Virtual Warfare: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Propaganda in the Russo-Ukrainian War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the intersection of sexual and political discourses as a particular aspect of the body politics that Russia has employed, among other strategies, in its massive propaganda offensive during the hybrid warfare against Ukraine.While recognizing sexuality as one of the mainstream concepts in political analysis, the paper draws on sexually explicit imagery and idiom used in Russian social media, and public discursive space in general, as propaganda techniques, and maps their “genealogy” within wider sociocultural and political contexts. Being conceptualized in terms of Russian hegemonic masculinity in relation to subordinated femininity and non-hegemonic masculinities of its adversarial others, these setups reveal how sexuality constitutes uneven and contradictory nexuses of power once being co-opted by Putin’s propaganda machine. It is noteworthy that Russia’s neo-imperial discursive tactics of homologizing sexual and political dominance—when supplemented with the official rhetoric of restituting Russia as a great power, Orthodox Christian fundamentalism as an integral part of Russian unique “state-civilization,” state-sanctioned homophobia, and traditional macho gender ideology—contribute quite effectively to sustaining public support in Russia for aggression against Ukraine in the process of Russian reimperialization of the former Soviet space.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".