The persistence of workplace inequality requires female subjects to examine their place in exploitative systems of production and consumption, and to identify means for emancipation beyond masculine dominant orders. In this paper we examine our past experiences as young women in the finance and oil industries, the phallocentric and extractive engines of global capitalism. We do this by employing a duo-ethnographic approach and a feminist reading of Jacques Lacan’s ideas on sexual difference, aiming to contribute to the literature on female identification in phallocentric organizations. Our analysis reveals how we oscillated between accepting subordinate feminine subject positions linked to emotional work and striving to access ‘universal’ masculine subject positions linked to success and achievement. At the same time, we both engaged with imaginaries of uniqueness and critique, control and success in order to keep functioning in our roles. Both our stories feature moments of rupture experienced as affective embodied responses, when our organizations placed ourselves or others at risk. We analyse these as moments when cracks were exposed in our fantasmatic survival strategies, leading to our eventual exit from these industries. We conclude that while a feminist Lacanian framework provides a useful lens for understanding processes of female identification in phallocentric organizations, the quest for female desire and subjectivity outside the masculine dominant order requires other (feminist) frameworks.

This article explores the discursive linkages between violent misogyny and violent right-wing extremism in the popular Swedish online discussion forum Flashback, which affords anonymous and relatively unmoderated commenting. Empirically, it focuses on the articulations of misogyny and anti-feminism mapped onto extreme right ideology including white supremacism in user comments posted across 16 Flashback threads. To analyze the extensive data set, we first drew on a collocation analysis of user comments (N = 20,359) scraped from a strategic selection of threads. From this sample we chose 36 combinations to be considered for a closer reading. In the second analytical step, critical discourse analysis coupled with the Essex School’s logics approach helped us unpack the logics of conspiracy and male entitlement, as well as the fantasmatic projections of Swedish women as both “race traitors” and “victims” at the heart of extreme right discourse in and beyond Sweden today.

This study examines the social, political, and fantasmatic logics involved in the production of contemporary discourses about Scandinavia as a symbolic site and imagined place of sexual and moral decay and as a gender dysphoric dystopia by actors in the global anti-gender movement. Empirically, we draw on a rich digital archive of multi-modal media texts from an ongoing research project on anti-gender movements in Russia and Germany – two countries which provide particularly poignant examples of sites in which this mode of anti-gender propaganda is currently on the rise. In the analysis, we explore the discursive workings of a particularly prominent node in the material – that of the vulnerable child – and show how this figure is construed and instrumentalised to add urgency and fuel outrage among domestic audiences in Russia and Germany.

This article argues that child protection rhetoric rarely applies to all children and that it, in fact, often contains decisions over whose lives are worthy of protection, and whose are not. In Russia, “traditional (family) values” have effectively become state policy, the 2013 federal law “for the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values” being the most prominent example of this. The fixation of such “traditional values” discourses on protecting children from “early sexualization” by barring them from access to LGBTQ-inclusive education and care demonstrates that the child on whose behalf this protection is demanded is deemed to be straight, while further examples of child protection discourses also show that innocence is often viewed as the exlusive property of white, middle-class children. Responding to the recent escalation of Russia’s war on Ukraine, this text discusses how the trauma, displacement and death of children in Ukraine reveals the biopolitical core of traditional values discourses.

This article examines the role of national screen agencies in the realisation of an equitable screen sector. Publicly funded screen agencies like Ffilm Cymru Wales, Screen Ireland, Det Danske Filminstitut (Danish Film Institute) and Hrvatski Audiovizualni Centar (Croatian Audiovisual Centre) directly shape the sector, both on screen and behind the camera. Using interviews with senior decision-makers within several European screen agencies, we critically analyse the logics and practices of these cultural intermediaries in relation to gender equality. We chart how the issue is mediated by screen agencies, including their (in)actions. Alongside formal measures, we observe some staff working in quotidian ways to deliver change through positively leveraging their relationships with the sector. Our research highlights that while most of sampled agencies advocate for gender equality, few recognise ethnicity, socioeconomics, disability or age in their larger policy frameworks, and therefore, questions of intersectionality are rarely addressed formally in institutional approaches. We conclude that for screen agencies to become effective intermediaries for equality, a paradigmatic shift in their logics and working practices would be required. However, this would only represent a first step as wider policy and industrial reform is necessary to redress the exclusionary frames of the screen sector.

This article examines the post-Soviet transformations of Russian popular music culture (Estrada), arguing that its aesthetics can be analysed from the perspective of camp, by looking at two cult music performers bridging the Soviet and post-Soviet realm – Valery Leontiev and Filipp Kirkorov. The analysis is grounded in a close reading of the artists’ career trajectories, selected videos and – to a lesser extent – textual analysis of their lyrics and public statements. The article argues that their performative personas are rooted in a particular version of camp with differing modalities of subversiveness – each responding both to their respective cultural and political climates, audience expectations, and also in accordance with their individual embodiments of (post)-Soviet camp. While Leontiev demonstrates a more earnest commitment to high drama, Kirkorov continues his ironic experimentation with transgression, ambiguity and excess, thereby participating in the queering of post-Soviet popular culture. The article concludes that their appropriation of camp is strategic, as it responds to the temporal, national and global trends such as global gay culture and neo-camp in Russia.

Reports in April 2017 regarding a state-initiated wave of homophobic persecution in Chechnya attracted worldwide outrage. Numerous witnesses spoke of arrests, abuse, and murders of gay men in the republic. In response, a spokesman of Chechnya’s president, Ramzan Kadyrov, claimed that “you cannot … oppress those who simply do not exist.” In this article, with the antigay purge in Chechnya and in particular the denial of queer existence as their starting point, Brock and Edenborg examine more deeply processes of erasure and disclosure of queer populations in relation to state violence and projects of national belonging. They discuss (1) what the events in Chechnya tell us about visibility and invisibility as sites of queer liberation, in light of recent discussions in LGBT visibility politics; (2) what the episodes tell us about the epistemological value of queer visibility, given widespread media cynicism and disbelief in the authenticity of images as evidence; and (3) what role the (discursive and physical) elimination of queers plays in relation to spectacular performances of nationhood. Taken together, the authors’ findings contribute to a more multifaceted understanding of the workings of visibility and invisibility and their various, sometimes contradictory, functions in both political homophobia and queer liberation.

This article centres on two East German museums exclusively dedicated to the storage and display of everyday items produced in the German Democratic Republic between 1949 and 1989, locating both in the context of similar ‘memory museums’ of East German history, as well as history museums more generally. Examining these sites, the text investigates the types of relationships established with these artefacts of the past, analysing their function as mediators between the inner and outer world, and between memory and history. Taking nostalgia theory and specifically Ostalgie as a starting point for the analysis, it reflects on how the museums serve as containers for a multitude of objects both fantasmatic and material. The aim is to inject nostalgia theory, especially in its focus on materiality, with more distinctly psychosocial ideas and concepts. In order to understand whether there is a finality to the psychic and political transitions that took place after 1989, nostalgia’s link to a utopian politics of the future, rather than to a contested past, is addressed throughout.