Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation explores new gendered subjectivities that emerge as women negotiate tensions between "personal" and Russian neo-traditionalist national agendas. It is based on an ethnographic analysis of Russian entrepreneurial women's engagements with neo-liberal notions of self-reliance in corporate Russia, and essentialist gender politics. To educated Russian women in various generational groups, business represents compelling possibilities for self-realization and upward socioeconomic mobility. Yet in pursuing entrepreneurial careers, women must forcefully engage with a proliferation of policies, media, and popular attitudes since the mid-1980s, which encourage Russian professional women to focus their attentions on homemaking and childrearing. Women take part in intensive processes of self-reflection and legitimization in multiple contexts: motivational seminars run by transnational companies and their Russian offshoots, discussions of self-help literature on the Internet and with their colleagues, their own development and marketing of self-help services, and narrative strategies that draw on their own (and their mothers') socialist pasts as enterprise managers, komsomol leaders, and heads of families. An analysis of women's work lives and parallel processes of self-development pushes understandings of urban social life and change beyond the older activist language of solidarity and collaboration. Women's ideas of selfhood celebrate ephemeral exchanges as opposed to more stable relationships or group affiliations, as meaningful sites of social interaction. In their engagements with neo-liberal paradigms, women appropriate normatively "male" idioms of self-reliance and link them with their own abilities to make social contributions as businesswomen. In doing so, they infuse neo-liberal ideas of autonomous personhood with moral worth. This dissertation illustrates how business can be a site of social production and change under increasingly centralized national governments. It is a context within which people articulate more expansive definitions of gender and personhood than exist in conventional nationalist portrayals.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2010)
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Citation
Mazzarino, Andrea C.,
"Being Independent Together: Urban Russian Businesswomen and New Forms of National Belonging"
(2010).
Anthropology Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0PN93W4
