Imagining Russia

Cover

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Title Page, Copyright Page

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Contents

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Figures

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pp. ix-x

Acknowledgments

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pp. xi-xii

I am deeply grateful for the generous intellectual support given this project by the Women’s Studies community at the University of Maryland, particularly those feminist scholars who introduced me to literatures, perspectives, and ways of understanding the world that I would not otherwise have encountered. Most important among them...

Introduction: Imagining Russia

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pp. 1-19

During the fall of 2005, the fashion design company Diesel featured a jeans advertisement that ran in the United States in GQ Magazine. In this ad, a shirtless young cowboy, culturally intelligible as white, lays prostrate, sprawled in apparent contented exhaustion across a plush red...

1. The Geopolitical Traffic in Gendered Russian Imaginaries

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pp. 21-38

Having discussed in the last chapter the four foundational precepts that undergird my research, my focus in this chapter is to demonstrate the salience of these precepts by providing some information concerning the historical development and deployment of gendered, racialized, and...

2. Freedom for Whom? Support for What? Making Feminist Sense of U.S. Russia Policy

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pp. 39-66

In the little more than two years between the fall of the Berlin Wall in the summer of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, U.S. policymakers who had lived their lives within the context of the cold war came to realize that the geopolitical changes in Eastern Europe necessitated a conceptual reorientation of their understanding...

3. Death and the Maiden: The Representational Violence of Imperial Nostalgia

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pp. 67-92

I first discovered the existence of Anastasia International, Inc., which advertises itself as “the industry leader” in East-West matchmaking,2 while doing preliminary research in the fall of 1996 as part of an undergraduate course on radical women activists in late imperial Russia. After typing “Russian women” into whatever Internet search engine...

4. Crime, Corruption and Chaos: Sex Trafficking and the Failure of United States Russia Policy

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pp. 93-107

In 1997, law enforcement officials raided a brothel in an upscale, predominantly white neighborhood just outside Washington, DC, arresting not only the brothel owners, but also the sex workers, whom police learned had been illegally brought into the United States...

5. “It’s a Cold War Mentality”: U.S.-Russian Relations on The West Wing

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pp. 109-145

Each of the many different approaches to theorizing the origins and mechanisms of nationalism, which I discuss at length in chapter one, argues that the maintenance of nationalism relies upon “the centrality of nationalist story-telling, on the evocative narrative of the links between the past, present and future,”² making popular media crucial to contemporary...

6. The Cultural Politics of Cold War: The International Spy Museum and the U.S. Security State

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pp. 147-177

According to its public relations materials, Washington, DC’s International Spy Museum, which opened to the public in July 2002—just ten months after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center— houses “the largest collection of international espionage artifacts ever placed on public display.”² The museum’s...

Conclusion: Casualties of Cold War

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pp. 179-193

I have explored the narrative and visual depictions of Russia and Russians in several key post-Soviet American popular and political cultural texts in an attempt to expose the gendered, racialized, and heteronormative discursive configurations that constitute the American nationalist framework within which the United States conducted...

Appendix

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pp. 195-209

Notes

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pp. 211-256

Bibliography

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pp. 257-278

Index

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pp. 279-287

Back Cover

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