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About That: Deploying And Deploring Sex In Postsoviet Russia , Eliot Borenstein

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Desovietization brought sex as a visible cultural phenomenon into Russia, one rife with contradictions and conflicts. Newspapers, popular magazines, advertisements, pornography, the first Russian sex talk show (About That), and pronouncements by a broad range of quotable public figures indicate that the problematics of sex during the 1990s consisted of the following: a sexualized relationship between Russia and the West; a sexualization of politics (rather than the politicization of sex); an inflexible yet implicit code governing the deployment of sex in "high" and "low" culture; and, above all, the development of a sexual discourse that defied circumlocution and …