“Traditional Values” as a Cure: Putinite Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS

CBEES Advanced Seminar with Dmitrii Dorogov, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES), Södertörn University

Speaker: Dmitrii Dorogov, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES), Södertörn University

Discussant: Pauliina Lukinmaa, Postdoctoral Researcher, School of Humanities, Philosophical Faculty, University of Eastern Finland

Chair: Kirill Polkov, Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Gender Studies, Södertörn University

Abstract: The paper investigates Putinite biopolitics of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Russia in the aftermath of the turn to “traditional values” in the early 2010s and, most recently, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. On the basis of a discourse analysis of dominant narratives on HIV/AIDS advanced by the Russian state over a decade, the paper offers a critical account of the ways the increasing traditionalism and the effects of the war tell on Russia’s most disenfranchised and vulnerable social groups that often exist at the intersection of multiple stigmas further reinforced by the massive economic, ideological, and social transformations the Russian society is undergoing.

Dmitrii Dorogov is a postdoctoral researcher at CBEES and the Department of Gender Studies at Södertörn University. In 2022, he defended his PhD thesis on the Putinite biopolitics of 'sexual sovereighty' at the Central European University, Vienna. His research is focused on the increasingly authoritarian biopolitics of Putinism and the political, cultural, and societal transformations it is contributing to.