Searching for lost femininity: Russian middle-aged women’s participation in the post-Soviet consumer culture

Abstract

In the existing literature, the relatively stable period of the 1970s, in Russia, is characterised by the rise of ‘socialist consumer modernity’, while the affluent 2000s were the time when a new phenomenon, ‘the culture of glamour’, emerged. Both periods parallel some cultural developments in the western world: the 1970s–1980s supposedly saw the rise of late modernity whereby individuals, freed from constraints of social structures, engage in ongoing process of self-reflexivity and self-fashioning, through consumption. In this article, drawing on the interviews with 20 middle-aged women from Moscow, I examine the limitations on self-fashioning as a means of achieving and maintaining a position of privilege. I particularly focus on the women’s concerns about failing to engage in normative practices of self-care, including anti-ageing cosmetic procedures, and hence failing to embody feminine dispositions that had value in their middle-class milieu. The analysis of such concerns helps discern the ways different markers of identity (gender, class and age) interplay and act as enablers or constraints in the mundane struggle for power at the interpersonal level.