Helena Goscilo > Quotes

“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male; the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision.”
― Helena Goscilo, Dehexing Sex: Russian Womanhood During and After Glasnost

“The Yeltsin years considerably lowered the bar [of public expectations] for the country’s next leader: Putin’s specific policies and actions arguably matter far less than his reassuring symbolic function as “a real man” who can husband the nation’s resources and promise a return to greatness. (2007: 227)”
― Helena Goscilo, Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon

“Scholars generally understand post-Soviet nostalgia as something more than a simple longing for the return of the Soviet past (Boym 2001; Ivanova 1997; Nadkarni and Shevchenko 2004; Oushakine 2007; Sabonis-Chafee 1999). Nostalgia “emphasizes the irretrievability of the past as the very condition of desire,” since it “is never longing for a specific past as much as it is longing for longing itself, made all the safer by the fact that the object of that desire is deemed irrevocably lost” (Nadkarni and Shevchenko 2004: 491).”
― Helena Goscilo, Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon

“former KGB officer with a confident walk and shy smile, a tough administrator of disarming simplicity, a market-oriented reformer willing to increase state control over the market, and a touching father who can fly a jet and uses military slang in his speech. (Fartyshev”
― Helena Goscilo, Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon

“Moreover, it is important to recognize that notions of self-fashioning were circulating in Renaissance Europe not only among members of the rising middle class but also in writings addressed to monarchs. Consider, for example, Machiavelli’s Prince or the various Mirrors for Princes of the early modern period, which advocate that monarchs carefully manipulate their image in order to solidify their authority and to mask the exercise of coercive power, for, as Machiavelli writes, the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it; and in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a place there only when the many have no ground to rest on (2002) (for more on Putin and Machiavelli,”
― Helena Goscilo, Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon