Gendered and sexualized violence on the move: unravelling collective (im)mobilization in the name of post-Soviet imperial membership

Contemporary discourses of the Russian Federation reproduce images of militarized heterosexual masculinity and frame its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This war encouraged the large-scale displacement and caused Ukrainian citizens’ horrible experiences of gendered and sexualized violence. Relying on the secondary data, the article studies these war-torn forms of gendered and sexualized violence as framed by the military coercion taking place in three different realms: in Ukraine, on the route to the Russian Federation, and on the route to the EU. First, the article introduces the imperiality-sensitive ideas with the goal to interpret the nexus of embodied violence and war-torn state-led (im)mobilization strategies as articulations of post-Soviet imperial membership. Second, it specifies the concept of politics and policies of (sociospatial) (im)mobilization to address the ways in which (state) actors coercively channel movement by relying on the carceral apparatus. Third, the article delineates Russian ethnic dominance, anti-Westernism, neo-Stalinist elements, and heteronormative-patriarchal organization as four dimensions of post-Soviet membership and relates them to RF’s war-related discourses, politics, and policies. The subsequent empirical section zooms into the forms of gendered and sexualized violence (in Ukraine, on the route to the Russian Federation and to the EU) as embodied practices of post-Soviet membership.