Say My Name

Putin’s critics have long noted his obstinate refusal to publicly utter the name of imprisoned opposition politician Alexei Navalny. But on Sunday, when asked by loyalist journalist Andrei Kolesnikov about Moscow theater director Zhenya Berkovich and Moscow leftist Boris Kagarlitsky, both of whom have been arrested on flagrantly trumped-up charges of “condoning terrorism,” Putin claimed never to…

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The Russian authorities have recently charged two female theater artists, Zhenya Berkovich and Svetlana Petriychuk, with “justifying terrorism.” While the allegations connected to the production of Petriychuk’s play, “Finist the Bright Falcon,” are highly controversial, what Russians talk about the most when talking about this case is why it is that Berkovich calls herself “rezhissyorka” — using a gendered suffix to convey that she is not a “director” but a female “directoress.” The Russian journaliste Shura Gulyaeva thinks that the debates about “feminitives” — feminine-gendered nouns in the Russian language — have nothing to do with grammar, and everything to do with ideology and politics. She explained her reasoning in her essay for Meduza’s newsletter Signal.

In this abridged English translation, we have deliberately followed the author’s decision to use “feminitives,” or feminine-gendered nouns, to describe women’s professions. Contemporary Russian feminists argue that feminitives help make women’s achievements and contributions to the professions more visible. What do you think? Send us your thoughts!

Why ‘directoress’?

In late May, a Moscow court dismissed the complaint filed by Zhenya Berkovich and Svetlana Petriychuk about their unlawful arrest. Both of them are being prosecuted for allegedly “justifying terrorism” through the rhetoric used in Berkovich’s production of Petriychuk’s play, Finist the Bright Falcon. In her play, Petriychuk tells the story of the hundreds (possibly even thousands) of Russian women who converted to radical Islam and married Syrian jihadists.

Zhenya Berkovich, who produced Petriychuk’s prize-winning play, is an ardent feminist who has for years insisted that others should call her not a rezhissyor (“director” in Russian) but a rezhissyorka, using a feminitive corresponding to “directoress” or something similar in English. As Finist the Bright Falcon and the criminal prosecution of the two female artists drew the attention of the press, excitement about Berkovich’s use of feminitives grew on Russian social media (as it does every time a feminitive makes headlines).

A typical comment reads like this: “The helpful media has informed our whole city and the rest of the world that Zhenya Berkovich is not a director who stages plays but just some chick.” “She’s not really a director, just a directoress,” ran the pejorative reading of the female professional’s preferred noun.

When, two weeks after the two women’s arrest, the legendary rock musician Andrey Makarevich joined the conversation, it was only to say: “You’ve got to be monstrously, criminally deaf to your mother tongue to come up with pearls like professorka, poetka, rezhissyorka… Are you completely bonkers, people?”

Why not just ‘director’?

Well, to begin with, Berkovich herself wants to be called a “directoress.” She even insists that others should refer to her this way. But not everyone is convinced.

Recent years’ heated debates on the use of feminitives in the Russian language have consolidated two mutually intolerant positions. People who side with inclusivity in the use of language are convinced that the use of feminitives raises awareness of the women’s achievements and contributions to the professional world, culture, and society. They think that feminitives can help correct social injustices with respect to women, including gender discrimination, income inequality (women in Russia earn 30–35 percent less than men), and the inequitable spread of domestic chores.

The opponents of feminitives, on the other hand, believe that this linguistic practice diminishes women and doesn’t recognize them as men’s equals. They also like to say that feminitives simply don’t sound “natural” in Russian.

In reality, starting at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, an increasing number of women in Russia (and elsewhere in the world) joined the workforce, offering their labor for hire. At the same time, a variety of new professions were just emerging and becoming a part of regular life, and women who joined them were frequently referred to with feminitives, as she-transcribers, -telegraphists, -aviators (or, rather, “aviatrixes”), and so forth.

Against this backdrop, the pre-revolutionary Russian feminist movement demanded suffrage rights for women. Unlike European suffragettes, Russian women were able to achieve this reform as early as 1917, when, following the February Revolution, the Provisional Government gave in to their demands and granted them the right to vote.

What to call women

At the same time, writes the Russian lingvistka Irina Fufayeva in her book What to Call Women, a linguistic undertow was normalizing the plural masculine form as the generic description of what people — both men and women — can do professionally. What’s a bit more surprising, though, is that this pattern of generalizing the masculine nouns as gender-neutral only became the norm by the 1960s. While, at the turn of the century, feminitives were preferred by women’s publications in 63 percent of cases, by the 1950s this number went down to 25 percent, dropping to 19 percent by the 1980s.

Marxism and Leninism treated women’s emancipation as a task of making them fully equal to men. Immediately after the October Revolution, Soviet propaganda portrayed women as strong workers and peasants. Some might even say they looked “masculine.” Still, even at that time, women were barred from certain occupations, considered too “dangerous” for all but men. By the late 1970s, the list of occupations closed to women grew to 431 different professions, obviating the feminitives that otherwise might have survived in the language.

Zhenya Berkovich is one of the contemporary Russian feminists who try to counter the generalization of the masculine gender. Besides, her determination to do this “definitely doesn’t hurt anyone,” she says.

The unconvinced

The question of using or not using feminitives is, first and foremost, a question of politics. This is, in fact, what bothers people who feel that their right to staying neutral is being taken away from them by the politicization of feminitives.

The linguist Alexander Pipersky thinks that, at the bottom of any linguistic debate there is inevitably a political creed. Anyone who takes part in the heated contemporary debates on language inevitably expresses a political position, sometimes in spite of themselves, or else has one attributed to them, sometimes against the grain of what they really think and feel. This is true not just for the arguments about gendered nouns, but also for other linguistic debates, like the proper way to refer to Ukraine. Either embracing or rejecting feminitives instantly broadcasts an ideological commitment, Pipersky believes: “Maybe you didn’t want to broadcast it. Maybe you’re just coming to a clinic to see a doctor and it’s not the place and time for politics.” When settings like that are newly politicized, it can bother people, Pipersky observes.

One of the arguments for the use of feminitives is that they highlight gender inequality through language and counter the invisibility of women’s work. But some people who oppose the wider use of feminitives think it’s irrelevant to focus on a professional’s gender, since gender falls outside of a person’s professional identity. Other critics of the practice believe that gender-neutral language helps protect women from discrimination. On these grounds, feminists in the English-speaking world have long advocated for gender neutrality in reference to work and professional occupations.

Nevertheless, since in the 1960s, sociolinguists have been noticing that using masculine nouns as neutral doesn’t automatically result in gender-neutral perceptions. When asked about their first associations with generic plural nouns like “writers,” “doctors,” “journalists,” or “experts,” both respondents and respondentesses in Romance in Germanic languages said that their first thought was about a group of men.

Nancy Fraser’s position

One of the critics of the rhetoric of recognition exemplified by the feminitives is the American philosopher Nancy Fraser. She does not believe that inclusive language is enough to solve society’s structural problems. “We are facing,” she writes, “a new constellation in the grammar of political claims-making — and one that is disturbing on two counts.”

First, this move from redistribution to recognition is occurring despite — or because of — an acceleration of economic globalization, at a time when an aggressively expanding capitalism is radically exacerbating economic inequality. In this context, questions of recognition are serving less to supplement, complicate and enrich redistributive struggles than to marginalize, eclipse and displace them. 

Second, today’s recognition struggles are occurring at a moment of hugely increasing transcultural interaction and communication, when accelerated migration and global media flows are hybridizing and pluralizing cultural forms. Yet the routes such struggles take often serve not to promote respectful interaction within increasingly multicultural contexts, but to drastically simplify and reify group identities. They tend, rather, to encourage separatism, intolerance and chauvinism, patriarchalism and authoritarianism.

Does this mean that we should give up on the feminitives? I prefer to think that cultural shifts can complement our efforts towards economic justice.

The court in Safonovo today began to consider another administrative case against Ilya Yashin for a foreign agency. Due to the fact that Roskomnadzor clumsily completed the documents, the meeting was postponed to March 14. But Yashin managed to deliver his speech, rhyming it “in the style of Zhenya Berkovich.” Your Honor, please take into account, that in Russia you can sit down for words and jokes, speech patterns, for drawings, memes, jokes, for the story about the duck's house... There are simply no healthy boundaries if you are a foreign agent. Your Honor, here before you a man who thirsts so that the war ends. I'm sure she - the heavy cross of the entire people, who exchanged freedom to empty promises, to evil messages, to the empire of deceit and – the ambitions of a tyrant. Your Honor, understand: revenge - that's the real reason legal arbitrariness and cruel trial regarding me and other people who dare call war war defending the honor of the Fatherland and saving her flag from bloody shame, when brother was betrayed by brother. I'm branded a foreign agent they want to stick it on your chest swindlers and hypocrites, opening the way our Motherland to the dull servant girl roles for imposing Beijing, where they are fed directly from your hand. Your Honor, I have pride openly declare to you: I won't humiliate myself to be a coward, to cry and pray you about a lenient sentence. I feel more comfortable living his years let in captivity, but worthy and passing the path is thorny, without reconciling with the will of the evil leader. Die is cast. I will continue to defend my country from a mad tyrant, which spreads darkness everywhere. Citizen judge you can do it too don't tarnish your honor. You just have to not be scared acquit the political prisoner. Believe: the sacrifice is not in vain. This is all. Today is that time.

https://t.me/yashin_russia/902

Arts and Life | Yevgenia Berkovich's Statement in Verse to the Court is Now an Illustrated Music Video Theater director Yevgeniya (Zhenya) Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk were back in court right after the New Year’s holidays to determine if they would be released from pre-trial detention. The two women have been held since May 2023 on charges that the play “Finist, the Brave Falcon,” written by Petriychuk and directed by Berkovich, contained elements justifying terrorism. The play is about Russian women who fall in love online with Islamic terrorists. This time, when Berkovich had her chance to make a statement to the court, she recited her statement in verse. Read more | Subscribe to our channel

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Meduza:

Just like how the invasion of Ukraine continues taking lives even on days without major battlefield shifts, Russia’s political repression machine keeps swallowing people up even when the victims don’t make headlines in the West. Take a minute to consider three cases whose defendants have moved closer to jail time in the last two days.

The first is the that of of playwright Svetlana Petriychuk and theater director Zhenya Berkovich, who were arrested in May on charges that they “justified terrorism” with their production of a play that tells the true story of Russian women recruited by ISIS. They’ve been in custody since then, and on Wednesday, a Moscow court remanded them for two more months.

Speaking to journalists from the courtroom’s glass cage before their hearing, the women appeared to be in good spirits, though they admitted it’s not always easy for them to cope with the reality that they could spend the next seven years in prison. Berkovich said that while she tries to maintain a sense of humor, she’s also determined not to lose sight of the injustice of her situation. “But that drives you to such a rage you’re ready to bang your head against the wall,” she added.

Then there’s the case of Mikhail Afanasyev, a journalist from the Republic of Khakassia in eastern Siberia who founded the news outlet Novy Fokus. On Thursday, an Abakan court sentenced him to 5.5 years in prison for spreading “disinformation” about the Russian army in an article he published in April 2022 about riot police who refused to fight in the war. After his release, Afanasyev will be barred from working in journalism for another two years, and according to his lawyer, his arrest forced Novy Fokus to close, costing Russia one more of its precious few independent news sources.

Finally, there’s Ilya Startsev, a U.S. citizen who works as an English teacher in the city of Oryol. On Thursday, a court arrested Startsev on suspicion of donating money to Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, an “extremist” organization under Russian law. The 36-year-old was taken into custody a day earlier as part of a roundup of men in various regions facing the same charges. All of them could spend up to eight years in prison if convicted.

Several months ago, in hopes of providing some context for Russia’s ongoing descent into autocracy, Meduza asked the Belarusian political scientist Artyom Shraibman to shares lessons from his country’s recent past. He described how, because of the incentive structure they create, political repressions can become self-replicating and intensify even in the absence of specific quotas or orders: “Repressions create a class of beneficiaries — career security agents for whom the fight against ‘enemies’ becomes a career elevator.” He also warned against the normalization of draconian laws and absurd sentences, writing that “the most important thing Belarus can teach Russia is that it can always get worse.”