mass Media (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 62.

18. 18.  J.E. Stets and J.H. Turner, Handbook of Sociology of Emotions (New York: Springer, 2006).

19. 19.  P. Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’, in J.E. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory of Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), pp. 241–58.

20. 20.  M.D. Cottingham, ‘Theorizing Emotional Capital’, Theory and Society, 45 (2016), 451–70.

21. 21.  Cottingham, ‘Theorizing Emotional Capital’.

22. 22.  A. Lacey, ‘Networked Communities: Social Centers and Activist Spaces in Contemporary Britain’, Space and Culture, 8 (2005), 286–301.

23. 23.  B.H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 2.

24. 24.  Lacey, ‘Networked Communities’, p. 287.

25. 25.  O. Andreevskikh, ‘Confessional Narratives in Digital Self- and Life-Writing of Bisexual Activists in Russia: A Case Study of Bisexual Identity Building’, in AvtobiografiЯ: Queer Life-Writing in Russia and Beyond (forthcoming in 2023).

26. 26.  O. Andreevskikh and M. Muravyeva, ‘Doing Gender Online: Digital Spaces for Identity Politics’, in D. Gritsenko, M. Wijermars and M. Kopotev (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russian Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 205–19.

27. 27.  Serano, Excluded.

28. 28.  I. Perheentupa, ‘Digital Culture and Feminist Politics in Contemporary Russia: Inside Perspectives’, Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media (digitalicons.org), 19 (2018), 117–27.

29. 29.  P. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).

30. 30.  E. Green and A. Adam (eds.), Virtual Gender: Technology, Consumption, and Identity (London: Routledge, 2001).

31. 31.  V. Arvidsson and A. Foka, ‘Digital Gender: Perspective, Phenomena, Practice’, First Monday, 20 (2015).

32. 32.  S. Ratilainen, M. Wijemars and J. Wilmes, ‘Re-Framing Women and Technology in Global Digital Spaces: An Introduction’, Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media (digitalicons.org), 19 (2018), 1–10.

33. 33.  See, for example, ‘ “I Am a Blogger and I Would Like to Receive Some Cosmetics Set”: The Correspondence between Feminist Activist Bella Rapoport and the Cosmetic Brand Lush Gave Birth to a Meme’, www.bbc.com/russian/other-news-47640832 (accessed 8 July 2022).

34. 34.  In June 2020, Vodvud had over 163,000 followers on Instagram and over 480,000 subscribers on YouTube.

35. 35.  ‘Nixel Pixel, Russia’s Most Famous Feminist, Tells Meduza What Prices Nika Vodvud Has to Pay for Her Activism’, https://meduza.io/feature/2019/09/10/nixel-pixel-samaya-izvestnaya-feministka-rossii (accessed 8 July 2022).

36. 36.  See, for example, ‘Public Response: Meduza Released a Profile of Feminist Activist Nika Vodvud (nixelpixel). The Outlet Was Accused in Promotion of Cyberbullying’, https://esquire.ru/articles/123352-rezonans-meduza-vypustila-profayl-feministki-niki-vodvud-nixelpixel-izdanie-obvinili-v-pooshchrenii-internet-travli (accessed 8 July 2022).

37. 37.  B.H. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 3.

38. 38.  The research was a self-funded three-month project I carried out alongside my primary research on ‘Communicating Non-Heteronormative Masculinities in Contemporary Russian Media: Discourses on “Non-Traditional Sexual Orientation” in the Context of “Traditional Sexuality” Legislation’, which I conducted as part of the PhD programme at the University of Leeds, UK between 2015 and 2020.

39. 39.  The analysis of the media findings obtained during the three months’ monitoring of those social media pages was previously published elsewhere: O. Andreevskikh, ‘Social Networking Sites as Platforms for Transgression: Two Case Studies of Russian Women Involved in Bisexual and Transgender Rights Activism’, Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media, 19 (2018), 11–39, www.digitalicons.org/issue19/social-networking-sites-as-platforms-for-transgression (accessed 8 July 2022).

40. 40.  The text on bi-inclusive language in the media was eventually published in the 2018 edition of the Side-by-Side brochure ‘How to Write about Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender People Correctly’ (Kak korrektno pisat’ o geiakh, lesbiankakh, biseksualakh i transgenderakh), after the joint effort of the bi-community (other bi-activists and I signed an open petition to the editors) and after a fellow LGBTQ-rights activist co-edited with Olga Masina the new version of the document. The text is now used as the primary source of reference of LGBTQ communities and media professionals working with the bisexual rights agenda.

41. 41.  K. Yescavage and J. Alexander, ‘Bi/Visibility’, Journal of Bisexuality, 1 (2000), 173–80.

42. 42.  I. Capulet, ‘With Reps Like These: Bisexuality and Celebrity Status’, Journal of Bisexuality, 10 (2010), 294–308.

43. 43.  K.L. Nutter-Pridgen, ‘The Old, the New, and the Redefined: Identifying the Discourses in Contemporary Bisexual Activism’, Journal of Bisexuality, 15 (2015), 385–413.

44. 44.  I. Perheentupa, ‘Feminist Politics in Neoconservative Russia’, PhD thesis (University of Turku, Finland, 2019).

45. 45.  J. Suchland, ‘The LGBT Specter in Russia: Refusing Queerness, Claiming “Whiteness”’, Gender, Place & Culture, 25 (2018), 1073–88.

46. 46.  H. Sykes, ‘Decolonizing Sporting Homonationalisms’, in The Sexual and Gender Politics of Sport Mega-Events: Roving Colonialism (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 157–61.

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• Suchland, J., ‘The LGBT Specter in Russia: Refusing Queerness, Claiming “Whiteness”’, Gender, Place & Culture, 25 (2018), 1073–88.
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