Released on YouTube in June 2022, the video project Fem Is was introduced by its producers as the first Russian non-fiction series on the history of feminist thought and practice. Backing this promise was a strong cast of female experts in gender studies and sociology, psychology, feminist theory, and activist work. The line-up included the prominent feminist artist and poet Daria Serenko, cyber activist and popular blogger Nika Vodvud (known as @nixelpixel), and icon of socio-political commentary Ekaterina Shulman.
Many of the experts involved host popular YouTube channels, and yet the most striking aspect of the release was the effective absence of discussion. Lacking neither production quality nor caliber, the series aroused little media attention and yielded an average of 6,000 views per episode. The low traffic had nothing to do with the topic: on Shulman's own YouTube channel, the unedited footage of her interview garnered nearly 400,000 views. While the projected appeal of the series was the united educational effort from major experts in the field, precisely this unmitigated solidarity largely prevented productive discussion.
As Daria Serenko suggests in the trailer to Fem Is, “feminism in present-day Russia is characterized by the impossibility of speaking about it in the singular form—indeed, it is not feminism but feminisms.” Acknowledging that contemporary feminism is an umbrella concept for hundreds of movements with varying agendas, the series focused on specific subjects such as “Feminism and Money,” “Feminism and Language,” “Feminism and Children,” and “Feminism and Popular Culture.” Each themed episode was based on interviews with several speakers approaching the subject from a range of disciplinary angles. The most successful episodes introduced key theoretical concepts alongside compelling local examples, such as explaining why small and medium businesses in contemporary Russia are run predominantly by middle-aged women and why the biggest problem facing Russian mothers is getting alimony payments, not maternity leave.
The final and arguably most relevant episode, “Feminism and War,” was produced after the beginning of the full-scale military invasion of Ukraine. Starting with a brief historicization of feminist causes in the wartime context, the episode moves to recent examples of feminist anti-war activism that have emerged as a tangible resistance force in Russia in the past few months. The series also addressed wartime sexual violence, an exceedingly fraught topic in the post-Soviet public discourse. The author and producer of the series, Anna Rivina, is the well-known founder and director of the abuse problem resolution center “Nasiliu.Net” which helps women escape domestic and gender-based violence.
While the series succeeded in showcasing women who perform femininity in a range of different ways, its format resembles a panel more rather than a talk-show. Edited together out of stand-alone interviews, the series prioritized a comprehensive narrative over polemical discussion (such as the values of liberal feminism vs. radical feminism, sex-positive feminism vs. sex-negative feminism). Moreover, the different voices brought together by Fem Is all ultimately had much in common: the experts were professionally successful white heterosexual women. The series misses more contemporary debates around feminism and disability, feminism and LGBTQ+ communities, and feminism and the trans-movement, all actively taking place on Russian Twitter and Instagram. Many compelling feminist projects in Russia have been connected with the appeal to decolonize Russian cultural space. For instance, anti-war resistance has been particularly strong in the republics of Buriatia and Tuva, the regions supplying major human forces for the conscript army and often indirectly accused of the war-time atrocities. Such othering and ethnic profiling spurred a wave of anti-colonial and anti-militaristic activist resistance led by local women. The phenomenon has been covered by online media platforms such as Beda Media, Feminist Translocalities, and Instagram zine@agasshin, which function as collaborative spaces uniting Moscow and regional initiatives (for example, a feminist journal published in Erzya, the local language of the Republic of Mordovia).
In place of all this, Fem Is offers an expository digest of feminist ideas as a united front of experts. Rather than a refreshing show of solidarity, the series leaves us wanting for the real thing: an open debate about the pursuit of emancipation and its contradictions.
