Gender, power and international (mis)recognition: Russia’s quest for epistemic agency through the ‘civilisational’ crusade against the rights of sexual and gender minorities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores Russia’s quest for agential equality with the US through the lens of the gendered dynamics of international (mis)recognition. It draws on the constructivist scholarship that emphasises Moscow’s unfulfilled desire for parity with, and perceived misrecognition by, the West as one of the principal drivers of post-Soviet Russian foreign policy. However, the article moves beyond these analyses by bringing to the fore the centrality of gender in the Kremlin’s pursuit of recognition. It argues that Russia’s ‘civilisational’ crusade against universal human rights, especially the rights of sexual and gender minorities, should be understood as part of the broader struggle for recognition on Russia’s terms. Since misrecognition is associated with curtailed agency and lower status, it invokes associations with femininity, which Russian elites and society generally view as a humiliating act of emasculation. Moscow’s crusade against the rights of sexual and gender minorities has been explicitly predicated on gendered meanings, discourses and policies. This crusade has been intended as a bold, remasculinising campaign that would enable Russia to assert its epistemic agency in the realm of universal human rights and establish epistemic parity with the West. Importantly, Moscow’s struggle against perceived Western misrecognition comes at a cost to sexual and gender minorities in Russia: it amounts to structural, social and physical violence against these minorities, rendering them profoundly insecure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".