Gender, resilience and recognition: masculinities and transitions out of care in Russia

Research on young people leaving care often points to a clear gendering of pathways, but has hitherto paid little attention to gender. This article uses a gender lens to develop a perspective on the dynamic processes of exclusion and inclusion that mark transitions to adulthood amongst young men leaving care in Russia. It does this by combining insights from the sociology of masculinities with recent theorising around the concepts of resilience and recognition in inter-disciplinary research on leaving care. It argues that, while recognition theory has become central to social and ecological understandings of resilience, its applications have focused on emotional and legal rather than social recognition, which better illuminates the wider social and cultural contexts, in this case surrounding gender, framing young people’s transitions and identity construction. In turn, this approach facilitates a perspective on the ‘social resilience’ of care leavers as a marginalised group in a particular national context. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in 2018–2019, the article highlights the ways young men adopt different versions of masculinity as they experience and perceive forms of recognition and misrecognition both in the present and the future, and the import this has for processes of social exclusion and inclusion.