The shift to streaming platforms has caused major changes in the Russian television industry. Notably, an increase in production values has resulted in the migration of prestigious names from film to television. Of course, in the global Anglophone context, new distribution models have made television the site of prestige cultural production for several decades. But in catching up with this trend, Russia also adds its own particular twist.

OTT media services, streaming platforms that can be watched directly on a laptop, have been more willing to break with the Kremlin's cultural agenda than traditional television channels. Eduard Oganesyan's new miniseries Chicks is a good example of this. Set in the agricultural Russian south, Chicks follows the trials and tribulations of four former sex-workers as they open a gym in their small town. The series premiered in the summer of 2020 on more.tv and was a smash hit.

In the context of a state-led agenda of extreme heteronormativity, and the attendant misogynist and homophobic backlash, Chicks breaks taboos in representing queer sexuality, sex work, and domestic violence. To my knowledge, the series contains the first coming-out scene in Russian television. One of the protagonists, Zhanna, has a son who, while lip-synching in drag, asks, “Mom, do you think I'm gay? Because I really don't know,” to which she responds, “Will you tell me when you find out?” Zhanna vehemently defends her son when a social worker refers to his performance as “abnormal.” Her own sexuality remains ambiguous throughout the series.

Driven by a plot that does not revolve around either the women protagonists’ relationships with men or their aspirations to start a family, Chicks is overtly a narrative of women's empowerment. Along with the taboo-breaking representation of marginalized subjects, its gender politics places the series in a subversive position with regard to the official cultural politics. Unsurprisingly, it has garnered plaudits from Russia's liberal intelligentsia for this critical stance.

However, Chicks’ central theme—business ownership—gives its feminism a distinct flavor. Zhanna, who has lived in Moscow, comes up with the hip idea of opening a gym, eliding the fact that the capital's gentrification is the effect, not the cause of its economic dominance. Furthermore, the women must secure their independence by running a business—they must become literal “girlbosses.” The material distinctions between women bosses and women workers, wealthy Moscow and impoverished provinces, are dissolved. In short, Chicks aspires to a Russian version of “neoliberal feminism”—Sheryl Sandberg in Krasnodar—more than any radical alternative.

The unresolved contradiction at the heart of this feminism—whether women are wombs or workers—is neatly illustrated by the denouement of the first season of Chicks. Although still pursuing their dream of owning a gym, three of the four women are now in happy relationships with men, opening up the possibility that they can, as the women's magazine saying goes, “have it all.”