CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Podgornova, Dinara |
|---|---|
| Title | Gay-Bashing and Slut-Shaming Online: Examining Digital Moral Activism of 'Occupy Pedophilia' and 'Check You' |
| Summary | This thesis explores two projects of digital moral activism taking place on the pages of the Russian social network VK, namely, ‘Check You’ and ‘Occupy Pedophilia’. Both communities are involved in self-identified moral crusades against marginal sexual practices and stigmatize the ‘transgressors’: young women agreeing to engage in casual extramarital heterosexual sex for money, and men arranging a date with male adolescents allegedly to lure them into intergenerational homosexual sex, respectively. I situate these projects within the context of state-led discourses on panicking about homosexuality, pedophilia, cyberspace and other imagined threats to childhood and national security as well as in the context of the current crackdown on civil society and digital oppositional activism in Russia. I analyze the official statements, web pages and videos of the two communities. People crossing the boundaries of accepted erotic conduct are presented by moral activists as threats to societal values. Their wrongdoing is exposed through internet pranks organized by activists, and subsequently punished through the regimes of online exposure where ‘folk devils’ are assigned the affectively charged categories of ‘whores’ and ‘pedophiles’. This thesis explores the contradictions within the logic of the moral activists, as well as the ways in which both projects evolve around the question of irredeemability of ‘folk devils’, which as I shall argue eventually undermines the whole correctional ethos of this activism. The thesis argues for the importance of analyzing the discourses of sexual difference articulated by moral activists, due to the damaging social effects they have for the stigmatized populations in present day Russia. |
| Supervisor | Barát Erzsébet |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/podgornova_dinara.pdf |
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