The bears and the bees: Racialized gender and sexuality in Russian children’s TV

Today, there are more than 100 distinct ethnic groups living in the Russian Federation. Officially, the Soviet Union was against racial inequality and pursued racial equity, at times genuinely and at other times cynically. Scholarship has addressed the function of race and racialization in the Russian empire and Soviet Union, though more work is to be done in the contemporary context. In this article, I analyse racialization at the intersection of gender and sexuality in the Russian children’s TV series Masha and the Bear (2009–present). Herein, I reveal narrative themes, topic associations, and visual cues that join to globally communicate messages from a Russian perspective of proper romantic coupling, parentage, and gender and sexual expression. Finally, I invite further studies into how racialized gender and sexuality in Russian media affects ethnically minoritized people in the contemporary Russian Federation.