Dr. McReynolds’ chapter “The Actress and the Wrestler: Gendering Identities” identifies two Russian celebrities — Maria Savina and Ivan Poddubnyi — whose popularity illuminates ways in which gender roles were evolving amidst Russian industrialization. McReynolds references Foucault while introducing her argument and I feel it is important to further contextualize Foucault’s influence on Dr. McReynolds’ argument to better appreciate McReynolds’ claims about the “polyvalent” relationship between Savina and Poddubnyi and their fans and how this relationship impacts the “construction of selfhood.”
In Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Foucault endorses a new regime of power in which society constructs a “new economy of bodies and pleasures.” Foucault’s language is notably evocative. The words “regime” and “economy” imply Foucault’s interest in and characterization of sexuality is largely through a social lens. Furthermore, this language situates Foucault’s discussion of sexuality within the existing historical frame of industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Foucault directly responds to this historical analysis in the first part of History of Sexuality, titled “We ‘Other Victorians'” in which Foucault responds to the repressive hypothesis and later challenges it in his second part.
Foucault considers sexuality to be an instrument of social control; sexuality is a social construction through which power can be exercised. Foucault’s History of Sexuality is largely a conversation about power. Foucault defines power as relational — it is not so much an object as it is a force that can be exercised through relationships. In describing power through these terms, Foucault determines power exists in all relationships and cannot be isolated or confined to specific categories because power is always happening, constantly occurring and changing. He encourages power to be understood “as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate.”
I reference Foucault’s discussion of power because I believe it pertains to and informs McReynolds’ claim regarding the polyvalence between these Russian celebrities and their fans. McReynolds’ language of polyvalence mirrors Foucault’s articulation of a “multiplicity of force relations.” In both cases, what we observe is this sense of interdependence and this inability to concretely identify points of origin and response. Instead, what we can isolate are the relational forces between star and fans and determine how these forces contribute to evolving understandings of gender, which McReynolds accomplishes in the chapter. In evoking Foucauldian thinking, McReynolds substantiates her analytical intention in examining how the relationship of “imitation” is not simply a dynamic of original and copy but far more nuanced, thus allowing McReynolds to emphasize such nuance in the construction of selfhood in Russian culture at the turn of the century.
