How my body-positive images turned into pornography
In recent months, activist Yulia Tsvetkova from Komsomolsk-on-Amur is constantly in the news: first, due to the pressure of the city administration, she had to cancel the festival of activist art, now the police called her body-positive pictures “pornographic” and required explanations. We talked with Yulia Tsvetkova about what happened.
Julia Dudkina
The acclaimed story with posters and the festival "Color of saffron" is only part of a long chain. I have been doing activism for a little over a year, and all this time amazing things have happened to me. Then crowds of haters come to my account and publics, then they call me to the police or the E center, then articles about our performances are deleted from the city portal. I certainly am not going to give up. But visits to the police are already pretty tired. The saddest thing is that not only I suffer from this, but also the children who are engaged in our theater with my mother.
I'll start in order. I lead several activist projects. The first is the "Merak" theater. In it, I direct and teach, and the administrator is my mother. This is a studio where children and teenagers go to study - from six to seventeen years old. We stage plays about harassment, stereotypes - in general, we raise social problems. Another our project is called "KOM.UNITI". Once a week we organize open events - it can be film shows or lectures. The main idea of this project is to create a safe and comfortable space, to help guests self-realize.
I also organized a feminist educational platform "Komsomolskaya Pravda". It all started with a public social network, but then I began to organize events: film screenings, meetings, lectures on women's history. Conduct master classes called "I'm big." We draw together on very large canvases on them. The fact is that women are accustomed to save on themselves, to spare material. These workshops are like therapy, during which we learn not to be afraid of using space and materials for our own purposes.
When I started femmery events, I realized that the city was not ready for this. As soon as I posted an announcement somewhere in social networks, a bunch of insults and threats immediately appeared in the comments. The very word "feminism" frightens many - if you call yourself a feminist, people start to remove you from friends on the VKontakte network. As such, we also have no community. I know a few girls who are engaged in educational work on the Internet and openly support feminism. But we have not managed to cooperate. Basically, our communication only led to a debate about which direction of feminism is the “right” one. This is very disappointing: it seems to me that in such an environment it would be better to act together and forget about the differences. I will be glad if sometime we succeed.
My main accomplice in all endeavors is my mother. When I first began to learn about feminism, to understand what abyuz and violence are, I began to share with her new knowledge. I also told her about the “Myth of Beauty” and bodypositive. She was surprised: "But this is exactly what I have been thinking all my life!" So it turned out that we are with her. Themies themselves.
The femme activities that we organize usually come from two to twenty people. It can be anyone: we invite all who are interested. Not all of our guests consider themselves to be feminists or openly say so. And I understand that, many are simply afraid of condemnation. In addition, in our city, if you work in an administrative position, you can easily have problems with work because of your views.
But, although we are not yet very many, I already see the results. For example, once I myself compiled small brochures about the issue and distributed to everyone who wanted to read them. After a couple of weeks, the guests of “KOM.UNITI” and family activities began to share their experience: they reconsidered their past and current relationships, they realized that in certain situations they encountered violence that they did not even know about. When I hear this, inspiration immediately appears - I want to work even more actively.
When the work was in full swing, they called me from the city administration and began to ask strange questions: "What are your productions? What does pink and blue mean?"
All the time that we were engaged in feminist activities, each of our actions caused some kind of HYIP. For example, once I decided to hold a feminine intake - it was assumed that the girls would get together and discuss the topics of concern to them. I agreed with one of the local libraries, but at the last moment I was asked to cancel everything: the announcement of tea drinking in social networks made so much noise that the site administrators were frightened. As a result, we held a "secret", a private tea party in another place.
Our theater is not directly connected with feminism - it’s rather a story about creativity and activism. But the guys who go to us to engage, too, gets. They are constantly asked: "What are you talking to feminists? Is it true that they do not shave?" When I am going to hold a master class or a meeting, I post announcements on social networks and immediately go away from the computer - I can’t read tons of these horrible comments anymore. Sometimes they start writing in PM too. For example, when a story with “pornographic” pictures appeared in the media, I received 120 messages in one evening. Mostly they said that I was “terrible”, “crazy”, that I should be killed or imprisoned.
For the past couple of months, I have been meeting regularly with the police and the E center. It all started when we with our theater decided to hold a festival of activist creativity. We were going to show several theatrical productions: one anti-war, one - against bullying. Another performance was called Pink and Blue. He talked about stereotypes about boys and girls - as if girls should be cute and wear only pink, and boys should be belligerent, active and in blue. It is this name that played a cruel joke with us.
We chose Komsomol Youth House as a platform. It is not the first time that we have cooperated with them, they know our theater there. We told about our idea, the director liked everything. We began to actively distribute posters and sell tickets. We needed to fill the hall for four hundred people, and for us it is quite a lot. And now, when the work was already in full swing, they called me from the city administration and started asking strange questions: “What are your productions about? What does pink and blue mean?” What impressed me most was when a voice at the end asked, “What do you mean by the word 'person'?” I could not find the answer.
After this conversation, the House of Youth refused to hold the festival. We were told that on this day another event was taking place there, and nothing could be transferred - everything is scheduled six months in advance. Of course, in reality there was no "other event", on the appointed day the assembly hall was empty.
Then the police began to arrive. One time law enforcement officers came to my office. They asked students and their parents whether I was promoting LGBT people. The funny thing is - when we called the play Pink and Blue, we didn’t even think that someone might think about homosexuals. We meant that girls and boys are traditionally associated with these two colors, that's all. But no matter how hard I tried to explain this to the police, they seemed not to have heard.
Following this, I was called to the center "E" and told to write an explanatory statement about what I think "about traditional and non-traditional family values." At the same time I was asked to explain what gender stereotypes are. Here I had a feeling that the word “gender” is associated by law enforcement officers with something “indecent”.
After the police became interested in us, several parents took the children from the theater. Someone thought that we really are somehow connected with LGBT topics. Someone accused us of having come up with an unfortunate name for the performance and brought on problems. But most of the children continued to go to rehearsals. Some of them know me and my mother almost from infancy - first they went to their mother in the early development group, and then they came to the theater. They grew up with us. Of course, their parents know that we do not do any propaganda.
Despite everything, we wanted to hold a festival and found a new venue for it. It was a private room. The owner said that no problems should arise. We resumed training. But on March 16 and 17 policemen came to our students. They interviewed them at school, without parental consent and participation. One girl was interrogated for two hours. She was presented with screenshots from my pages and asked who told her what LGBT is. All the time they repeated: "Did Yulia tell this? Is she there?" You would think schoolchildren have nowhere else to find out about this.
One boy was terribly nervous during such a conversation. He was slipped a piece of paper, and he signed in horror without looking. Then it turned out, it was a statement that I was doing propaganda. The boy, of course, no questions. But the actions of the police and school administration surprise.
The day before the festival, the site owner called us. Her voice trembled. She said that she was summoned to the city administration, they said that I was "a defiance from Geyropy" and threatened: either she would refuse to host the festival, or the administration would take care of her to lose her premises. At this point, we ourselves decided that we would not expose a person and cancel everything. In the end, we held a festival in our own studio. There is very little space there, so we could only call for parents and a couple of journalists. But we made a video of the play "Pink and Blue" and put it in open access so that no one has any doubts - this is not about LGBT.
Recently, at 8:30 in the morning, the police once again knocked us with my mother. We went to the site, and a law enforcement officer said: "Open the door wider, we came to see how you live." Of course, we didn’t show anyone anything. She wrote me a summons and left.
They recently showed me my post with the hashtag #savelgbtinrussia. He was dedicated to Chechen gays and called for an end to torture. They asked: "Is this your post?"
When I went to the police, two women looked at me with very serious faces. They said: "Julia, we understand everything. But the children read you. And we learned that you are distributing pornography." They were so alarmed that I myself tensed up and began to sort through my head: what could be like this on my pages? And here they showed me screenshots. These were my pictures on bodipositive. Women with hair and folds, painted in a naive manner. For the pictures were captions in the style "Live women have fat, and this is normal." The idea is very simple. These are pictures that do not need to be shy of your body, naturalness is normal.
I drew these posters in the summer and laid out in my public. There is absolutely nothing remarkable in them - on the contrary, there is no originality in them at all. When I saw why I was called, I was ready to laugh out loud.
On Monday, I again had to go to the police - to write an explanatory note that there was no sexual connotation in my drawings. The police and the staff of the center "E" have a thick folder with my explanatory and screenshots. I don’t know what they are going to do with it, whether they will initiate a deal against me.
Everything that I tell about my conversations with the police seems ridiculous. But in fact it is very difficult. The police in a circle ask the same questions, raise their voice, do not listen to what you say to them in response. It puts a lot of pressure on me psychologically. They recently showed me my post with the hashtag #savelgbtinrussia. He was dedicated to Chechen gays and called for an end to torture. They asked: "Is this your post?" Of course, he was mine, moreover, he was completely neutral - I was completely incomprehensible what I could find fault with there. And then they showed me another screenshot - with the same hashtag, but also with some pornographic pictures. They began to convince me that if the same hashtag is used there, then the post is also mine. I first saw this post and tried to explain it to them. But they either didn’t understand the truth, or didn’t pay special attention.
The last time I was in the police, I was asked if I had a connection with the American embassy and what I did abroad (I studied in London for a long time). In the end, I was advised to direct a little less than aktivnichat - they say, then I will no longer constantly call the police. It already looked like a threat.
This whole story convinced me of only one thing: we must continue. If the word "blue" causes so much shock and hatred, then Komsomolsk needs activism more than ever. I have a lot of ideas and ideas, the performances are painted for years to come.
The only thing I regret is that our students saw so early how unfair the world is. We teach them that it’s great to be active, not to be silent. And now they know what happens.
Cover: Etsy