Managing spoiled Russian identity: geopolitical stigma, empire and masculine subject positioning during the Russia-Ukraine war

This article demonstrates that masculinity-related stigma management strategies can emerge in response to geopolitical events and among men who do not meet conventional definitions of marginalisation. I substantiate this by analysing how a diverse sample of Russian men living in Russia and abroad respond to the Western condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and to the stigma of belonging to an ‘aggressor state’. I show that geopolitical stigmatisation generates intense anxieties about status, strength, and recognition among the participants with masculinity functioning as a key site where geopolitical humiliation, status loss, and imperial nostalgia are processed and negotiated. Building on scholarship that theorises stigma as a form of power, the article identifies three stigma management strategies: ‘splitting and blaming’, ‘disclaiming agency’, and ‘turning to counter-discourses’ all of which show that masculine subjectivities are entwined with imperial imaginaries. I offer the concept of geopolitical stigma, as a crucial but overlooked form of power relations in Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities, and argue that masculinity functions as a key mechanism through which global coloniality and inter-imperiality are reproduced and normalised in everyday life.