Kashina M. A., Tkach S. History of the evolution of gender studies in Russia through the analysis of discourses of their subject fields (Based on the analysis of word-nets and word-clouds), р. 36-59


Gender studies are a new expanding interdisciplinary area of Russian sociohumanitarian thought. There are many review articles that describe certain areas of gender studies. However, there are still no works in which the nature and direction of the evolution of gender studies, considering the dynamics of the discourses of their subject fields, are analyzed. The main hypothesis of this study: the trajectory of the development of the discourses of Russian gender studies can be described as a tendency to expand in breadth. The concept of gender has not yet exhausted its explanatory potential in relation to Russian reality. Sample: 1716 titles of scientific articles by Russian gender researchers published between the early 1990s and 2021. Methods: digital (machine) technologies for natural language analysis, namely the bigrams function of the NLTK library, qualitative text analysis. Results. There are two trends in the development of Russian gender studies: 1) women’s studies are inferior in popularity to gender studies at the turn of the century, but regain it in the 2010s; 2) crystallization points at the institutional stage of development of gender studies are: at first disciplinary terms (“anthropological”, “pedagogical”, “sociological”, “psychological”, etc.), and then — general humanitarian ones (“communication”, “movement”, “modern”, etc.). This indicates a certain blurring of the subject field of gender studies. There is the desire of researchers to move away from the political agenda of gender inequality to more neutral topics, for example, social work, family, parenthood, and psychological well-being. One of the reasons for this is the pressure of the external circuit, which requires both the constant legitimization of the term “gender” and the proof of its need for the analysis of Russian reality. Read in PDF