Kremlin has ‘Weaponized Misogyny and Homophobia’ in Its Anti-Ukrainian Discourse, Gaufman Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 4 – Many in the West were shocked when Vladimir Putin told a highly offensive rape “joke” to the French president just before the Kremlin leader launched his expanded invasion of Ukraine in February of this year, Elizaveta Gaufman says. But “long-time Russian-language social media watchers were less so.”

            Not only terms like “Gayropa” have been used in Russia for some time, the professor of Russian discourse and politics at the University of Groningen says, but Putin’s saying that Ukraine is “’a beauty has to take it whether she likes it or not’ is a common trope in pro-Kremlin discourse” (ridl.io/the-real-men-of-pro-kremlin-rhetoric/).

            That discourse “tends to represent Ukraine as an effeminate entity, incapable of making its own decisions and in need of rescuing” occurs alongside the glorification of “appropriately masculine ‘real men’ ‘with balls’ who are supposed to be in charge.” Not only is that a staple of autocrats but it is often found in talk of global politics by those who want a hierarchy to exist.

            Gaufman says that her examination of anti-Ukrainian VKontakte groups in the lead up to the expanded invasion of Ukraine this year shows three distinct “gendered narratives” about Ukraine that show this is very much the case in Putin’s Russia where the regime has “weaponized” both misoygyny and homophobia as part of its war effort.

            The first of these, which she labels “the damsel in distress,” involves “describing Ukraine as a sex worker,” using “one of the most obscene taboo words in the Russian language” to characterize that country as “a woman who has ‘lost her way’ and can be dominated by any man who finds her.” In this narrative, a masculine Russia is ready and able to “save” her.

            The second narrative involves reducing all things connected to Ukraine to something small by adding the -ka suffix to their names, stressing “either the harmless nature or petite size of the subject. It has been especially often found in describing the former US president Barack Obama in openly racist terms.

             And the third narrative involves talking about “Gayropa,” a term Russians often use to talk about what they see as European “gender deviance” and a threat to Russia precisely because it has spread to Ukraine and even more broadly, the Russian researcher based in the Netherlands continues.

            For Russians who use this term, Europe is under the yoke of the US and lacks agency; but at the same time, “Europe’s ‘false values’ are exemplary of the dangerous femininity that can devour Russian traditional values. For them, “Europe has gone insane because men dress like women while ‘the decline of Europe’” is understood as a linear degeneration from Hitler to gays.

            In contrast, Gaufman says, any fascist threat is masculine, making it more threatening but less insidious in Russian eyes. And that may be why the initial talk of fascism which justified invasion has yielded to talk of Gayropa which plays up the insidious threat of the West from which Ukraine must be a beauty who simultaneously “’has to take it’” and be rescued.

“By feminizing Ukraine in this way, Russian politicians deny it its agency and construct a hierarchical relationship, where Russia is superior to Ukraine,” Gaufman says. And “they highlight how gendered rhetoric has contributed to legitimation of the war among the Russian population.”