Issue 3. Between Big Brother and the Digital Utopia: e-Governance in Post-Totalitarian Space
Sudha Rajagopalan
Sudha Rajagopalan is Research Affiliate with the Media Studies Group (Research Institute for History and Culture) at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. She obtained her PhD in Russian History from Indiana University, Bloomington (2005). Her research interests are in oral history, cultural memory, media reception, transnational cultural flows, sites of leisure and the interfaces of old and new media on Runet. She is the author of Indian Films in Soviet Cinemas: The Culture of Movie-going after Stalin (Indiana University Press, 2009). She has worked at the International Institute for Social History (Amsterdam), researching the Russian émigré diaries. Rajagopalan also runs a visual history archive that documents the active, public role of women in the countries of South Asia.
3.5 How to be a well-groomed Russian: Cultural Citizenship in the Television / New Media Interface
Every morning on Channel One, the makeover programme Fashion Verdict offers candidates and audiences sartorial advice appropriate to a middle-class sensibility. The show sets out to transform so-called dowdy candidates in ill-fitting clothes into style icons. The transformation helps each candidate find her ‘true self’, ‘empowerment’ and other such coveted end-goals. The show is an exercise in governmentality through which viewers’ conduct as well-groomed citizens is sought to be influenced. On the official message board, however, viewers also participate in the articulation of the show’s cultural ideals, specifically those of femininity and individuality, and work on making the show’s prescriptions correspond to reality as they understand it. Thus, the makeover enterprise is a multi-platform text where online audiences not only consume but also become co-arbiters of the sartorial discourse, making their engagement with the show’s prescriptions an exercise in cultural citizenship.
Language of contribution: English