Co-winner of the 2009 SUNY Press Dissertation/First Book Prize in Women's and Gender Studies, Imagining Russia uses U.S.-Russian relations between the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 as a case study to examine the deployment of gendered, racialized, and heteronormative visual and narrative depictions of Russia and Russians in contemporary narratives of American nationalism and U.S. foreign policy. Through analyses of several key post-Soviet American popular and political texts, including the hit television series The West Wing, Washington D.C.'s International Spy Museum, and the legislative hearings of the Freedom Support Act and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, Williams calls attention to the production and operation of five types of "gendered Russian imaginaries" that were explicitly used to bolster support for and legitimize U.S. geopolitical unilateralism after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, demonstrating the ways that the masculinization of U.S. military, political, and financial power after 1991 paved the way for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Imagining Russia Foundational Precepts Implications and Interventions 1. The Geopolitical Traffic in Gendered Russian Imaginaries Gendered Russian Nationalism Gendered American Nationalism Russia and Russians in a U.S. Context U.S. Foreign Policy and the Triumphalist Mythscape 2. Freedom for Whom? Support for What? Provisions and Objectives Implementation Capitalism as "Freedom" Imaginaries at Work Russia as Child/United States as Great, White Father Russia as Student/United States as Tutor Russia as Frontier/United States as Entrepreneurial Pioneer Russia as Pathologically Ill Patient/United States as Doctor Russia as Retrogressive Baba/United States as Responsible Superpower Imperial Masculinity 3. Death and the Maiden Conjuring the Ghost Anastasia on Stage and Screen A Reflection of U.S.-Russia Policy Reckoning with the Ghost 4. Crime, Corruption, and Chaos American Heroes Russian Victims and Villains With Impunity: The United States as Innocent Bystander From Mother Russia to Miss Russia 5. "It's a Cold War Mentality" The West Wing and U.S. Political Culture Gendered Discursive Configurations Vassily Konanov as Boris Yeltsin: "Our Kind of Crazy" Cold War Holdouts Peter Chigorin as Vladimir Putin: Barlet's Last Best Hope Whose Cold-war Mentality? 6. Cultural Politics of Cold War A Cold-war Museum Atomic Secrets The Rosenbergs as Discursive Phenomena The Rosenbergs at the International Spy Museum Origins of State-based Terror Heterosexpionage The Cold War as Cautionary Tale Conclusion: Casualties of Cold War Russia's Geopolitical Resurgence Competing Masculinities Obama's "Reset" Appendix Notes Bibliography Index