CEERES Director's Lecture — Khamstvo and Smiling: Neoliberalism Meets Post-Soviet Bureaucracy
Monday, June 7, 2021 at 12:00 PM CST
Register to attend online at: https://bit.ly/3feGCvV
This talk will be devoted to the Soviet communicative practice of khamstvo as related to ruchnoe upravlenie and the new emotional style in post-Soviet maternity care. Soviet doctors and nurses often interacted with their maternity patients using khamstvo -- a rude communicative style used to assert authority and discipline. In an age of post-Soviet neoliberal reforms, growing demands for consumer-oriented practices require a different style of emotional display, expressed in the metaphor of the “smile.” These two emotional styles co-exist in contemporary Russian health institutions, where health care providers shift between them in order to navigate institutional and organizational needs. They do this in a “manual way” (ruchnoe upravlenie), involving new varieties of emotional labor, and creating new challenges and vulnerabilities - especially in the era of COVID-19.
About the Lecturer
Anna Temkina received her Ph.D. in social sciences from the University of Helsinki in 1997. She is the Chair of Public Health and Gender and Co-Director of the Gender Programme at the European University at St. Petersburg. Her interest in gender studies and feminism began in the 1990s, and had expanded to include gender, reproductive heath, sexuality, feminist theory, and gender relations in Soviet and Post-Soviet societies. She is the author of Women’s Sexual Life: between Freedom and Subordination (2008; in Russian), and Russia in transition (1997; in English). She is the author and co-editor of In Search of Sexuality (2002), New Byt: Gender Studies of Everyday Life (2009), Health and Trust: Gender Approaches to Reproductive Medicine (2009). Health and Intimate life (2011), 12 Lectures in Gender Sociology (2015: in Russian). She has written numerous articles, including Multiple Vulnerabilities in Medical Settings: Invisible Suffering of Doctors Societies 2020, (with Litvina D. Novkunskaya, 2020); Creating health care consumers: The Negotiation of Un/Official Payments, Power and Trust in Russian Maternity (with Michele Rivkin-Fish, 2020); Care, Social Theory and Health (2019); ‘Childbirth is Not a Car Rental’: Mothers and Obstetricians Negotiating Consumer Service in Russian Commercial Maternity Care (with Litvina D. Novkunskaya); and Multiple Vulnerabilities in Medical Settings: Invisible Suffering of Doctors Societies 2021 Emotional Styles in Russian Maternity Hospitals: Juggling between Khamstvo and Smiling Emotions and Society.