An innocent provocation or homoerotic challenge? Mediations of the 'Satisfaction' video parody in the Russian mediascape.

Within Putin's conservative nation-building agenda, the Russian mediascape excludes or marginalises non-heteronormative sexualities' voices from the official discourse. However, certain manifestations of non-heteronormative sexualities infiltrate public space through convergent traditional and new media (Jenkins, 2006, Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press) and the performativity of non-heteronormative sexualities in popular culture. This paper claims that these convergent media-enabled representations of NS can challenge, inform, mediate or authenticate the establishment discourse. It focuses on a particular case of a sexually provocative video with homoerotic undertones (mimicking a popular music hit 'Satisfaction') produced by male cadets from the Ulyanovsk Institute of Civil Aviation and uploaded onto YouTube in January 2018 (allegedly without the cadets' permission). The paper examines its mediation from the grassroots to semi-official peripheries, to mainstream media (TV) and back again (focus group data), highlighting a dramatic change in the official coverage as well as a lack of hegemonic consensus regarding representations of non-heteronormative sexualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]