This paper would look into the politics of representation of multi-media project “The Ethnic Origins of Beauty”. It is a UNESCO supported non-commercial and educational Youtube and photo project, which aims to represent ethno/cultural diversity of the world through the beauty of women by recording short video interviews and making photos of young women representing different ethnicities. The project is initiated by Russian photo journalist Natalia Ivanova and has truly global ambitions aiming to produce 3 interviews with representatives of each ethnicity of the world. I will examine the rhetoric of ethno/cultural diversity and strategies of visual representation of the project. I would argue that these strategies contain and depoliticize difference and partly rely on the modes of representations of the Other inherited from Imperial and Soviet pasts. I will then turn to the selection of interviews with women from post-soviet spaces and will try to suggest a decolonial reading of some fragments.

Dinara Podgornova is a PhD fellow at the Center for Women’s and Gender Research at the University of Bergen, Norway. In her PhD project she looks at how intersectional feminist discourses travel across borders and how they get used, transformed and appropriated in Russian-speaking feminist online spaces. Her project is situated within debates on geopolitics of knowledge production within gender studies and feminist activism; translation and transnational circulation of feminist texts, theories and activist frames and feminist critiques of intersectionality

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