Lisa Gaufman

Kiddo came home saying that everyone in his class voted for #D66 apart from 2, who voted for “Partij voor diertjes” (which is apparently a party he would vote for). He was worried that the “Pif” party might still win, “because they want to send all the foreigners out and we are foreigners”.

With the official prognosis giving one additional seat to PVV and one to FvD compared to the ext poll, the narrative should really not be that the Netherlands/Jetten has beaten the radical right. The far right bloc remains remarkably stable.

Ten years ago today I defended my PhD dissertation “Enemies at the gates: existential threat narratives in Putin’s Russia”. I had chapters on Ukraine, the West, homophobia, migrants and “spiritual bonds”. And the argument still freaking holds, damn.

As I was giving feedback on a clearly ChatGPT generated lit review, I realized that I am just feeding new prompts to the student to feed to his genAI. It’s exhausting and meaningless.

I can finally rub it in to every single copy-editor who tired to break my half a page long sentences :)

Short thread on the findings:

bsky.app/profile/lisa...

Cover of the book «Language, gender and politics in Central and Eastern Europe” edited by Ksenija Bogetic

First page of the chapter “teaching to love the mother(land): Russian z-poetry, gendered rhetoric and the legitimation of war”

Always a surreal feeling to hold the printed words in your hands.

#propaganda #war

woman in a black blazer gesturing at a yellow screen

woman in a blue shirt standing next to a yellow screen

Had a blast synergising @deconspirator.bsky.social and ARM project with @mariellew.bsky.social at the @clingendael.bsky.social REKA conference. Discussed current approaches to #FIMI and the challenges European democracies face. Despite our happy faces, we were not always optimistic...

There used to be a great course on comparative children’s literature in our program at RUG, but it was cut because of the budget cuts… I can try asking the colleague who used to teach it!

Chasing foxes in Russian folk tales This paper examines the representation of foxes in Russian folk tales (narodnye skazki). It explores the frequency of the word “fox” (lisa) in the titles of folk tales, the number of single occurre...

Don’t know about different languages, but here is a fun article about foxes in Russian folkloric tales www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Fox is also a she, so she gets to be this stereotypical “female” cunning character who uses her “feminine” wiles. Some researchers even argued a fox in eastern Slavic mythologies can even be representative of a “vagina dentata” myths

Oh big time! For the most part because the languages are gendered so the animal gets a gender (like dog is a she, bear is a he). Translations are funny: for instance Owl in Winnie the Pooh is a female character in Russian because owl and birds in general are “female”

Slavic languages will have a totally different diagram!

oh, gotta read this!!!

Bedankt, Tony! Beterschap!

Language, Gender and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe This volume is the first book-length collection of research on language, gender and sexuality in the societies of Central and Eastern Europe.

Special thanks to our editor Ksenija Bogetic for her tireless work and check out the other fascinating (but also a little depressing) chapters in the volume link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

It was not the worst one if you can believe it!

Anyway, if you want to lose appetite, here is the pre-print drive.google.com/file/d/1e2Q8...

The authors in this collection tend to build a very clear gender hierarchy in their poems, with devalued femininity serving as an
important metaphor in constructing conflict roles and conflict necessity.

The "poetry" suggests that the discursive power of gendered
representations comes from their inherent power to evoke affects of pity, disgust, or anger, which helps to naturalize discourses of Russo-Ukrainian conflict as aspects of the ‘moral’ and ‘normal’ duty.

Most authors from the collection employed rather crude devices to get their messages across: dead children, girls with pouty lips, gaunt old ladies, and "real" men fighting for the truth. The authors tried to intentionally offend, humiliate, and degrade their opponents by ‘feminizing’ them.

Coca-cola? Gendered. Lattes? Gendered. Mangoes and cookies? Ditto. We show in our analysis that the aggressive masculinization is prompted by different social dynamics, and used to mask emerging anxieties over pacifism and resistance to warfare among different classes and subcultures.

We found a suitable corpus: "The Poetry of Russian summer" and with lyrics like "I selflessly love my Motherland just like I love the plump breasts of the Komisar woman" we knew we would find plenty of gendered representations of, well, anything.

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Ever since my Damsels in Distress article, I knew I would have to look into the full-scale invasion gendered rhetoric. I knew there would be a lot of it, beyond the "loose woman Ukraine sleeping with Western men" narrative

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Language, Gender and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe This volume is the first book-length collection of research on language, gender and sexuality in the societies of Central and Eastern Europe.

🚨 Publication alert 🚨

I went to the depths of despair and analyZed Russian pro-war poetry with Alsu Buiting:

"Teaching to Love the Mother(land):
Russian Z-poetry, Gendered Rhetoric
and the Legitimization of War" in link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

A quick 🧵 on our main findings

I can show you a contemporary analogue!

Is it what American TV is going to look like too? #Colbert

If you want to watch NTV today, you will not find anything even remotely resembling anti-government satire. Same with the rest of Russian TV. Authoritarians can't stand being made fun of. They need to be praised and that's what Russian TV does all day long.

Somehow, out of nowhere, the TV channel broadcasting Kukly started experiencing problems. Many critical journalists (including Shenderovich and Kiselyov) left. Kukly disappeared, then reappeared with a different writers team and then cancelled.

Then Putin came to power. So in February 2000 his rise was depicted as the "Little Tsakhes" fairy tale, where Putin was presented as an ugly dwarf, whom, by the magic of the "television fairy" (Berezovsky), everyone perceives as a handsome man