Eliot Borenstein
OVERKILL: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007, 288 pages.
Series: Culture and Society after Socialism
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4770.
Perestroika and the end of the Soviet Union transformed every aspect of
life in Russia, and as hope began to give way to pessimism, popular
culture came to reflect the anxiety and despair felt by more and more
Russians. Free from censorship for the first time in Russia's history,
the popular culture industry (publishing, film, and television) began to
disseminate works that featured increasingly explicit images and
descriptions of sex and violence.
In Overkill, Eliot Borenstein explores this lurid and often-disturbing
cultural landscape in close, imaginative readings of such works as
You're Just a Slut, My Dear! (Ty prosto shliukha, dorogaia!), a novel
about sexual slavery and illegal organ harvesting; the Nympho trilogy of
books featuring a Chechen-fighting sex addict; and the Mad Dog and
Antikiller series of books and films recounting, respectively, the
exploits of the Russian Rambo and an assassin killing in the cause of
justice. Borenstein argues that the popular cultural products consumed
in the post-perestroika era were more than just diversions; they allowed
Russians to indulge their despair over economic woes and everyday
threats. At the same time, they built a notion of nationalism or heroism
that could be maintained even under the most miserable of social
conditions, when consumers felt most powerless.
For Borenstein, the myriad depictions of deviance in pornographic and
also detectiv fiction, with their patently excessive and appalling
details of social and moral decay, represented the popular culture
industry's response to the otherwise unimaginable scale of Russia's
national collapse. "The full sense of collapse," he writes, "required a
panoptic view that only the media and culture industry were eager to
provide, amalgamating national collapse into one master narrative that
would then be readily available to most individuals as a framework for
understanding their own suffering and their own fears."
About the Author
Eliot Borenstein is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of
Russian & Slavic Studies at New York University. He is the author of Men
without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929.
Series "Culture and Society after Socialism":
The formerly socialist world represents one of the fastest growing and
theoretically challenging areas in the humanities and social sciences. A
decade after perestroika, it is possible to begin to chart the
topography of a diverse realm of new scholarship, built on the
theoretical and methodological foundations of cross-disciplinary work.
"Culture and Society after Socialism," a series edited by Bruce Grant
and Nancy Ries, looks to present the very best of this body of writing.
Providing close-up perspectives on the lived experience of socialism and
its aftermath, this series advances innovative work that fundamentally
rethinks the cultural projects of socialist states and their outcomes.
Through detailed readings of historical and cultural contexts, these
works bridge the study of power systems and cosmologies, material
practices and social meanings, political economies and the mythic forces
that sustain them.
Series Editors:
Bruce Grant is Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York
University.
Nancy Ries is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colgate University.
Culture and Society after Socialism:
CONTESTED TONGUES
Language Politics and Cultural Correction in Ukraine
Laada Bilaniuk
PRIVATIZING POLAND
Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor
Elizabeth C. Dunn
EMPIRE OF NATIONS
Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union
Francine Hirsch
THE UNMAKING OF SOVIET LIFE
Everyday Economies after Socialism
Caroline Humphrey
HOW RUSSIA REALLY WORKS
The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business
Alena V. Ledeneva
DEFENDING THE BORDER
Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia
Mathijs Pelkmans
RUSSIA GETS THE BLUES
Music, Culture, and Community in Unsettled Times
Michael Urban; with Andrei Evdokimov
THE VANISHING HECTARE
Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania
Katherine Verdery
COMMUNITIES OF THE CONVERTED
Ukrainians and Global Evangelism
Catherine Wanner
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