Janet Elise Johnson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3921976 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Janet Elise Johnson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Janet Elise |
| FAMILY NAME | Johnson |
| SIGNATURE | JOHNSON J E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brooklyn College |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9807-9877 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 119 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The Way Home, or the Way to Prison? Gender Legacies and Anti-War Protest in Russia
This article analyzes the activist rhetoric of Put′ Domoi (The Way Home)—a prominent, Russia-based public protest movement consisting primarily of women whose family members were “mobilized” into fighting in Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. Using a detailed framework that describes Russia’s gender-related ideologies under Putin, we analyze Put′ Domoi’s activist rhetoric focusing primarily on the first six months of their public activism (…
How Russia’s war in Ukraine can change gender studies
The catastrophe of Russia's war in Ukraine following on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter-inspired protests raises the possibility of marked changes in people's gendered experiences in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E). Drawing upon recent discussions, events, and publications-with particular attention to Ukrainian voices and reflexivity as to my position as a US-based political scientist mostly trained on Rus…
Russia’s Authoritarian Policymaking
This article examines why domestic violence remained contentious in Russia after the 2017 partial decriminalization and how this led to a partial recriminalization in June 2022. While other analyses show the continuing importance of gender politics, this study highlights authoritarian regime dynamics, using process tracing following five models found in the scholarship on policymaking in Russia. The article indicates the central role of intra-eli…
Unpacking ‘Traditional Values’ in Russia’s Conservative Turn
We argue for analytically separating women’s and LGBTQ+ rights and differentiating the degrees of sexism and LGBTQ-phobia in Russia to better understand its conservative turn in the 2010s. Comparing Putin’s speeches to domestic audiences (1999–2020) with public opinion, we identify a somewhat conservative trend regarding women’s rights and a far more conservative one on LGBTQ+ rights. While Russia made a sharper conservative turn in summer 2021, …
Authoritarian Gender Equality Policy Making
This article provides an analytical framework for understanding why and how many authoritarian regimes have recently adopted reforms that address gender equality. I illustrate and hone the framework by tracing three policy-making processes on domestic violence in Russia, an important and least-likely case for such reforms. While recent scholarship finds the importance of international leverage, strategic actions by women’s groups, and regime inte…
The Gendered Ambiguity of the Postcommunist Transitions
The Routledge Handbook of Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia
"This Handbook is the key reference for contemporary historical and political approaches to gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Leading scholars examine the region's highly diverse politics, histories, cultures, ethnicities, and religions, and how these structures intersect with gender alongside class, sexuality, coloniality, and racism. Comprising 50 chapters, the Handbook is divided into six thematic parts: Part 1 Conceptual Debates a…
Mixed signals
The prevailing wisdom among scholars of gender in Russia is that Vladimir Putin – as Russia’s “strongman” president – has become an agent of traditionalism. Some political scientists, often without a gendered lens, have argued that Putin is not so powerful, compelled to deploy various tactics and ideologies to balance competing interests among elites and retain support from the general public. We systematically analyze Putin’s statements about ge…
Oksana Shachko (1987-2018), co-founder of Femen
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
How Human Rights Advocates Influence Policy at the United Nations
Rethinking Qualitative Methodology around Masculinity
Given the predominance of men among elites, it is remarkable how little scholarship there is on the challenges of qualitative empirical work on elite men, especially work that interrogates the intersection of gender and class. We have both sought to include elite men as subjects, noting that the gender of our subjects, their social power, and our own gender performance have played a central role in defining our efficacy as researchers. Darren has…
Fast-Tracked or Boxed In? Informal Politics, Gender, and Women’s Representation in Putin’s Russia
Why hasn’t the marked increase in women in politics over the last half century led to the expected results of increased gender equality and more democracy? In order to propose a new answer to this question, which is central for both theoretical and empirical feminist political science, I look at the case of Putin’s Russia as one of the authoritarian-leaning regimes that have promoted women into politics while simultaneously becoming more misogyni…
Street-level Practice of Russia's Social Policymaking in Saint Petersburg
Despite the growth in studies of Russian social policy, the reality of the social policy process - most of which is regionally based - remains a puzzle. In this article, we stake a claim for the importance of studying street-level social service provision in Russia's regions to advance the understanding of social policymaking in authoritarian-leaning regimes. We show that - albeit in small ways in only some places - Russia has expanded its welfar…
Pussy Riot as a feminist project
This article considers Pussy Riot as a feminist project, placing their actions and the regime's reactions in the context of three post-9/11 developments in gender and sexuality politics in Russia. First, I assert that Pussy Riot's stunts are a logical reaction to the Kremlin's masculinity-based nation-rebuilding scheme, which was a cover for crude homophobic misogyny. Second, Pussy Riot is part of the informal feminism emerging in Russia, a respo…
Twenty-First-Century Feminisms under Repression
This article charts the ideology and mobilization of the women’s crisis center movement—the most recognizable example of postcommunist feminist activism until 2011—over the first decade of the twenty-first century as Russia moved toward consolidation and authoritarianism. We draw on our experience in and observation of this movement, a 2008 photoethnography project, and a nationwide survey of crisis centers conducted in 2008–9. By the end of Vlad…
A Feminist Theory of Corruption
Half a decade into a new global economic crisis, most policymakers, pundits, and scholars discuss the situation in nongendered ways, carting out long-standing criticisms of bloated states or of neoliberalism, despite powerful feminist critiques. At the same time, feminist scholars, particularly those within feminist political science (FPS) studying advanced democracies, have been struggling with a “central paradox . ... The widespread formal adop…
Assessing civil society in Putin’s Russia
The article assesses civil society in Putin’s Russia through the lens of the small social movement working against gender violence. Based on questionnaires distributed to movement organizations in 2008–2009, we find significant retrenchment among the NGO segment of the movement, adding evidence to the claim of Russia’s turn toward authoritarianism. However, this innovative, midlevel analysis–not the typical society-wide surveys nor the small numb…
Gender violence in Russia
Unwilling Participant Observation among Russian Siloviki and the Good-Enough Field Researcher
In 1999, on a trip to Russia to study gender violence, I was sitting in on a special training at a Moscow police academy. In between jokes about the impossibility of prostitutes getting raped, the cops-in-training could not stop focusing on me, the one American and one of three women in a rowdy room. For example, one man loudly asked me whether all Americans had cars and followed up with a comment that, of course we did, because this is where “yo…
Domestic Violence Politics in Post-Soviet States
Journal Article Domestic Violence Politics in Post-Soviet States Get access Janet Elise Johnson Janet Elise Johnson [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 14, Issue 3, Fall 2007, Pages 380–405, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxm015 Published: 25 August 2007
Living Gender after Communism
Highlights postcommunist opportunities for renegotiating gender roles in Central and Eastern Europe
The emergence of contrasting domestic violence regimes in post-communist Europe
English Between the end of socialism and the 2004 European Union enlargement, options for women in Central and Eastern Europe seeking to overcome domestic violence grew noticeably. Because these options include both social movement organisations and the state, we adopt what we call a ‘domestic violence regime’ approach, comparing 11 countries and exploring four – Poland, Russia, Slovakia and Armenia – in more depth. Considering the impact of fore…
Privatizing Pain
In the decade since the fall of communism in Russia, woman battery has become a more salient issue. On the one hand, the criminal justice system is failing to respond to woman battery. While this failure within the context of limited state capacity may not be surprising, police, prosecutors, and judges justify their behavior with familiar sounding arguments such as "she provoked it" or "it is a private affair." On the other hand, non-governmental…
Women and Political Change
Mixed signals
The prevailing wisdom among scholars of gender in Russia is that Vladimir Putin – as Russia’s “strongman” president – has become an agent of traditionalism. Some political scientists, often without a gendered lens, have argued that Putin is not so powerful, compelled to deploy various tactics and ideologies to balance competing interests among elites and retain support from the general public. We systematically analyze Putin’s statements about ge…
A Feminist Theory of Corruption
Half a decade into a new global economic crisis, most policymakers, pundits, and scholars discuss the situation in nongendered ways, carting out long-standing criticisms of bloated states or of neoliberalism, despite powerful feminist critiques. At the same time, feminist scholars, particularly those within feminist political science (FPS) studying advanced democracies, have been struggling with a “central paradox . ... The widespread formal adop…
Fast-Tracked or Boxed In? Informal Politics, Gender, and Women’s Representation in Putin’s Russia
Why hasn’t the marked increase in women in politics over the last half century led to the expected results of increased gender equality and more democracy? In order to propose a new answer to this question, which is central for both theoretical and empirical feminist political science, I look at the case of Putin’s Russia as one of the authoritarian-leaning regimes that have promoted women into politics while simultaneously becoming more misogyni…
Authoritarian Gender Equality Policy Making
This article provides an analytical framework for understanding why and how many authoritarian regimes have recently adopted reforms that address gender equality. I illustrate and hone the framework by tracing three policy-making processes on domestic violence in Russia, an important and least-likely case for such reforms. While recent scholarship finds the importance of international leverage, strategic actions by women’s groups, and regime inte…
Assessing civil society in Putin’s Russia
The article assesses civil society in Putin’s Russia through the lens of the small social movement working against gender violence. Based on questionnaires distributed to movement organizations in 2008–2009, we find significant retrenchment among the NGO segment of the movement, adding evidence to the claim of Russia’s turn toward authoritarianism. However, this innovative, midlevel analysis–not the typical society-wide surveys nor the small numb…
Domestic Violence Politics in Post-Soviet States
Journal Article Domestic Violence Politics in Post-Soviet States Get access Janet Elise Johnson Janet Elise Johnson [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 14, Issue 3, Fall 2007, Pages 380–405, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxm015 Published: 25 August 2007
Unpacking ‘Traditional Values’ in Russia’s Conservative Turn
We argue for analytically separating women’s and LGBTQ+ rights and differentiating the degrees of sexism and LGBTQ-phobia in Russia to better understand its conservative turn in the 2010s. Comparing Putin’s speeches to domestic audiences (1999–2020) with public opinion, we identify a somewhat conservative trend regarding women’s rights and a far more conservative one on LGBTQ+ rights. While Russia made a sharper conservative turn in summer 2021, …
The emergence of contrasting domestic violence regimes in post-communist Europe
English Between the end of socialism and the 2004 European Union enlargement, options for women in Central and Eastern Europe seeking to overcome domestic violence grew noticeably. Because these options include both social movement organisations and the state, we adopt what we call a ‘domestic violence regime’ approach, comparing 11 countries and exploring four – Poland, Russia, Slovakia and Armenia – in more depth. Considering the impact of fore…
Pussy Riot as a feminist project
This article considers Pussy Riot as a feminist project, placing their actions and the regime's reactions in the context of three post-9/11 developments in gender and sexuality politics in Russia. First, I assert that Pussy Riot's stunts are a logical reaction to the Kremlin's masculinity-based nation-rebuilding scheme, which was a cover for crude homophobic misogyny. Second, Pussy Riot is part of the informal feminism emerging in Russia, a respo…
Street-level Practice of Russia's Social Policymaking in Saint Petersburg
Despite the growth in studies of Russian social policy, the reality of the social policy process - most of which is regionally based - remains a puzzle. In this article, we stake a claim for the importance of studying street-level social service provision in Russia's regions to advance the understanding of social policymaking in authoritarian-leaning regimes. We show that - albeit in small ways in only some places - Russia has expanded its welfar…
Gender violence in Russia
Unwilling Participant Observation among Russian Siloviki and the Good-Enough Field Researcher
In 1999, on a trip to Russia to study gender violence, I was sitting in on a special training at a Moscow police academy. In between jokes about the impossibility of prostitutes getting raped, the cops-in-training could not stop focusing on me, the one American and one of three women in a rowdy room. For example, one man loudly asked me whether all Americans had cars and followed up with a comment that, of course we did, because this is where “yo…
The Way Home, or the Way to Prison? Gender Legacies and Anti-War Protest in Russia
This article analyzes the activist rhetoric of Put′ Domoi (The Way Home)—a prominent, Russia-based public protest movement consisting primarily of women whose family members were “mobilized” into fighting in Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. Using a detailed framework that describes Russia’s gender-related ideologies under Putin, we analyze Put′ Domoi’s activist rhetoric focusing primarily on the first six months of their public activism (…
How Russia’s war in Ukraine can change gender studies
The catastrophe of Russia's war in Ukraine following on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter-inspired protests raises the possibility of marked changes in people's gendered experiences in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E). Drawing upon recent discussions, events, and publications-with particular attention to Ukrainian voices and reflexivity as to my position as a US-based political scientist mostly trained on Rus…
The Gendered Ambiguity of the Postcommunist Transitions
Oksana Shachko (1987-2018), co-founder of Femen
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Rethinking Qualitative Methodology around Masculinity
Given the predominance of men among elites, it is remarkable how little scholarship there is on the challenges of qualitative empirical work on elite men, especially work that interrogates the intersection of gender and class. We have both sought to include elite men as subjects, noting that the gender of our subjects, their social power, and our own gender performance have played a central role in defining our efficacy as researchers. Darren has…
Privatizing Pain
In the decade since the fall of communism in Russia, woman battery has become a more salient issue. On the one hand, the criminal justice system is failing to respond to woman battery. While this failure within the context of limited state capacity may not be surprising, police, prosecutors, and judges justify their behavior with familiar sounding arguments such as "she provoked it" or "it is a private affair." On the other hand, non-governmental…
Women and Political Change
Living Gender after Communism
Highlights postcommunist opportunities for renegotiating gender roles in Central and Eastern Europe
The emergence of contrasting domestic violence regimes in post-communist Europe
English Between the end of socialism and the 2004 European Union enlargement, options for women in Central and Eastern Europe seeking to overcome domestic violence grew noticeably. Because these options include both social movement organisations and the state, we adopt what we call a ‘domestic violence regime’ approach, comparing 11 countries and exploring four – Poland, Russia, Slovakia and Armenia – in more depth. Considering the impact of fore…
Domestic Violence Politics in Post-Soviet States
Journal Article Domestic Violence Politics in Post-Soviet States Get access Janet Elise Johnson Janet Elise Johnson [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 14, Issue 3, Fall 2007, Pages 380–405, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxm015 Published: 25 August 2007
Gender violence in Russia
Unwilling Participant Observation among Russian Siloviki and the Good-Enough Field Researcher
In 1999, on a trip to Russia to study gender violence, I was sitting in on a special training at a Moscow police academy. In between jokes about the impossibility of prostitutes getting raped, the cops-in-training could not stop focusing on me, the one American and one of three women in a rowdy room. For example, one man loudly asked me whether all Americans had cars and followed up with a comment that, of course we did, because this is where “yo…
Assessing civil society in Putin’s Russia
The article assesses civil society in Putin’s Russia through the lens of the small social movement working against gender violence. Based on questionnaires distributed to movement organizations in 2008–2009, we find significant retrenchment among the NGO segment of the movement, adding evidence to the claim of Russia’s turn toward authoritarianism. However, this innovative, midlevel analysis–not the typical society-wide surveys nor the small numb…
Twenty-First-Century Feminisms under Repression
This article charts the ideology and mobilization of the women’s crisis center movement—the most recognizable example of postcommunist feminist activism until 2011—over the first decade of the twenty-first century as Russia moved toward consolidation and authoritarianism. We draw on our experience in and observation of this movement, a 2008 photoethnography project, and a nationwide survey of crisis centers conducted in 2008–9. By the end of Vlad…
A Feminist Theory of Corruption
Half a decade into a new global economic crisis, most policymakers, pundits, and scholars discuss the situation in nongendered ways, carting out long-standing criticisms of bloated states or of neoliberalism, despite powerful feminist critiques. At the same time, feminist scholars, particularly those within feminist political science (FPS) studying advanced democracies, have been struggling with a “central paradox . ... The widespread formal adop…
Pussy Riot as a feminist project
This article considers Pussy Riot as a feminist project, placing their actions and the regime's reactions in the context of three post-9/11 developments in gender and sexuality politics in Russia. First, I assert that Pussy Riot's stunts are a logical reaction to the Kremlin's masculinity-based nation-rebuilding scheme, which was a cover for crude homophobic misogyny. Second, Pussy Riot is part of the informal feminism emerging in Russia, a respo…
Fast-Tracked or Boxed In? Informal Politics, Gender, and Women’s Representation in Putin’s Russia
Why hasn’t the marked increase in women in politics over the last half century led to the expected results of increased gender equality and more democracy? In order to propose a new answer to this question, which is central for both theoretical and empirical feminist political science, I look at the case of Putin’s Russia as one of the authoritarian-leaning regimes that have promoted women into politics while simultaneously becoming more misogyni…
Street-level Practice of Russia's Social Policymaking in Saint Petersburg
Despite the growth in studies of Russian social policy, the reality of the social policy process - most of which is regionally based - remains a puzzle. In this article, we stake a claim for the importance of studying street-level social service provision in Russia's regions to advance the understanding of social policymaking in authoritarian-leaning regimes. We show that - albeit in small ways in only some places - Russia has expanded its welfar…
How Human Rights Advocates Influence Policy at the United Nations
Rethinking Qualitative Methodology around Masculinity
Given the predominance of men among elites, it is remarkable how little scholarship there is on the challenges of qualitative empirical work on elite men, especially work that interrogates the intersection of gender and class. We have both sought to include elite men as subjects, noting that the gender of our subjects, their social power, and our own gender performance have played a central role in defining our efficacy as researchers. Darren has…
Oksana Shachko (1987-2018), co-founder of Femen
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
The Routledge Handbook of Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia
"This Handbook is the key reference for contemporary historical and political approaches to gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Leading scholars examine the region's highly diverse politics, histories, cultures, ethnicities, and religions, and how these structures intersect with gender alongside class, sexuality, coloniality, and racism. Comprising 50 chapters, the Handbook is divided into six thematic parts: Part 1 Conceptual Debates a…
Mixed signals
The prevailing wisdom among scholars of gender in Russia is that Vladimir Putin – as Russia’s “strongman” president – has become an agent of traditionalism. Some political scientists, often without a gendered lens, have argued that Putin is not so powerful, compelled to deploy various tactics and ideologies to balance competing interests among elites and retain support from the general public. We systematically analyze Putin’s statements about ge…
The Gendered Ambiguity of the Postcommunist Transitions
How Russia’s war in Ukraine can change gender studies
The catastrophe of Russia's war in Ukraine following on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter-inspired protests raises the possibility of marked changes in people's gendered experiences in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E). Drawing upon recent discussions, events, and publications-with particular attention to Ukrainian voices and reflexivity as to my position as a US-based political scientist mostly trained on Rus…
Russia’s Authoritarian Policymaking
This article examines why domestic violence remained contentious in Russia after the 2017 partial decriminalization and how this led to a partial recriminalization in June 2022. While other analyses show the continuing importance of gender politics, this study highlights authoritarian regime dynamics, using process tracing following five models found in the scholarship on policymaking in Russia. The article indicates the central role of intra-eli…
Unpacking ‘Traditional Values’ in Russia’s Conservative Turn
We argue for analytically separating women’s and LGBTQ+ rights and differentiating the degrees of sexism and LGBTQ-phobia in Russia to better understand its conservative turn in the 2010s. Comparing Putin’s speeches to domestic audiences (1999–2020) with public opinion, we identify a somewhat conservative trend regarding women’s rights and a far more conservative one on LGBTQ+ rights. While Russia made a sharper conservative turn in summer 2021, …
Authoritarian Gender Equality Policy Making
This article provides an analytical framework for understanding why and how many authoritarian regimes have recently adopted reforms that address gender equality. I illustrate and hone the framework by tracing three policy-making processes on domestic violence in Russia, an important and least-likely case for such reforms. While recent scholarship finds the importance of international leverage, strategic actions by women’s groups, and regime inte…
The Way Home, or the Way to Prison? Gender Legacies and Anti-War Protest in Russia
This article analyzes the activist rhetoric of Put′ Domoi (The Way Home)—a prominent, Russia-based public protest movement consisting primarily of women whose family members were “mobilized” into fighting in Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. Using a detailed framework that describes Russia’s gender-related ideologies under Putin, we analyze Put′ Domoi’s activist rhetoric focusing primarily on the first six months of their public activism (…
Political science (19 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Gender Politics and Representation (16 works) · Law (16 works) · Politics (16 works) · Gender, Security, and Conflict (12 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies (10 works) · Gender Studies (9 works)