Michele Rivkin-Fish1; 1 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States
Discussion
Reproductive and family politics offers rich terrain for analyzing the performance of state power and responses to it in contemporary Russia. Since the 1990s, nationalists have generated an unrelenting moral panic over low fertility, urging both economic incentives and neotraditional cultural shifts to establish greater rates of childbearing. Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian state and regional governments have significantly intensified such campaigns; both legal restrictions and practical obstacles to accessing abortion have expanded. A range of pronatalist campaigns are underway, from material incentives to give birth (e.g., maternity capital) to fining people and organizations for “encouraging” a pregnant woman to abort or propagating so-called “childfree” ideology. Educational programs often involve affective processes of provoking shock and disgust by screening graphic films showing abortion procedures and labeling women who abort as murders. This paper uses critical discourse analysis to examine the performative and affective components of pronatalist campaigns, highlighting the specific emotions they invoke regarding family and patriotism. The paper also contrasts such campaigns with an analysis of the roles of affect and argumentation in criticisms of pronatalist policies presented by journalists and feminist social media sites. The paper demonstrates how the discursive sphere of family and reproductive politics is an important site of negotiations, including efforts at persuasion and opposition, between the state and citizens in today’s militaristic and repressive Russia.
