In times of war, gendered analyses—already marginalized in geopolitical thinking—are often seen as superfluous. When I am asked as a feminist sociologist with regional expertise on Ukraine and the former Soviet Union (FSU) to comment on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, my interlocutors expect me to talk about women, first as victims and then as empowered resistors. However, I suggest the gendered lens reveals that Russia’s war on Ukraine is a significant part of an oppositional “modernity of manliness” project that—despite Western media representations of Russian President Vladimir Putin as a lone dictator who might be mad—is offering a world vision that appeals to many in disparate locales.
Ukrainian Women-as-Victims vs. Empowered Women
In the “women-as-victim” trope, my interlocutors expect a discussion of how the war creates disproportionate burdens on women and girls. They expect me to talk about the politics and practices of genocide, including Russia’s use of rape as a weapon and the atrocities in Bucha (login required). Or perhaps I should discuss the race, class, and gender injustices of Ukraine’s surrogacy industry (login required) exacerbated by war.
The horrific plight of the 265,000 Ukrainian women who were pregnant when Russia invaded Ukraine received international attention after Russia bombed a maternity hospital in Mariupol. just 19 days into the Russian invasion although the war has been ongoing since the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Women gave birth in underground subways in Kyiv while sheltering from bombs with their children.
A UN report found that women-headed households, already more food-insecure prior to the war, were on the losing end of increasing gender gaps in rates of food insecurity and malnutrition. The same UN report notes that this food crisis is not only disproportionately borne by women inside Ukraine, but by women in the more than 120 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East who receive food assistance from the World Food Programme, which is largely dependent on Ukrainian wheat.
In the “empowered woman” trope, interviewers expect me to remind folks of the Ukrainian woman who told a Russian soldier to “put sunflower seeds in your pocket so they grow when you die”—sunflowers being Ukraine’s national flower and a symbol of Ukrainian resistance. I could comment on Olena Zelenska’s role as first lady in making Ukraine’s case to the West. According to Vogue, she has become the “face of her nation—a woman’s face, a mother’s face.” I might explain that Ukraine has a history of women soldiers, which some scholars cite as evidence of a feminist tradition, and note that 25 percent of the Ukrainian armed forces are women. I describe the tenacity and strength of Ukrainian women and the role of migration in the early stages of this conflict in my book, On the Shoulders of Grandmothers: Gender, Migration, and Post-Soviet Nation-State Building (Routledge 2018), where I argue that middle-aged migrant women are producing the so-called new Ukraine transnationally and with an eye to Europe.
All of the above are important for our understanding of the dynamics of Russia’s war on Ukraine. However, in this essay, I suggest that a gendered analysis asks us not only to consider the differential experiences of groups on the ground but also how understandings about the sex/gender/sexuality system can legitimize and make appealing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as part of Russia’s imperial project. Though interesting, the conversation about Ukraine as a bulwark of democracy against Russian fascism or nihilism misses the gendered appeal of Putin’s imperial vision.
Putin’s geopolitical project is fundamentally one about gender and sexuality. It frames and advances a modernity that centers manliness in opposition to a Western modernity that has centered empowered women. Countries in Africa and the Middle East and large democracies such as India that refuse to condemn Russia’s war are not choosing Russian fascism. What they find appealing is its alternative gendered modernity. In fact, this oppositional modernity of manliness also appeals to the conservative Right in Western Europe and the US. If we dismiss Putin’s rhetoric as crazy, nihilist, or fascist, we ignore the appeal of this oppositional modernity at our peril.
Homophobia, Traditional Values, and Annexation
On September 30, 2022, Putin gave a speech at a ceremony at the Kremlin to announce the annexation of four Ukrainian regions—Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. He called on Kyiv and “their real masters in the West” to recognize popular referendums (login required) in the regions, widely viewed in Ukraine and the West as illegitimate, as the people’s desire to “return to their true, historical Fatherland.” Putin reminded the crowd that Russia is a “country-civilization” in opposition to the “collective West” which “brazenly divides the world into their vassals, into the so-called civilized countries and into the rest,” dividing nations into First and Third Worlds so that “Western racists … add [Russia] to the list of barbarians and savages.” Putin, and many Russians, see gender and sexuality as the fault line between those nations that are seen as modern or as backward.
In our forthcoming book, The Gender Order of Neoliberalism (Polity), Smitha Radhakrishnan and I argue that nation-states since the 1970s have signaled their modernity by answering the question, “How do you treat your women?” Nation-states are now asked, “How do you treat your LGBTQ+ citizens?” Russia notes this dividing line between “gay Europe,” shortened to “Gayropa” in Russian, and Russia’s post-2013 turn toward positioning itself as the defender of so-called traditional values. Putin continued his annexation speech by asking “all citizens of Russia” the following:
[D]o we want to have, here, in our country, in Russia, parent number one, number two, number three instead of mom and dad – have they gone mad out there? Do we really want perversions that lead to degradation and extinction to be imposed on children in our schools from the primary grades? To be drummed into them that there are various supposed genders besides women and men, and to be offered a sex change operation? Do we want all this for our country and our children? For us, all this is unacceptable, we have a different future, our own future. I repeat, the dictatorship of the Western elites is directed against all societies, including the peoples of the Western countries themselves.
Here Putin, as he does in other speeches, suggests that the West’s embrace of LGBTQ+ people is a defining feature of Western modernity and a national security risk to Russia and the post-Soviet world.
As the birth rate drops in Russia and across the region since the Soviet collapse, gay and gender-diverse people are constructed as agents of Western imperialism—Western spies sent to destroy the ethnonation. Consequently, Putin has been targeting LGBTQ+ Russians at home since his return to the presidency in 2012. Gender scholar Emil Edenborg argues that, for Putin, homophobia is geopolitics. Just as Western powers have used modernity discourses of “saving women” to legitimate Western military incursions abroad, so has Putin used discourses of “protecting family values” and homophobia to legitimate Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Although Ukraine, like most of Europe and the US, is not a bastion of queer acceptance, Ukrainians such as Vlad Shast (they/them)—a prominent member of Kyiv’s queer community who works as a stylist and performs as a drag queen “in a slinky pink gown and thigh-high boots”—is the type of image that Putin uses to legitimize Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, corrupted by Gayropa—in much the same way that the image of women in burqas was used to justify US military action in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Putin sees the spread of what the political Right calls gender ideology, not only as a national security threat to Russia and Ukraine, but also as a threat to the West itself—as in the quote above where Putin said that “Western elites” have turned on “peoples of the Western countries themselves.” The West might place Russia in the category of “barbarian” nations, but Putin believes Russia will fulfill its historical, messianic mission of saving Europe and the West from its own degeneracy, characterized by sexual immorality and the dissolution of the so-called natural gender order. Russia will save Europe from itself, and in so doing will offer the world an alternative modernity that centers ideas of manliness and the traditional family.
Yet, how can homophobia and traditional values be presented as modern? We can only understand this perspective in the context of the Cold War and Soviet demise.
Russia’s Oppositional Modernity
During the Cold War, contestations for modernity were centered on nation-states proving they had empowered women. The West worried that the Soviet Union—with women at near full labor participation rates, high university graduation rates, and an enviable array of state services that made it possible for women to work and study—might win the competition for status in the global hierarchy of nations. Claims to modernity and notions of historical progress are a powerful political resource and lie at the heart of global power politics. They have been used to justify control and violence against colonized populations—which is how Ukrainians largely understand their relationship to Russia—as well as against domestic minority groups—which is how Russians largely understand their relationship to Ukraine.
In On the Shoulders of Grandmothers, I argue that when the FSU took a neoliberal turn, many post-Soviet states, including Ukraine, decided that the Soviet policies and support mechanisms provided to facilitate women’s labor market participation (i.e., generous maternity benefits, state-run childcare facilities, and collective dining halls) were too costly for countries trying to compete on a global stage. After all, in the West this labor was simply called housework and their women did this work for free. Thus, in post-Soviet states domestic work devolved back onto the shoulders of women. Without systems of private childcare (or a movement for men to take on caring responsibilities), post-Soviet women’s material links to the paid labor market became increasingly precarious. Simultaneously, capitalist markets were characterized as a masculine arena unfit for women.
Post-Soviet discourse suggests that the Soviet Union had made women too empowered at the expense of men, resulting in masculine women and effeminate men, a distortion of biology that led to Soviet demise. In this context, we can understand why a discourse of traditional family values would take hold in the region. In Ukraine as well as in Russia, the popular belief is that gender egalitarianism and the Soviet gender order “failed.” Although the West champions capitalism as leading to women’s empowerment by simply including women in capitalist markets, in the post-Soviet world capitalism is expected to save men suffering from unemployment and marginalization in families, as well as from the circumstances that contributed to a life expectancy that plummeted so much that Ukrainian sociologist Tatiana Zhurzhenko called Ukrainian men an “endangered species.”
If gender egalitarianism is framed as a failed policy of the past, then traditional family values can be seen as an alternative modernity of the future. If in the past the Soviet state centered social policies that supported women’s so-called liberation, then the future centers men and remasculinization. If, after the collapse of its Soviet welfare institutions, Russia can no longer win the contestations of modernity based on how they treat women and gender-diverse citizens, then shifting the terrain of national competition to manliness improves its odds. One example of this competition over manliness, and by extension which nation-state is more “manly,” can be seen on social media. In 2016, Russia’s deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin tweeted an image of President Putin petting a leopard juxtaposed with an image of US President Barak Obama holding a white poodle with the tagline, “We have different values.” He also tweeted the now iconic image of Putin riding a Siberian horse shirtless.
This oppositional modernity that centers manliness is appealing to populations in disparate locales. The rise of autocratic strongmen around the world competing for who is more misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, war-mongering, and brutally repressive—Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Narendra Modi in India, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, and Donald Trump in the US, to name just a few—means that there are many players seeking to redefine the rules of how nation-states lay claim to the political resources this oppositional modernity makes possible. With the invasion of Ukraine, Putin positions Russia as the leader of a transnational conservative network that allows him to not only create alliances with conservative factions of Western powers but also with postcolonial states in the Global South, whose liberation movements the Soviet Union supported during the Cold War.
As we in the West bear witness to the horror and brutality of Russia’s attempt to forcefully keep Ukraine out of Europe and within its repressive control, it is helpful to keep the stakes of the war at the forefront. A gendered lens focuses our attention on Russia’s war crimes and the death and human suffering endured by Ukraine, a peaceful nation seeking, as part of its nation-state building process, to construct itself as modern—for better or worse—by following Europe’s modernity rules. Although the world might be better off abandoning colonial discourses of modernity and progress altogether, Europe and the US must also recognize that Putin and his modernity of manliness has found fertile ground and cannot be allowed to stand.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
