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A STUDY OF RUSSIAN BIOPOLITICAL TECHNIQUES IN WOMEN’S BEAUTY AND HEALTH CARE // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2022. Issue 2 (32). P. 172-189

Here, we explore how biopolitical techniques regulating women’s bodies address the health, longevity and propagation problems to approach the demographic crisis that Russia is facing. The research is the establishment of how and why women willingly care about their health and beauty, so that the state will enjoy healthy women as human capital, the labor force and the producer of the future labor force and Russian race. We study how the control of issues of Russian women’s diet, drinking, and beauty care can be influential factors as biopolitical techniques. The survey is based on the Foucauldian concept of governmentality that demands two complementary dimensions of biopolitics and neoliberal rationality. We investigate a triangle of neoliberal market, biopolitical rationality and women as active agents. We examine how neoliberal market produces knowledge via advertisement discourse about the ideal female subject; we demonstrate that neoliberal market marketizes health and beauty, leading women towards the state-desired way. Women as entrepreneurs invest their time and money in their human capital to enjoy social visibility and promotion. This is not objectification of bodies, rather a new form of subjectification. Habituating women toward healthy diet and moderate drinking, the state enjoys a healthy labor force. On the other hand, naturalization of sex difference by highlighting the essentially fit and attractive female body materializes the female body promising heterosexuality and obviously propagation. Moreover, conducting women to care about the beauty assures the maintenance of the myth of Russian woman’s stunning beauty. Beautified improved Russian woman’s body can mirror the superiority of race. We conclude that the reiteration of heteronormativity in all three sides of the mentioned triangle manifests that Russia uses traditional heteronormativity as a technique for managing the critical demographic situation. A feminist perspective on Russian biopolitics establishes the way the female body is regulated to divide the border between the viable subjects, the healthy, thin, fit and attractive female body and the opposing abject bodies threatening Russian demography and race. The analysis confirms that the conduct of women toward self-monitoring to gain the approved subjectivity promises healthy women as human capital. Besides, association of peculiar features to the female body constructs a truth about the normal female body, driving women to quest the constructed truth, which is naturalized as an essential feature. Attribution of properties to the female body and idealization of its man-pleasing peculiarities highlight the sex difference and contribute to the circulation of heterosexuality, which is a way to manage demographic problems.

Keywords: biopolitics, neoliberal market, governmentality, entrepreneur, subjectivity, health and beauty care, diet, female body, heteronormativity