Authors

Discussion

“Traditional values”, family and femininity in contemporary Russia: a case-study of self-published romance novels

In my presentation, I aim to examine the representation of femininity, family, romantic love, and women’s agency in the romance novels published in the 2020s on the self-publishing platforms Litnet.com, Litgorod.ru, and Litmarket.ru.

Since the mid-2010s, the Russian government has actively promoted so-called traditional values, which include patriarchal gender order, normative gender roles, and the idea of a strong family, which is the union between man and woman, as declared in the Amendments to the Constitution. Popular culture cannot help but reflect the current social order; and romance novels, traditionally, have been seen as a space for the representation of femininity, gender roles, and ideas of family and love, and serve this purpose.

Self-publishing platforms, where thousands of authors publish thousands of texts, are seen by Tarleton Gillespie as an egalitarian mechanism that gives people a public voice. I suggest approaching texts published there as a manifestation of political unconscious, i.e., as a part of collective discourse, and based on this premise, analyse how the authors and readers of romance novels actually imagine what family and femininity are.

I will choose several novels published on the platforms, and, using close reading methods, will analyse what linguistic means authors use to construct female characters, how female agency reveals itself on a linguistic level, what paratexts describe the main topics connected to the family and romantic love, and how these paratexts are realised in the novels’ plot. Based on preliminary observation, I suppose that the actual notions of family are far from the government’s propaganda: betrayal, divorce, and single maternity occupy a significant place in the narrated stories. Heroines act as subjects who look for a better life and are responsible not only for domestic duties, but also for paid work or running a business. I assume that this reflects a tension between state ideology and the real thoughts of the people.