Maria Brock
PhD
Researcher
I am Principal Investigator of the Baltic Sea Foundation-funded project "Networked misogyny in Sweden, Germany and Russia: articulations, intersections and transnational flows".
+46 8 608 54 15
+4686085415
Culture and Education
PC207
- My research interests and expertise include gender and sexuality, digital media and communication, and memory, nationhood and representation. I have a special interest in Germany and Russia, and am fluent in both languages. In my published work, I have for example interrogated the epistemic value of queer visibility in Russian media, charted the digital public’s violently negative responses to Pussy Riot, as well as the public guises of Vladimir Putin, ranging from heteropatriarchal hypermasculinity to hyperrealism. I have also documented the material and psychic remains of socialism across the Eastern Bloc, assuming a vantage point rooted in specific sites and artefacts. I have examined subjectivity, inequality and organisational change in the cultural and financial industries. Recent publications have focused on the role of anti-feminism in right-wing populism, and on violent misogyny and white supremacy in Swedish ‘Incel’ forums.
- In CHILDCIPH
External link, opens in new window., a Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship (2021-2023), I examined networked actors and campaigns in Russia and Germany that advocate 'traditional family values', anti-LGBTQI+ and anti-gender politics in the name of protecting children, marking a culmination as well as further development of my expertise in analysing processes of political mobilisation, in particular issues threatening gender equality and LGBTQI+ rights. Publications emerging from the project have analysed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and its official state ideology of ‘traditional values’ and examined the discursive and strategic functions of representations of Sweden as a feminist dystopia in online disinformation campaigns in Russia and Germany. - My current project on Networked Misogyny in Sweden, Germany and Russia External link, opens in new window. (with Prof Tina Askanius), funded by the Baltic Sea Foundation (2024-2027) aims to understand how misogyny is articulated, reproduced and circulated in contemporary online spaces, in particular by female actors. It uses a comparative lens, with Russia, Germany and Sweden offering three different political systems and levels of gender equality, and with Russia acting as a transnational hub for the proliferation of ’traditional values’, which ultimately involve the curtailment of women’s rights.