Winner of the 2009 SUNY Press First Book/Dissertation Prize in Women’s and Gender Studies, Imagining Russia (SUNY Press 2012) is the first book to centre gender-as-discourse as the bedrock of post-Soviet U.S. Russia policy. It analyzes depictions of Russia and Russians in several post-Soviet American popular and political cultural texts, exposing the gendered, racialized, and heteronormative discursive configurations at the heart of U.S.-Russian relations in the 1990s. The book makes a case for why and how to connect American popular and political culture by bringing to bear a feminist cultural studies approach to policy analysis.

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