Winner of the 2009 SUNY Press First Book Award in Women's & Gender Studies and published in 2012, this book uses an interdisciplinary approach to interrogate the gendered, racialized, and heteronormative dynamics of post-Soviet U.S. Russia policy, demonstrating how the hyper-masculinization of U.S. military, political, and financial power since 1991 paved the way for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, post-9/11 U.S. imperialist approaches to international “development,” and the ongoing “war on terror.” 

Chapter 1, "The Geopolitical Traffic in Gendered Russian Imaginaries," is available for free download here, or purchase the entire book from the vendors listed below.

Praise for Imagining Russia

“Williams has written a masterful look at the gendered rhetoric produced in the West (and sometimes by Russians themselves) to describe post-Soviet Russia in the aftermath  of the Cold War … Highly recommended.”
- CHOICE

“[C]ontributes meaningfully to our understanding of how popular perceptions about countries are formed and how they shape foreign policy decisions. Most notably, it adds to the scholarship on the cultural and ideational dimensions of international relations, which is a necessary complement to the large body of work on materialist approaches to the discipline.”
- Pamela Jordan, Harvard University’s Davis Centre for Russian & Eurasian Studies

“This is an outstanding book and an excellent example of feminist IR analysis. The thesis and objectives are to show the ideological causes of (asymmetrical and deteriorating) U.S.–Russian relations, which Williams convincingly argues are rooted in gendered understandings.”
- Valentine M. Moghadam, coeditor of Making Globalization Work for Women

“[T]his bold scholarly project [makes] starkly visible the gendered mechanisms of IR, contribut[ing] to broader efforts to confront the injustices of both U.S. geopolitical unilateralism and the global oppression of women.”
- Janet Dean, English & Cultural Studies, Bryant University