Current discourses rather underscore Putin’s masculinity to create awareness for the alleged threat that Russia poses to US security and liberal values. Earlier discourses, however, portrayed Russia as a defeated/effeminate has-been world power in order to legitimize the US’s active interference in Russian national matters (Williams, 2012). Current discourses on US-Russian relations, as I will show in my examples, follow the same gendered logic. US national unity, cultural and political superiority were constructed through discourses that feminized Russia and thereby signified ‘her’ inferiority, weakness, and underdevelopment. The feminist scholar Kimberly Williams ( 2012) shows in her work on American post-Cold War culture and politics between 19 that US nationalist discourses employed a binary gender model to signify the US–Russian relationship, wherein power was ascribed to masculinity. The gendered logic of American New Cold War politics In doing so, I further argue, liberal media and satire bring forward a ‘tacit populism’ that utilizes toxic masculinity and homophobia to promote liberal values. I will show that while liberal news media emphasize Putin’s masculinity as aggressive and dangerous to warn against the Russian threat, satire mocks Putin, using homophobic imagery that implicitly confirms traditional masculinity – the very masculinity Putin promotes as politically viable – as normative. Analyzing all these sites’ representations of Putin, I aim to show that both sets of data reinstate Putin’s masculinity as a politically potent tool, although through different visual and textual strategies.
Gay memes 2016 tv#
The second corpus of data contains humorous images from satirical news sites such as The Daily Squat, the comedy TV shows The Late Show and Saturday Night Live, and the caricatural drawings by the artist Ant the Artist. Using the methodology of ‘feminist critical discourse analysis’ (Lazar, 2007) that includes an examination of visual representations through images, I study two different, yet arguably mutually influencing sets of data that both speak to Putin’s masculinity in the context of New Cold War politics and the rivalry between the US (or the Western world in more general terms) and Russia the first corpus of data are articles and their accompanying images from online liberal mass media news sources, such as The Washington Post, CNN, The Huffington Post, political journalism sites online, such as TalkingPointsMemo and BuzzFeed as well as images and articles from liberal magazines, such as The Atlantic or The New York Review of Books. Taking up the findings of political scientists Valery Sperling ( 2014) and Andrew Foxall ( 2013), media scholar Helene Goscilo ( 2013) and others, who have thoroughly analyzed the Russian president’s gender performance as an important aspect of his populist politics, I am interested in the ways US media, especially liberal media and popular culture reflect upon, perpetuate or challenge Putin’s populist masculinity. Katz, 2016 Messerschmidt, 2010, 2016), I am interested in the ideas and meanings concerning representations of Putin’s masculinity within the US context. Starck & Luyt, 2019 Starck & Sauer, 2014 Williams, 2012) and the utilization of masculinity to make politics (e.g. Building on works that analyze the construction of the political as masculine (e.g. In this article, I analyze some of the most popular representations of the Russian president Vladimir Putin in US online news media as well as popular culture, such as political comedy, photomontages, comics etc., between 20 from a queer-feminist perspective. Introduction: masculinity and New Cold War culture Lastly, and paradoxically, many of these images rely on anti-gay sentiments in the name of western values and liberal democracy to make assessments of the political relationship between the US and Russia.
![gay memes 2016 gay memes 2016](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/2f/ca/37/2fca376ad4b608da76930c4dad28cca2.jpg)
![gay memes 2016 gay memes 2016](https://pics.me.me/1950s-by-the-year-2016-we-should-be-in-an-8710965.png)
I argue that the media’s focus on Putin, and specifically on his masculinity in criticizing the US president and his politics, however, exaggerates the threat ‘of Russia’ and thus not only runs the risk of affirming a hierarchical binary gender model of power, but also of participating in a tacit populism. Images of Putin are also frequently used to criticize US president Donald Trump and his populism, which suggest that he is a puppet of Russia. Such imagery is utilized to create a contrast to the US that, in turn, appears as a united, modern and progressive nation. Arguably, the depictions of Putin focus on his masculinity, thereby rendering the Russian president Other, as backwards, undemocratic, and as a threat to the US. I take a closer look at these representations in terms of their types, political aims and effects, using critical image and discourse analysis. In this article I analyze the recurring representations of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin in US liberal online news media and in political comedy 2013–2019.