The literature on violence against women in politics (VAWIP) has made substantial contributions to understanding how gender shapes political exclusion. Foundational work by Krook and Restrepo Sanín (Reference Krook and Sanín2016; Reference Krook and Sanín2020) defined VAWIP as a form of hate crime and as systematic backlash against women’s entry into political life. This conceptual scaffolding informs Krook’s (Reference Krook2022) subsequent attention to semiotic and symbolic harm, extending the VAWIP framework beyond physical violence to encompass the representational strategies through which female politicians are delegitimized. Bjarnegård and Zetterberg’s (Reference Bjarnegård and Zetterberg2023) edited volume extends the framework further, recognizing that gender-based political violence operates across a broader range of contexts and along a “psychological-physical continuum” (7) that is neither temporally nor institutionally confined to election cycles or legislative chambers.
This growing scholarship has substantially enriched our understanding of gendered power. Yet it has also inherited a structural assumption that significantly limits its reach. As Bardall, Bjarnegård, and Piscopo (Reference Bardall, Bjarnegård and Piscopo2020) point out, VAWIP frameworks take as their point of departure women’s experiences of abuse within political life. The organizing logic is one of backlash: existing power holders resist the inclusion of new actors, using violence to push women out or keep them from entering. This framing, however, requires as its baseline a political space that in principle admits women and whose disruption by violence can be measured.
Neumann’s (Reference Neumann2024) analysis of antifeminism in Nicaragua adds another layer to the conceptual framework of VAWIP. She demonstrates that feminist organizations function in authoritarian contexts as ideological threats to the regime’s legitimacy — not merely as organizational competitors for political space. The key distinction Neumann draws is between women being excluded from existing political space (the standard VAWIP story) and women being prevented from creating alternative political spaces outside the regime’s reach. What is at stake is not representation but the existence of autonomous feminist political subjectivity as such. Walby (Reference Walby2023) provides a macro-level framework for situating these dynamics: in authoritarian gender regimes, violence operates as a central institutional domain through which the state consolidates power, and civil society — including feminist organizing — is suppressed precisely because it represents the primary mechanism through which that deployment of violence could be named, contested, and held accountable.
What this emergent literature has not yet fully theorized is the specific logic by which women in authoritarian contexts are not merely excluded from political space but constituted as a threat to national security — a category whose very existence becomes grounds for violence. The question is thus not only why authoritarian regimes repress feminist movements — Neumann (Reference Neumann2024) answers that — but how these regimes generate new political categories through violence and, with them, new identities that are then targeted.
Constitutive Violence in Authoritarian Contexts
Political violence can generate antagonized identities across many contexts. What distinguishes authoritarian gender regimes is that the antagonized identity is produced through the gender order itself. Nation-making projects require a prescribed femininity as their reproductive and symbolic foundation (Peterson Reference Peterson1992). This requirement means that deviation from prescribed femininity is experienced by the regime as an existential threat to the national order itself — to its biological reproduction, its symbolic coherence, and its moral legitimacy (Wilkinson Reference Wilkinson, Swati Parashar and True2018). Consequently, the targeted identity is constituted as oppositional not through political acts but through its relationship to the reproduction of the nation. This is the configuration that makes VAWIP in authoritarian regimes categorically different from other forms of political violence that generate antagonized subjectivities — and it is what the concept of constitutive violence is designed to capture.
The Russian case offers direct purchase on these dynamics. Since the early 2010s, Russia’s regime has defined “the people” in part through the regulation of gendered visibility. It suppresses queer presence while hypervisibilizing patriotic masculinity (Edenborg Reference Edenborg2020, 107) and draws on the figure of “Mother Russia” to organize a symbolic order in which challenging state narratives registers as a treasonous violation of a gendered national covenant (Wilkinson Reference Wilkinson, Swati Parashar and True2018, 119). The regime has pursued, in other words, what I document as systematic “norm antipreneurship,” actively organizing opposition to gender equality norms globally while also deploying antifeminist politics as an element of national identity and moral sovereignty at home (Kuteleva Reference Kuteleva2024, 158).
The Russian state consistently “protected women” by extending maternity capital payments, providing free in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment, and promoting pronatalist welfare measures. Simultaneously, it targeted feminist organizations and individual activists for harassment, criminal prosecution, and forced exile through the “foreign agent” law (Kuteleva Reference Kuteleva2024, 163–69). Davidenko (Reference Davidenko2020) documents how this “foreign agent” framework compelled Russian anti-violence nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to abandon public advocacy for domestic violence legislation in order to survive. Tracing the micropolitics of authoritarian gender policymaking through three domestic violence reform processes, Johnson (Reference Johnson2023) similarly shows that autonomous feminist movements are precisely what authoritarian regimes suppress. Johnson’s (Reference Johnson2017, 11–13) “gender equality paradox” captures the specific logic at work: formal inclusion is offered simultaneously with the informalization of power, constraining feminist movements structurally rather than merely tactically.
This pattern accelerated and sharpened after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Feminist Anti-War Resistance (FAR), designated as a “foreign agent” in December 2022 and labeled as an “undesirable organization” in April 2024, exemplifies the organizational targeting that Neumann (Reference Neumann2024) identifies. FAR’s nonhierarchical network form is itself a response to this logic, a structure designed to survive the regime’s effort to identify and suppress the movement’s leadership (Sundstrom, Henry, and Sperling Reference Sundstrom, Henry and Sperling2022).
But the Russian case does not simply confirm Neumann’s (Reference Neumann2024) framework. It pushes beyond it. Neumann’s unit of analysis is the feminist organization, and her mechanism is organizational dismantling — removing legal status, confiscating assets, eliminating funding. What her framework does not capture is what happens when the regime shifts its targeting from the movement to the individual subject — when it is not the organization that is designated as a threat but the woman herself. In Russia after 2022, these targets included not only FAR activists and women’s NGO leaders but also antiwar women who rejected the patriotic motherhood narrative, lesbian and queer women, childfree women, and women who challenge patriarchal authority in their professional domains.
The violence directed at these women is not confined to state prosecution. The state designates women who reject the state-endorsed ideal of “traditional” womanhood as a national security threat. That designation authorizes and enables violence from multiple directions simultaneously: online harassment taking specifically gendered forms, social ostracism, workplace coercion, and the ambient threat that makes self-censorship rational. The anticipatory fear produced by ideological designation is itself a form of violence — it forecloses political subjectivity before prosecution is necessary.
This is not to claim that personal choices are inherently political, or that VAWIP should encompass all state-sanctioned violence against women. The distinction that matters is the direction of politicization. A woman may choose not to have children with no political intent — she does not define her choice as feminist resistance or collective action. It is the position of the Russian state, as expressed through propaganda and legislation, that designates her choice as political deviance.
In other words, the politics is ascribed by the regime, not chosen by the woman. It is how the state renders personal choices legible as a form of political opposition that brings these cases within the scope of VAWIP. Therefore, this violence is not a backlash against inclusion. Instead, it operates along a continuum between political and interpersonal domains, establishing its targets according to their ascribed opposition to the regime rather than their presence within its institutions, affiliation with oppositional organizations, or conscious political acts.
Compliant Women and the Russian State
The Russian state has used the law, policy, organizational infrastructure, and media (Danilova and Mathers Reference Danilova and Mathers2026; Gradskova Reference Gradskova2023) to construct an affirmative figure of compliant femininity — the caring mother-patriot — against which all alternative womanhoods are measured and found threatening. Through networks of state-dependent women’s organizations, medals for “Mother Heroines,” and the managed appointment of loyal women to representative office, the state rewards women who conform to traditional models of femininity. In so doing, it also establishes other models as deviant before any prosecution is brought.
When the state then formalizes these designations in law, it is thus institutionalizing the categories that already operate at the level of social life. In November 2024, for example, the Russian government passed Federal Law 411-FZ. This law places nonreproduction in the same category as queer sexuality, as a form of ideological contamination and a threat to demographic survival. The statute is drafted to reach expression rather than choice, yet the first prosecution under this law was brought against a 29-year-old woman in Sevastopol for posts on her personal social media page (Velikaya and Rodionova Reference Velikaya and Rodionova2025, 86–87). Consequently, speech about one’s own life becomes propaganda once the life it describes has been designated deviant, and the woman need not have understood herself as making a political claim for the claim to be attributed to her.
The semiotic dimension of this violence is most visible in prosecutions of public intellectuals. Theater director Zhenya Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk were arrested in 2023 and convicted of terrorism in 2024 for a play that portrayed women’s complex motivations for joining radical Islamist groups with empathy. The prosecution discourse and the coverage of the case in conservative media fixated not on the content of the play alone but on the challenge it posed to state-sanctioned narratives of Russian womanhood — as well as on the personal lives of Berkovich and Petriychuk themselves (Kuteleva Reference Kuteleva2025). The semiotic violence here was structurally produced by the ideological designation the state had already made: because feminist womanhood has been categorized as opposition to the national order, the media coverage of these women’s private lives becomes a legitimate extension of the prosecution. What was on trial was not a political act but a figuration of womanhood — and the trial’s semiotic violence, its public constituting of these women as deviant, was authorized by the ideological order that preceded it.
These acts of violence cannot be accounted for in existing VAWIP frameworks, which require asking the counterfactual question (Bardall, Bjarnegård, and Piscopo Reference Bardall, Bjarnegård and Piscopo2020, 924): Would a similarly situated man be targeted in the same way? This works when the underlying logic is one of exclusion, when violence functions to keep women out of political spaces that men occupy. In the Russian case, the counterfactual misfires. The relevant comparator is not a male dissident but a compliant woman. The compliant woman is not a methodological reference point. She is the state-sanctioned subject position: the woman who subordinates her identity and her personal choices to the needs of the state, who accepts that the nation defines her womanhood for her and reproduces hegemonic femininity. Against this prescribed figure, all femininities are measured and noncompliant ones are found threatening.
That is precisely how violence becomes constitutive rather than merely repressive — and why ideology functions here as violence, not metaphorically but materially. In Alam and Wood’s (Reference Alam and Wood2022) terms, this is implicit authorization: ideology prescribes patterns of violence without explicit orders because it has already defined the target as a legitimate object of force. The cascade operates in two stages. In the first, authoritarian ideology constitutes noncompliant femininities and womanhoods as incompatible with the national order, producing the category before any individual woman has acted. In the second, as feminist civil society is systematically dismantled, the organizational targets are exhausted and the state’s targeting gaze shifts to bodies, identities, and private choices.
Ideological designation, in turn, produces the conditions for legal persecution. Legal persecution authorizes physical violence at protests and the semiotic violence of public trials. Both authorize the more diffuse promise of violence — the self-censorship, the adjusted identity, the choice not to speak — that reaches every woman. The trial of Berkovich and Petriychuk or the prosecution of a 29-year-old woman in Sevastopol for a social media post confirmed for many women what the ideological order had already told them: that who they are may be enough.
Conclusions
The authoritarian state does not wait for women to make political gains. It preemptively defines certain ways of being a woman as threats to national order and security, then uses that designation to authorize violence against women from multiple directions: legal, social, semiotic, and physical. The politics here is not located in women’s intent or in their presence within formal or civil society political spaces. It is produced by the state’s act of designation — marking specific femininities and womanhoods as opposition, as deviance, as national security threats — independently of what any individual woman does, intends, or claims for herself. This is what distinguishes constitutive violence from both backlash and ordinary authoritarian repression: it does not respond to women’s political agency. It produces the political meaning against which that agency becomes legible as a threat in the first place.
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The literature on violence against women in politics (VAWIP) has made substantial contributions to understanding how gender shapes political exclusion. Foundational work by Krook and Restrepo Sanín (Reference Krook and Sanín2016; Reference Krook and Sanín2020) defined VAWIP as a form of hate crime and as systematic backlash against women’s entry into political life. This conceptual scaffolding informs Krook’s (Reference Krook2022) subsequent attention to semiotic and symbolic harm, extending the VAWIP framework beyond physical violence to encompass the representational strategies through which female politicians are delegitimized. Bjarnegård and Zetterberg’s (Reference Bjarnegård and Zetterberg2023) edited volume extends the framework further, recognizing that gender-based political violence operates across a broader range of contexts and along a “psychological-physical continuum” (7) that is neither temporally nor institutionally confined to election cycles or legislative chambers.
This growing scholarship has substantially enriched our understanding of gendered power. Yet it has also inherited a structural assumption that significantly limits its reach. As Bardall, Bjarnegård, and Piscopo (Reference Bardall, Bjarnegård and Piscopo2020) point out, VAWIP frameworks take as their point of departure women’s experiences of abuse within political life. The organizing logic is one of backlash: existing power holders resist the inclusion of new actors, using violence to push women out or keep them from entering. This framing, however, requires as its baseline a political space that in principle admits women and whose disruption by violence can be measured.
Neumann’s (Reference Neumann2024) analysis of antifeminism in Nicaragua adds another layer to the conceptual framework of VAWIP. She demonstrates that feminist organizations function in authoritarian contexts as ideological threats to the regime’s legitimacy — not merely as organizational competitors for political space. The key distinction Neumann draws is between women being excluded from existing political space (the standard VAWIP story) and women being prevented from creating alternative political spaces outside the regime’s reach. What is at stake is not representation but the existence of autonomous feminist political subjectivity as such. Walby (Reference Walby2023) provides a macro-level framework for situating these dynamics: in authoritarian gender regimes, violence operates as a central institutional domain through which the state consolidates power, and civil society — including feminist organizing — is suppressed precisely because it represents the primary mechanism through which that deployment of violence could be named, contested, and held accountable.
What this emergent literature has not yet fully theorized is the specific logic by which women in authoritarian contexts are not merely excluded from political space but constituted as a threat to national security — a category whose very existence becomes grounds for violence. The question is thus not only why authoritarian regimes repress feminist movements — Neumann (Reference Neumann2024) answers that — but how these regimes generate new political categories through violence and, with them, new identities that are then targeted.
Constitutive Violence in Authoritarian Contexts
Political violence can generate antagonized identities across many contexts. What distinguishes authoritarian gender regimes is that the antagonized identity is produced through the gender order itself. Nation-making projects require a prescribed femininity as their reproductive and symbolic foundation (Peterson Reference Peterson1992). This requirement means that deviation from prescribed femininity is experienced by the regime as an existential threat to the national order itself — to its biological reproduction, its symbolic coherence, and its moral legitimacy (Wilkinson Reference Wilkinson, Swati Parashar and True2018). Consequently, the targeted identity is constituted as oppositional not through political acts but through its relationship to the reproduction of the nation. This is the configuration that makes VAWIP in authoritarian regimes categorically different from other forms of political violence that generate antagonized subjectivities — and it is what the concept of constitutive violence is designed to capture.
The Russian case offers direct purchase on these dynamics. Since the early 2010s, Russia’s regime has defined “the people” in part through the regulation of gendered visibility. It suppresses queer presence while hypervisibilizing patriotic masculinity (Edenborg Reference Edenborg2020, 107) and draws on the figure of “Mother Russia” to organize a symbolic order in which challenging state narratives registers as a treasonous violation of a gendered national covenant (Wilkinson Reference Wilkinson, Swati Parashar and True2018, 119). The regime has pursued, in other words, what I document as systematic “norm antipreneurship,” actively organizing opposition to gender equality norms globally while also deploying antifeminist politics as an element of national identity and moral sovereignty at home (Kuteleva Reference Kuteleva2024, 158).
The Russian state consistently “protected women” by extending maternity capital payments, providing free in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment, and promoting pronatalist welfare measures. Simultaneously, it targeted feminist organizations and individual activists for harassment, criminal prosecution, and forced exile through the “foreign agent” law (Kuteleva Reference Kuteleva2024, 163–69). Davidenko (Reference Davidenko2020) documents how this “foreign agent” framework compelled Russian anti-violence nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to abandon public advocacy for domestic violence legislation in order to survive. Tracing the micropolitics of authoritarian gender policymaking through three domestic violence reform processes, Johnson (Reference Johnson2023) similarly shows that autonomous feminist movements are precisely what authoritarian regimes suppress. Johnson’s (Reference Johnson2017, 11–13) “gender equality paradox” captures the specific logic at work: formal inclusion is offered simultaneously with the informalization of power, constraining feminist movements structurally rather than merely tactically.
This pattern accelerated and sharpened after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Feminist Anti-War Resistance (FAR), designated as a “foreign agent” in December 2022 and labeled as an “undesirable organization” in April 2024, exemplifies the organizational targeting that Neumann (Reference Neumann2024) identifies. FAR’s nonhierarchical network form is itself a response to this logic, a structure designed to survive the regime’s effort to identify and suppress the movement’s leadership (Sundstrom, Henry, and Sperling Reference Sundstrom, Henry and Sperling2022).
But the Russian case does not simply confirm Neumann’s (Reference Neumann2024) framework. It pushes beyond it. Neumann’s unit of analysis is the feminist organization, and her mechanism is organizational dismantling — removing legal status, confiscating assets, eliminating funding. What her framework does not capture is what happens when the regime shifts its targeting from the movement to the individual subject — when it is not the organization that is designated as a threat but the woman herself. In Russia after 2022, these targets included not only FAR activists and women’s NGO leaders but also antiwar women who rejected the patriotic motherhood narrative, lesbian and queer women, childfree women, and women who challenge patriarchal authority in their professional domains.
The violence directed at these women is not confined to state prosecution. The state designates women who reject the state-endorsed ideal of “traditional” womanhood as a national security threat. That designation authorizes and enables violence from multiple directions simultaneously: online harassment taking specifically gendered forms, social ostracism, workplace coercion, and the ambient threat that makes self-censorship rational. The anticipatory fear produced by ideological designation is itself a form of violence — it forecloses political subjectivity before prosecution is necessary.
This is not to claim that personal choices are inherently political, or that VAWIP should encompass all state-sanctioned violence against women. The distinction that matters is the direction of politicization. A woman may choose not to have children with no political intent — she does not define her choice as feminist resistance or collective action. It is the position of the Russian state, as expressed through propaganda and legislation, that designates her choice as political deviance.
In other words, the politics is ascribed by the regime, not chosen by the woman. It is how the state renders personal choices legible as a form of political opposition that brings these cases within the scope of VAWIP. Therefore, this violence is not a backlash against inclusion. Instead, it operates along a continuum between political and interpersonal domains, establishing its targets according to their ascribed opposition to the regime rather than their presence within its institutions, affiliation with oppositional organizations, or conscious political acts.
Compliant Women and the Russian State
The Russian state has used the law, policy, organizational infrastructure, and media (Danilova and Mathers Reference Danilova and Mathers2026; Gradskova Reference Gradskova2023) to construct an affirmative figure of compliant femininity — the caring mother-patriot — against which all alternative womanhoods are measured and found threatening. Through networks of state-dependent women’s organizations, medals for “Mother Heroines,” and the managed appointment of loyal women to representative office, the state rewards women who conform to traditional models of femininity. In so doing, it also establishes other models as deviant before any prosecution is brought.
When the state then formalizes these designations in law, it is thus institutionalizing the categories that already operate at the level of social life. In November 2024, for example, the Russian government passed Federal Law 411-FZ. This law places nonreproduction in the same category as queer sexuality, as a form of ideological contamination and a threat to demographic survival. The statute is drafted to reach expression rather than choice, yet the first prosecution under this law was brought against a 29-year-old woman in Sevastopol for posts on her personal social media page (Velikaya and Rodionova Reference Velikaya and Rodionova2025, 86–87). Consequently, speech about one’s own life becomes propaganda once the life it describes has been designated deviant, and the woman need not have understood herself as making a political claim for the claim to be attributed to her.
The semiotic dimension of this violence is most visible in prosecutions of public intellectuals. Theater director Zhenya Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk were arrested in 2023 and convicted of terrorism in 2024 for a play that portrayed women’s complex motivations for joining radical Islamist groups with empathy. The prosecution discourse and the coverage of the case in conservative media fixated not on the content of the play alone but on the challenge it posed to state-sanctioned narratives of Russian womanhood — as well as on the personal lives of Berkovich and Petriychuk themselves (Kuteleva Reference Kuteleva2025). The semiotic violence here was structurally produced by the ideological designation the state had already made: because feminist womanhood has been categorized as opposition to the national order, the media coverage of these women’s private lives becomes a legitimate extension of the prosecution. What was on trial was not a political act but a figuration of womanhood — and the trial’s semiotic violence, its public constituting of these women as deviant, was authorized by the ideological order that preceded it.
These acts of violence cannot be accounted for in existing VAWIP frameworks, which require asking the counterfactual question (Bardall, Bjarnegård, and Piscopo Reference Bardall, Bjarnegård and Piscopo2020, 924): Would a similarly situated man be targeted in the same way? This works when the underlying logic is one of exclusion, when violence functions to keep women out of political spaces that men occupy. In the Russian case, the counterfactual misfires. The relevant comparator is not a male dissident but a compliant woman. The compliant woman is not a methodological reference point. She is the state-sanctioned subject position: the woman who subordinates her identity and her personal choices to the needs of the state, who accepts that the nation defines her womanhood for her and reproduces hegemonic femininity. Against this prescribed figure, all femininities are measured and noncompliant ones are found threatening.
That is precisely how violence becomes constitutive rather than merely repressive — and why ideology functions here as violence, not metaphorically but materially. In Alam and Wood’s (Reference Alam and Wood2022) terms, this is implicit authorization: ideology prescribes patterns of violence without explicit orders because it has already defined the target as a legitimate object of force. The cascade operates in two stages. In the first, authoritarian ideology constitutes noncompliant femininities and womanhoods as incompatible with the national order, producing the category before any individual woman has acted. In the second, as feminist civil society is systematically dismantled, the organizational targets are exhausted and the state’s targeting gaze shifts to bodies, identities, and private choices.
Ideological designation, in turn, produces the conditions for legal persecution. Legal persecution authorizes physical violence at protests and the semiotic violence of public trials. Both authorize the more diffuse promise of violence — the self-censorship, the adjusted identity, the choice not to speak — that reaches every woman. The trial of Berkovich and Petriychuk or the prosecution of a 29-year-old woman in Sevastopol for a social media post confirmed for many women what the ideological order had already told them: that who they are may be enough.
Conclusions
The authoritarian state does not wait for women to make political gains. It preemptively defines certain ways of being a woman as threats to national order and security, then uses that designation to authorize violence against women from multiple directions: legal, social, semiotic, and physical. The politics here is not located in women’s intent or in their presence within formal or civil society political spaces. It is produced by the state’s act of designation — marking specific femininities and womanhoods as opposition, as deviance, as national security threats — independently of what any individual woman does, intends, or claims for herself. This is what distinguishes constitutive violence from both backlash and ordinary authoritarian repression: it does not respond to women’s political agency. It produces the political meaning against which that agency becomes legible as a threat in the first place.