Becoming a Russian Doll: Interrogating Representations of
the Russian Mail Order Bride

By Alexandra Macias Lipskaia

In the contemporary media landscape, the increasing emphasis on visual and virtual
communication and narrative techniques has contributed to a heightened contestation regarding
representations of foreign female bodies in the West. How is the figure of the Russian woman
created and perpetuated by media technologies employed by the Russian Mail Order Bride
industry? How is Western popular culture appropriating these representations in ways that
reinforce the “otherness” and potential danger of the Russian Mail Order Bride? In conducting a
textual analysis of visual media, academic texts and first-person experiences of women in
contemporary Russia, I present a performative storytelling project focusing on modern Russian
women’s representations in the media, and their relationship to the Russian Mail Order Bride
phenomenon. I draw on the situated knowledges of women in visual media in creating a
performance-based video project that develops the visual discourse of the representation of
female bodies both on screen and on the page.
Keywords: Media, virtual worlds, female representation, Russian women, objectification,
agency, performance, regimes of power, discourse.