The “Anarchic” Male Body in Contemporary Russian Poetry and the Construction of New Masculinities

Abstract

The second half of the 2010s to the beginning of the 2020s in the Russian context are associated with the active intervention of the state in the sphere of private life. In a situation of gender inequality, the male body is subjected to particularly strict regulation. The new normative masculinity is perceived by a significant part of society as illegitimate. In the public sphere, the conflict between the state and society often takes the form of a performance, in which the naked male body turns out to be a medium of the utterance – rebellious and “anarchic”. In contemporary Russian poetry, resistance to the pressure of power is associated with the emergence of “non-normative” models of masculinity, in the design of which bodily representations also play an important role. Victim masculinity implies unbalanced, conflicted behavior, constant readiness for a political challenge. Transgressive masculinity connects the specifics of “masculinity” with striving for all possible boundaries and provocative violation of cultural and aesthetic prohibitions. Phenomenological masculinity puts the “masculine” into question, considering it as something looked-for, and not given a priori, and the “anarchic” meaning of this model is associated with the rejection of the very idea of a behavioral “pattern”.