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Paper short abstract

Based on interviews conducted in Russia, the paper examines how female political activists navigate interactions with state authorities by mobilizing categories of kinship and traditional gender roles.

Paper long abstract

Protest communities in contemporary Russia are often understood solely through the lens of implicit or explicit resistance, presupposing the existence of a specific subject, independent from the state and internally coherent. It is particularly difficult to reframe the dichotomy between the violent state and resistance communities without undermining the community's moral purity. In addition, any collaboration with state structures is fraught with the possibility of becoming an unwitting co-author of violence. But the possibility of political expression and action in today’s Russia is shaped within the state not only by institutional but also categorical systems.

The paper examines how, by performing traditional gender roles when interacting with authorities in unsafe situations and presenting themselves as “proper” and as belonging to the state's traditional gender system, female political anti-war activists delegitimize and mitigate violence against them. In court, during detentions and arrests, women translate themselves into the language of the state, becoming “childish girls,” “brides,” “nieces,” “mothers,” and, more generally, “relatives.” While remaining political, their actions simultaneously shift into the private realm.

Respondents rarely describe their actions as a conscious strategy and emphasize the absence of reflective distance in the moment of interaction. Based on in-depth interviews, the paper explores how activists integrate the experience of resistance and collaboration with the state into various narratives through frameworks of irony, fun, surrealism, goal-setting, risks, and benefits.

The paper contributes to critiques of liberal models of agency by showing how political subjectivity emerges not only through resisting norms, but through inhabiting them.