Personalia
Stephen Amico, born in Buffalo, New York, USA. Pd.D. from the City University of New York Graduate Center. Assistant Professor of Music and Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam.
Fellow (1 September 2014 – 30 June 2015)
From VIA-Gra to Pussy Riot: Popular Music, “Feminism,” and Globalization in Post-Post-Soviet Russia
Research Question
This project will explore the ways in which gender is constructed in the realms of popular culture/popular music in [post]-post-Soviet Russia, with attention to both the affective resonance of the human voice and the (digital) media through which voices and images are disseminated in an increasingly globalizing society.
Project Description
Understanding the foundational importance of gender in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, my study examines how musical constructions of the female, feminine and feminist – from the countercultural to the mass-marketed – have been both formed by and formative of indigenous popular culture, and the extent to which the affective, ideological, and material/technological circuits of globalization (via popular music, digital media, and the human voice) engage with and impact upon such constructions. Additionally, understanding that the term “post-Soviet” may no longer be entirely apropos nearly three decades after the dissolution of the USSR, I will attempt to theorize a post-post-Soviet model, one whose very foundations rest upon an understanding of the ubiquity of a globally and digitally disseminated expressive popular culture in relation to discourses of civil society.
Selected Publications
1) Amico, Stephen. 2014. Roll Over, Tchaikovsky! Russian Popular Music and Post-Soviet Homosexuality. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
2) Amico, Stephen. 2014. “‘The Most Martian of Martianesses’: Zahnna Aguzarova, (post-)Soviet Rock ‘n’ Roll, and the Musico-Linguistic Creation of the ‘Outside’.” Popular Music 33(2): 243-267.
3) Amico, Stephen. 2009. “Visible Difference, Audible Difference: Female Singers and Gay Male Fans in Russian Popular Music.” Popular Music and Society 32(3): 351-370.