Conceptualizing Feminist Strategies for Russian Reproductive Politics: Abortion, Surrogate Motherhood, and Family Support after Socialism

The question of whether and how feminist concepts and paradigms developed in Western, liberal contexts may be relevant for struggles for gender equality in former socialist states has been a central point of debate between and among feminists West and East since the late 1980s. In one of the most thought-provoking and important statements on this issue, Nanette Funk (2004) cautioned that US feminist critiques of Anglo-American liberalism cannot be readily exported to make sense of liberal campaigns in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Funk characterizes this critique of Anglo-American liberalism as having five key dimensions: first, that liberalismendows rights and goods to individuals, rather than recognizing nonindividual goods and rights, and fails to recognize that individuals may perceive themselves as having duties to broader collectives; second, that liberalism endorses a neutral vision of the state rather than recognizing that the state inevitably conveys political goals and visions; third, that liberalism’s value of independence does not adequately recognize human dependency; fourth, that liberalism imagines persons as disembodied, neglecting the ways bodies are gendered, raced, classed; and finally, that liberalism’s distinction between public and private spheres obscures the gendered power ofmen in both public and private, and fails to acknowledge how women’s subordination is ensured by their relegation to the private sphere (2004, 704)

Sexuality education in Russia: defining pleasure and danger for a fledgling democratic society

Public health indicators have plummeted throughout Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with exponential increases in sexually transmitted diseases reported among this society's young adults. Newly developing sexuality education programs provide insights into the ways local health providers interpret such public health challenges and conceptualize the educational needs of Russian youth. Moreover, these initiatives reveal the impact of both Soviet-era discourses and more recent, international anti-abortion activism on contemporary thinking about sexual health matters. This article explores the implicit and sometimes explicit ways that sex education lectures are being driven by debates over the significance of the Soviet past and anxieties over the perceived chaos of current transformations. Drawing on material from lectures, fieldwork, and interviews with sex educators, I argue that sexuality education efforts reveal a persistent ambivalence between the hope to promote individual autonomy from state interests and the presumed need to control sexual expression and reproductive practices within an emerging moral economy of post-Soviet Russia.Sexuality education Russia STDs Abortion