Queer-Feminist Solidarity and the East/West Divide 1788746791, 9781788746793

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Q U E E R I N G PA R A D I G M S V I I I Q UE E R-F E M I N I S T S O L I DAR I T Y AND THE EAST/WEST DIVIDE

Katharina Wiedlack, Saltanat Shoshanova, Masha Godovannaya (eds) Peter Lang

Q U E E R I N G PA R A D I G M S V Q U E E R I N G PA R A D I G M S V I I I

Q UE E R-F E M I N I S T S O L I DAR I T Y AND THE EAST/WEST DIVIDE

Q U E E R- F E M I N I S T S O L I DA R I T Y A N D T H E E A S T / W E S T DI V I D E

Katharina Wiedlack, Saltanat Shoshanova, Masha Godovannaya (eds)

Katharina Wiedlack, Saltanat Shoshanov Masha Godovannaya (eds)

Peter

Q U E E R I N G PA R A D I G M S • I N F O C US Series Editor Bee Scherer, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK

PETER LANG Oxford Bern Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien •

•

QUEER-FE MI NIST SOLIDARITY AN D THE EAST/WEST DIVIDE

Katharina Wiedlack, Saltanat Shoshanova, Masha Godovannaya (eds)

In cooperation with Masha Neufeld

PETER LANG Oxford Bern Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien •

•

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National­ bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

isbn 978-1-78874-679-3 (print) • isbn 978-1-78874-696-0 (ePDF) isbn 978-1-78874-697-7 (ePub) • isbn 978-1-78874-698-4 (mobi) doi 10.3726/b14797

© Peter Lang AG 2020 Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers, 52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom [email protected], www.peterlang.com Wiedlack et. al have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this Work. Cover illustration by Adelinaa (adelinaa.eu). All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed.

Contents

Acknowledgments   ix Katharina Wiedlack, Saltanat Shoshanova and Masha Godovannaya

Introduction   1 Part I Queering Paradigms, Challenging the Western Gaze Katharina Wiedlack

1

Fucking Solidarity: ‘Working Together’ Through (Un)pleasant Feelings   21

Veda Popovici

2

Solidarity in Illegality: How the Corrupt East Is Already a Queer East   51

Nick Mayhew

3 Queering Sodomy: A Challenge to ‘Traditional’ Sexual Relations in Russia   77 nadiya chushak, Yulia Serdyukova and Irina Tantsiura

4 ‘We’ll Be Fine, and You Just Hang in There’: A Queer Critique of the Imperial Gaze in Gaycation Episode ‘Ukraine’   97

vi  Part II Local Queer Practices: Between Nationalistic and Global Discourses Lesia Pagulich

5 New Lovers…? As Patriots and Citizens: Thinking beyond Homonationalism and Promises of Freedom (the Ukrainian case)   125 Vanya Mark Solovey

6 ‘Global Standards’ and ‘Internalized Coloniality’: How Feminists in Russia See the ‘West’   153 Raili Uibo

7

Prides in Estonia: Struggling in the Centrifugal Pulls of Nationalism and Transnational Leveraged Pedagogy   175

Joanna Chojnicka

8

Transition Narratives on Polish Trans Blogs: A Discursive Colonization Approach   201

Part III The Solidarity ‘Stress Test’ – Solidarity in Action – Empirical Studies of Queer Migration and Western Solidarity Projects Elena Smirnova

9

Could You Show Me Chechnya on the Map? The Struggle for Solidarity within the Support Campaign for Homosexual Refugees from the North Caucasus in France   231

Pauliina Lukinmaa and Aleksandr Berezkin

10 Migrating Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ Activists: On Displacement, Sense of Belonging and Transnational Activism   263



vii

Masha Beketova

11 Working with Russian-speaking LGBTIQ Refugees in Berlin   291 Part IV Art-based Research, Artivism, and Other Forms of Resistance Alexandra Yaseneva and Ekaterina Davydova

12 Boston Marriages in Contemporary Russia and Beyond   319 the queer-feminist affinity art group ‘unwanted organisation’

13 Queer Kinship or Queering Kinship: Starting Points, Methodological Speculations, Overcoming, Searching for Art Practices and Language – a Lecture-performance    333 14 The Fucking Solidarity Manifesto   351 Notes on Contributors   355 Index   361

Acknowledgments

This book is part of the larger project of applied academic queering in the form of the international scholar-activist network Queering Paradigms (QP).1 The editors want to thank the Queering Paradigms Network, and especially Bee Scherer, K.O. O’Mara, Betty Wambui, Patrick de Vries, and Leonardo J. Raznovich for their generous support. Without their faith in the people involved in this book project, none of this could have ever happened. This volume draws from the Queering Paradigms VIII conference titled Fucking Solidarity: Queering Concepts on/from a Post-Soviet Perspective, which was held at the Department for English and American Studies at the University of Vienna, from September 20–23, 2017. We want to thank Liza Belorusova, Siajvo Pivnichne, Sasha Skorykh, and Tania Zabolotnaya for coorganizing this event with us and all the conference participants, artists, scholars, and students for their important input during and following the conference that helped to shape the subsequent book. All chapters in this book were double-blind peer-reviewed and we want to convey our gratitude to all the peer-reviewers for their meticulous and con­ structive contributions. We want to thank Doris Arztmann, Brigitte Bargetz, Persson Baumgartinger, Heike Bestel, Darja Davydova, Therese Garstenauer, Cassandra Hartblay, Marty Huber, Dijana Jelača, Roberto Kulpa, Natalya Laskina, Annika Lems, Barbara Maly, Rasa Navickaitė, Viktoria Pötzl, Anna Sapuntsova, Olga Sasunkevich, Yana Sitnikova, Jennifer Suchland, Marianna Szczygielska, Daniil Zhaivoronok, and Jessica Zychowicz for their impor­ tant input and critiques on various drafts of this anthology. We also want to express our deepest gratitude to Sam Osborn for the thorough language editing of all the texts. Our special gratitude goes to Maria Mayerchyk and Olga Plakhotnik, the two editors in chief and their team of the open access online journal

1

Website: . Twitter: @queeringp. Facebook: .

x Acknowledgments

Feminist Critique: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies.2 They have agreed to collaborate with Siajvo Pivnichne, Liza Belorusova and our editing team in publishing versions of some of our chapters and additional materials from the ‘Fucking Solidarity’ conference in one of their upcoming special issues. The texts will be published in Russian and Ukrainian, which will allow non-English readers to learn about the exciting critical work on queer-feminist solidarity beyond the East/West divide. Last but not least, Lucy Melville and the team from Peter Lang also deserve a most grateful mention for their constantly friendly and profes­ sional support. This book is partly funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) as part of the project ‘Looking Eastward’ (T 767-G28).

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Katharina Wiedlack, Saltanat Shoshanova and Masha Godovannaya

Introduction

The Geographical and Cultural Context: Homophobia and the East/West Divide The last decade saw a revival of dichotomous thinking that the editors and authors of this book were taught in school as something belonging to the ‘past.’ As children of the 1980s and 1990s, we saw walls and curtains fall, and maps being newly drawn from different sides of the so-called East/West divide. The Cold War was declared to have ended, and with it the funda­ mental distinction between the West and the East that went far beyond the geographical (and had in fact never really corresponded to geography, as far as Central Europe is concerned). However, the enthusiasm of this declara­ tion turned out to be premature. Thirty years into the post-Soviet and postsocialist so-called ‘transition’ (which seems to be a never-ending process),1 the distinction between the so-called ‘East’ and ‘West’ has arguably become more pronounced, more emphasized, and called upon more frequently than ever before during our collective lifetimes. The old significations of ‘East’ and ‘West’ have been resurrected and new binary oppositions have been added to their assem­ blages of meanings; today, the East/West divide signifies the chasm between

1

Following Chris Hann and what he calls ‘teleology of “transition”’ (2002: 9), it is questionable if there has ever been a real chance that the notions ‘East’ and ‘West’ could lose their dichotomous meanings. Phrases such as ‘the return to Europe’ or the ‘rediscovery of civil society’ (ibid. 10) rather stabilized the power dynamic of the East/West divide than deconstructing it and othered the post-Soviet and postsocialist spheres as lagging behind the ‘West’ even further (see also Kolářová 2017).

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K. Wiedlack, S. Shoshanova and M. Godovannaya

‘traditionalism’ and ‘progress,’ ‘the retrograde’ and ‘the developed,’ ‘religious­ ness’ and ‘secularism,’ between ‘uncivilized’ and ‘civilized,’ etc. This chasm is strengthened by the discursive division between capitalist and (post)com­ munist/socialist countries, following the legacy of the Cold War. Proponents of both sides have declared issues of same-sex desire as well as sexual and gender non-normativity to be defining aspects of their respective ideological, national, and cultural sides (Riabov & Riabova 2012; Neufeld & Wiedlack 2016; Dhawan 2013). Hence, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender, and intersex people, as well as queer and otherly identified individuals and groups have become the ‘lynchpins for value negotiations’ (Neufeld & Wiedlack 2016). Western nations such as the U.S.A. (Puar 2007) and supranational institutions such as the EU (Kulpa 2014) have instrumentalized the social and political inclusion of some gay and lesbian existences and lifestyles into ideas of citizenship, progress, and modernity to stabilize or extend their power and influence on other regions. Many invasive practices in and sanc­ tions on other countries were justified by Western nations in the ‘name of LGBT+ rights’ (for example, in the case of Iran, see Khoshgozaran 2012). Through the employment of ‘homonationalism’ (Puar 2007) – namely the state-sanctioned protection of some LGBT people (i.e. mostly white, middle-class, able-bodied, with full citizenship and non-criminal back­ ground) and their rights, and its entanglement with nationalistic, racist, and xenophobic positions, these nations could justify and maintain their exclusionary policies against migrants. In many Western countries, public discourses construct non-European immigrants as a threat to LGBTIQ+ people (Feder et al. 2017), and some demand mandatory value tests for refugees as well as policies that would reject their applications if the test results showed homophobia or misogyny (Debating Europe 2016). These debates are based on the notion that migrants, and especially Muslim migrants, are homophobic and thus do not share Western values of toler­ ance and do not fit into Western societies, which by contrast are imagined as entirely egalitarian (Ammaturo 2015).2 2

‘[S]everal European countries have introduced citizenship exams that ‘involved values and social norms’ (Banulescu-Bogdan 2017: 11). Examples are ‘the Dutch test of lib­ eral attitudes that entailed showing applicants a picture of homosexual kissing and

Introduction

3

At the same time, nationalistic trans- and international right-wing and anti-Western discourses have helped to support homophobic oppres­ sion within legal and social spheres and vice versa in many post-Soviet and postsocialist countries or regions (Rivkin-Fish & Hartblay 2014; People For the American Way Foundation 2014; Lazarevic 2019). Male homosexuality remains criminalized in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, people suspected of being gay are persecuted and tortured in Chechnya (an autonomous republic of Russia) as well as in other regions in Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, and Ukraine. Political LGBTIQ+ activists and communities are increasingly limited in their actions and public lives through anti-gay propaganda laws in countries such as Lithuania and Russia, or through attempts to implement similar legislations empowered by public hostil­ ity in Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan (Amnesty International 2017). In Russia, various regional transphobic and homo­ phobic anti-propaganda laws are in place beside the national ‘anti-gay propaganda law.’3 Moreover, the ‘foreign agent law’4 specifically targets internationally supported organizations such as LGBTIQ+, feminist, and other human rights initiatives and NGOs. The number of people migrating to Western European countries, the U.S.A., or Canada to escape homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny in post-Soviet regions has significantly increased, according to human rights watch groups and media (Schreck 2018; Smirnova and Beketova in this book). Some have sought asylum, others have found different ways to leave

3

4

the “Muslim test,” introduced in the German state of Baden-Württemberg in 2004, [asking] applicants from Islamic countries […] questions about gender equality and homosexuality’ (ibid.). The national law was introduced in 2013 and forbids the so called ‘propaganda’ of ‘non-traditional’ sexualities to minors. It restricts representations and discussions of same-sex intimate relationships within media or any other public forum as well as education. Non-profit organizations that receive foreign donations and engage in ‘political activity’ have to register themselves as ‘foreign agents.’ This status makes the NGOs subject to additional audits. Moreover, it requires that NGOs mark all their official statements with a disclosure that it is being given by a ‘foreign agent.’ The word ‘foreign agent’ strongly refers to Cold War-era espionage within Russian culture. In effect, it renders most LGBTIQ+ and feminist NGOs, etc., foreign to Russian culture.

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K. Wiedlack, S. Shoshanova and M. Godovannaya

their countries of origin (Lukinmaa and Beryozkin in this book). Their arrival at queer communities and spaces in Western contexts as well as the previ­ ously described an increasingly precarious situation for many LGBTIQ+ individuals within post-Soviet spheres has prompted solidarity activism across national borders and communities. It also confronts solidarity prac­ tices with new and old challenges. The eighth Queering Paradigms volume presents critical research on and accounts of various initiatives and projects of solidarity that react to homophobic, transphobic, and misogynist discourses and practices within the post-Soviet sphere and beyond. Additionally, it presents works that try to conceptualize solidarity and find categories, narratives, and paths that are useful for solidarity projects that engage in the deconstruction of the artificial, yet very effective, East/West divide and try to bridge communities in their mutual struggle against militant conservative normalcy.

The State of the Art of Queer and Feminist Solidarity Theory Solidarity is a difficult concept to work with. It is often used in queer-fem­ inist political debates across geopolitical and social contexts and feminist scholars have been critically reflecting on and challenging queer and femi­ nist solidarities, not least from a critical decolonial perspective, over the course of the last four decades (hooks 1986; Mohanty 2003; Abu-Lughod 2013; Sharoni et al. 2015; Bouteldja 2010). Yet, not much scholarly work has offered a concept of solidarity that easily translates into a doing or action in everyday life. Moreover, only few scholarly analyses focus on the specific challenges that arise when thinking about solidarity and practicing it with regards to post-Soviet and postsocialist contexts from a feminist (Majewska 2015; Mishchenko 2015) and queer perspective. The few scholars that do work within the post-Soviet and postsocialist context focus on a national context rather than on transnational solidarity between the West and East (one exception is Binnie & Klesse 2012). The texts assembled in this book do some of this urgently needed work on transnational queer and feminist solidarities beyond the East/West divide.

Introduction

5

As a collective effort, they attempt to substantiate the lucid and often uncon­ crete aspects of queer-feminist solidarities and to hold on to the ‘solid’ part of solidarity. As a collective effort, the present volume of the Queering Paradigms series tries to critically highlight the specificities of solidarity that bridge the East/West divide and at the same time make important references to the rich corpus of works that have theorized solidarity activ­ ism and efforts – between the global North and the global South (Scholz 2008; Santos 2014; Padwell 2012), indigenous and non-indigenous activ­ ists (Milstein 2015), people of color and white allies (hooks 1992) – from a queer and feminist perspective. We acknowledge the important contributions of decolonial and indig­ enous thinkers, feminist and queer of color critics that analyzed racialized, gendered, and sexualized hegemonies and oppression. We refer to their works, keeping in mind that the post-Soviet and the postsocialist are not the same as the postcolonial. Rather than uncritically applying their knowl­ edge and methods to the post-Soviet and postsocialist context, we suggest a dialogue between our approaches, across different perspectives. When thinking about solidarity in post-Soviet and postsocialist con­ texts, we should not forget its ambivalent history as a part of Soviet and socialist ideologies (Majewska 2015; Mishchenko 2015). On the one hand, international efforts of solidarity such as the Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Organization were highly praised by the Soviets. Moreover, the yearly parades on International Workers’ Day (May 1) and the celebrations on International Women’s Day (March 8) propagated workers’ and women’s solidarity. On the other hand, initiatives such as the Polish labor union Solidarność, which grew into a powerful anti-communist social movement in the late 1980s, were feared by the Soviet government as an uncontrolled political force. While the former initiatives were endorsed and celebrated to stabilize and extend Soviet power internally and beyond its borders, initiatives like Solidarność were antagonized, albeit unsuccessfully, by the Polish communist party. These and other historical ambivalences and discursive difficulties need to be taken into account within discussions of solidarity of/with/between post-Soviet and postsocialist spaces (for a discussion of the Estonian case, see Uibo in this anthology).

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K. Wiedlack, S. Shoshanova and M. Godovannaya

Research Questions and a Working Concept of Solidarity So how can we think about solidarity with and in the space known as postso­ cialist and post-Soviet? How and in which way should we approach solidarity, conceptualize it, and build alliances? How can we, queer people from diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds and geographies, working in dif­ ferent disciplines and fields, with different resources and accesses, bridge and negotiate our differences in order to be supportive of and care for each other? How can we sustain our solidarities and extend them into everyday life, while at the same time acknowledging our failures and learning from them? The French Marxist Émile Durkheim is often referred to when attempts are made to rethink solidarity from a queer, feminist (Scholz 2008) and anti-racist (Roediger 2017) perspective. Durkheim distinguished a solidar­ ity based on kinship and similarity, which he termed ‘mechanical solidarity’ (1893: 73–80), from what he termed ‘organic solidarity’ (1893: 118–119). While ‘mechanic solidarity’ is a form of social bond that depends on a high degree of homogeneity (typical for pre-industrial societies), ‘organic solidar­ ity’ acknowledges mutual dependence between members of a social group beyond similarities or familial belonging and endorses the necessity of a labor division for the individual well-being. Katharina Wiedlack takes up the idea of solidarity in connection with shared labor in the first chapter of the anthology, titled ‘Fucking Solidarity: “Working Together” Through (Un)pleasant Feelings.’ Her attempt to theo­ rize solidarity as a working concept for concrete East/West solidarity projects builds on the growing corpus of works within the field of queer and femi­ nist materialism that follows, extends, and challenges Durkheim’s historic concept to make it applicable to the realities of modern capitalist societies (Griffiths 2018; Hennessy 2006; Bakker & Gil 2004). Drawing on queer post-Soviet and postsocialist critique of Western hegemonies (e.g. Binnie & Klesse 2012; Kulpa & Mizielińska 2012; Stella 2013) and leveraged pedagogies (Kulpa 2014) within international and transnational solidarity efforts, her chapter lays out a concept of solidarity as collaborative work that includes the confrontation and deconstruction of hegemonies and privileges among and between the collaborating parties. Additionally, reflecting on her personal experience with different queer and feminist solidarity events and efforts, she acknowledges the emotional and affective dimensions of solidarity.

Introduction

7

Wiedlack combines this critical work on the hegemonies within/of affect with her thoughts on the East/West divide, referring to feminist and queer studies scholars’ work on affective solidarity (Pedwell 2012; Capel James 2010), thus expanding the concept of solidarity as ‘working together’ by including aspects of working through feelings and affects. Following Wiedlack’s conceptualization, we understand this book not only as a critical analysis of solidarity with and in the space that is known as postsocialist and post-Soviet, but also as an act of solidarity. It is the prod­ uct of the collaborative shared labor of junior scholars and activists, who are either at the beginning of their academic careers or exploring the bor­ derlands of different disciplines and fields with more experienced scholars, artists, and activists. It is the attempt to confront and challenge Western hegemonies and share privileges. The editors, although speaking here as a single collaborative we, have different backgrounds and speak from different academic, activist, and artistic positions. We understand our book as a space that engages different point of views, perspectives, methodologies, forms of expressions, and styles of writ­ ings in a dialogue with each other. We do not always agree with the views that the authors of our anthology express. However, it was crucial for us to see beyond our differences and be in solidarity with a multitude of opinions and positionalities. In its entirety, the anthology problematizes solidarities, rethinks as well as reconfirms them from many different perspectives. As such, our collection is not exhaustive. Rather, it is an attempt to provide a profound and interesting starting point for further discussions on solidarity and the dismantling and deconstruction of East/West hegemonies.

Working Together to Create a Queer Monster: Incongruencies and ‘Accents’ This book is the result of a collective effort of an international group of people, queer scholars, activists, and artists, working in a variety of contexts and coming from diverse backgrounds and fields of expertise. As an act of solidarity, it is at times coarse or stylistically incongruous.

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K. Wiedlack, S. Shoshanova and M. Godovannaya

We acknowledge our collective voice as a voice of many different accents, metaphorically and quite literally. The language of our book is a foreign language to most of us, editors and authors. Only a minority of us frequently writes in English and/or in an academic scholarly style. The collaborative work to transcribe and translate thoughts, experiences, theories, research methodologies, and findings from Ukrainian, Estonian, Polish, Russian, French, German, and other languages into English was challenging, as was the labor of translating activism and artistic practices into the highly formalized corset of academic writing. We did this labor collectively in order to invite a broad spectrum of individuals interested in queer solidarity and post-Soviet and postsocialist contexts from/by/ for/together with researchers, activist, academics, and artists from those spaces into a conversation. To critically question the hegemonic position of English as the academic lingua franca within queer theories and the unequal division of labor between Eastern and Western allies, we decided to transliterate only a minimum of words from their Cyrillic original into Latin letters.5 We asked our authors to transliterate and translate Russian key terms once for non-Russian speakers and use only the Cyrillic words in the remainder of the text. Additionally, we decided to provide the Russian sources in their original form, without transliteration. We did not smooth out the incongruencies and stylistic differences between the contributions. We also did not censor the emotions and affects that speak through some of the texts in favor of a clearer or less controversial academic language. Our goal is to bridge the artificial and unsubstantiated division of Western and Eastern scholarly professionalism as well as academic, activist, and artistic knowledge production, but not through a negation of our differences. We understand the multiple tonalities and accents of our collective voice as a strength of the book. It underlines our argument that alliances beyond the East/West divide are possible and productive. However, it also emphasizes the effort that working together demands from all sides.

5

We use the ISO 9 for transcribing the words and terms. For the names we use the most common transcription and/or the transcription chosen by the people themselves.

Introduction

9

A Short Overview of the Individual Chapters The first part of the book is titled ‘Queering Paradigms, Challenging the Western Gaze’ and includes chapters that question and rethink Western notions of queer solidarity. Chapter 1, titled ‘Fucking Solidarity: “Working Together” Through (Un)pleasant Feelings,’ written by Katharina Wiedlack, suggests a concept of solidarity as working through East/West hierarchies together, as previously mentioned. This includes a thorough consideration of the hegemonic structures of individual and collective feelings and desires. Veda Popovici challenges the frequently occuring Westernizing narrative of queer politics in the postsocialist context in Chapter 2, titled ‘Solidarity in Illegality: How the Corrupt East Is Already a Queer East.’ Analyzing the Romanian LGBTIQ+ movement from a situated scholar-activist perspec­ tive, Popovici writes against politics that construct the West as a model and the postsocialist sphere as lacking. Moreover, she scrutinizes politics of respectability through principles of legality and rule of law as part of Westernizing narratives. Legality discourses align anticommunist narratives, respectability politics, and aspirational tropes in a problematic union. As a contrast to such discourses, Popovici proposes a redefinition of illegality through ideas of queerness and corruption to affirm the possibility of queer postsocialist subjectivity. Anchoring such subjectivity in a new temporality outside of the neoliberal time of Western becoming, Popovici offers ‘queer as corrupt’ as a radical category of subjectivation. In Chapter 3, titled ‘Queering Sodomy: A Challenge to “Traditional” Sexual Relations in Russia,’ Nick Mayhew returns to Muscovite Rus (c. fourteenth to seventeenth centuries) to explore the meaning of two terms that are now often understood to denote homosexual sex. In contemporary Russia, the terms мужеложство/muzhelozhstvo [man-lying] and содомский грех/sodomskij greh [sodomitic sin] are used as homophobic slurs, shoring up the notion that homosexuality is incompatible with Russian Orthodoxy. Mayhew challenges that idea, arguing that in the premodern period, neither of these terms referred to homosexual sex in any unambiguous way. The chapter suggests that medieval sexual terminology is inherently difficult to pin down since it existed in a world where clear-cut distinctions between heterosexual and homosexual sex did not exist. Having debunked the idea

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K. Wiedlack, S. Shoshanova and M. Godovannaya

that homophobia is an Orthodox tradition stretching back to premodern times, the chapter goes on to explore – on the contrary – how medieval texts about Russian Orthodox saints often venerated their heroes for rather subversive gender and sexual identities, focusing on the case study of Петр/ Petr and Феврония/Fevroniia. In Chapter 4, nadiya chushak, Yulia Serdyukova, and Iryna Tantsiura analyze the Gaycation episode ‘Ukraine.’ The authors questions Gaycation’s claim to be a travel show ‘with a noble cause,’ framing it instead as a Western travelogue that signifies Ukraine as an ambiguous and contradictory region in need of proving its belonging to European civilization. To legitimize this belonging, Ukraine has to show respect for LGBTIQ+ rights. The two Western hosts of the show explore the challenges that local LGBTIQ+ people face in homophobic Ukraine but also offer a platform for neo-Nazi and homophobic groups. chushak, Serdyukova, and Tantsiura dismantle the show’s gaze, which frames the two hosts as brave and benevolent, as a manifestation of the neoliberal ‘queer imperial gaze,’ rooted in homonorma­ tivity and homonationalism. Such a hegemonic perspective recognizes and replicates only certain lives and practices, erasing the rest, thus reproducing inequalities masked as global queer solidarity. This chapter is the result of the authors’ collaboration with Ukrainian queer activists, thus creating a space for the underrepresented local queer critique by including original comments from individual activists. It engages both with the colonizing Western gaze and with local homonormative and homonationalist discourses. The second part of our anthology, titled ‘Local Queer Practices: Between Nationalistic and Global Discourses,’ focuses on local queer practices and their positioning between nationalistic and global discourses. In Chapter 5, ‘New Lovers…? As Patriots and Citizens: Thinking beyond Homonationalism and Promises of Freedom (the Ukrainian Case),’ Lesia Pagulich explores the links between homonationalism, gay liberal rights discourses, and the production of narratives of progress and modernity alongside discourses of citizenship and patriotism, which leave racialized non-normative subjects behind. Based on an analysis of the art exhibition ‘Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…’ (Kiev, 2015), Pagulich suggests that claims to ‘Europeanness’ are crucial attributes for becoming a legible liberal subject, a subject that universalizes experience and re-inscribes whiteness as a national norm in the context of Ukraine. This process of the construction of a liberal subject hinges on the

Introduction

11

erasures of certain bodies, identities, and events. Unmarked whiteness is reinscribed in a ‘new’ liberal project, while racial and ethnic difference in the post-Soviet region remains unarticulated and homogenized. The analysis of the reductionist tendencies and tropes helps to think through the radical queer politics and politics of solidarity needed for a transformative change. Chapter 6, ‘“Global Standards” and “Internalized Coloniality”: How Feminists in Russia See the “West”’ by Vanya Mark Solovey, challenges domnant discourses within, as well as outside, academia that construct feminism as an inherently ‘Western’ ideology. Such discourses usually imag­ ine Russian society as profoundly conservative and patriarchal. This makes Russian feminism unthinkable, except perhaps as a ‘copy’ of the ‘Western’ one. Does the ‘West’ indeed set standards for Russia to follow? Is the rela­ tionship between the ‘West’ and Russia a colonial one? In order to move beyond simplistic answers and misleading dichotomies, Solovey draws upon his empirical research on contemporary feminist movements in Russia to examine the relationship between ‘Western’ and Russian feminisms from Russian feminists’ point of view. His analysis demonstrates that feminists in Russia are selective in their learning from ‘Western’ achievements, relying on critical scrutiny of what the ‘West’ has to offer or choosing other sources of knowledge and inspiration altogether. Ultimately, Solovey argues, the data demonstrates the subjects’ agency in handling ‘Western’ hegemony: rather than seeking to merely copy ‘Western’ models, they are producing their own feminism, one that acknowledges global developments but is rooted in the local. Raili Uibo focuses on the meaning-making around two simultaneous Pride parades that were organized in Estonia in 2017 in Chapter 7, titled ‘Prides in Estonia: Struggling in the Centrifugal Pulls of Nationalism and Transnational Leveraged Pedagogy.’ That year, the tri-annually rotating Baltic Pride, organized in the form of a cultural festival, was challenged by a group of activists who wished to organize a Pride parade after a ten-year break. In her chapter, Uibo provides an analysis of the complex, overlapping, and sometimes contradictory processes of negotiations between LGBTIQ+ activists that took place during the discussions surrounding Pride in Estonia. She analyzes the diverging attempts at queer solidarity and communitybuilding made by the different groups of organizers, reading them as shaped by the highly nationalist local context as well as by international LGBTIQ+

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K. Wiedlack, S. Shoshanova and M. Godovannaya

discourses. She shows how activists were forced to negotiate national politics and leveraged pedagogy emanated from transnational actors. In Chapter 8, ‘Transition Narratives on Polish Trans Blogs: A Discursive Colonization Approach,’ Joanna Chojnicka offers a reading of transition narratives on Polish trans blogs, using the concept of discursive colonization (Borba 2017). Gender transition in Poland is particularly challenging due to the lack of a gender recognition law and the lack of a national protocol of trans-specific healthcare. In practice, most doctors rely on the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which rep­ resents a specifically Western, medicalized understanding of transsexuality.6 Chojnicka’s study is based on a corpus of twenty-seven blogs written in Polish by authors self-identifying as transsexual or transgender. The transi­ tion narratives found on these blogs often refer to transness as a medical issue subject to treatment. The description of the bloggers’ experience of their transitions, however, contradicts these references. This difference might come from the variability and unpredictability of requirements resulting from the lack of national guidelines and addressing the doctors’ standard practices in the process of medical transitioning. The chapter concludes that the experience of transition in Poland is determined both by Western medi­ cal discourses, through the process of discursive colonization, and by local, culturally shaped understandings of gender roles, norms, and expectations towards femininity and masculinity. The third part of the anthology focuses on ‘Empirical Studies of Queer Migration and Western Solidarity Projects,’ thus observing and evaluating solidarity in action. In Chapter 8, Elena Smirnova compares her experi­ ence of working in the French non-governmental organization ‘Urgence Tchétchénie’ [Emergency Chechnya], which supports refugees from the North Caucasus region, with media discourses about the persecutions of gay people in the region in and after April 2017. Her chapter, titled ‘Could You Show Me Chechnya on the Map? The Struggle for Solidarity within the Support Campaign for Homosexual Refugees from the North Caucasus in France,’ questions the way in which solidarity with people fleeing homophobic

6

The World Health Organization (WHO) announced in May 2019 that it will remove ‘gender identity disorder’ entirely from its global manual of diagnoses (Lewis 2019).

Introduction

13

violence in the North Caucasus was built and what prevented it. It seeks to investigate the inadequacy between asylum policies and plural subjectivities of arriving people and tries to suggest ways to improve solidarity practices by pointing out micro-oppressions generated within activist structures. Chapter 10, ‘Migrating Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ Activists: On Displacement, Sense of Belonging and Transnational Activism’ by Pauliina Lukinmaa and Aleksandr Berezkin, explores the emigration and cross-border mobility of Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ activists and cross-border civic cooperations between LGBTIQ+ individuals in Russia and other former Soviet countries and Northern/Western civil actors. By means of thematic interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, Lukinmaa and Berezkin follow six migrating activists who organize or participate in LGBTIQ+ activities in Saint Petersburg and in other locations in post-Soviet countries. The authors propose that these activists’ activities are motivated by a sense of belonging and intention to give back to ‘their’ people. The mobile subjects navigate spaces between exclusion and inclusion, which enables them to locate themselves both in different settings and as ‘in-between’ subjects. This ‘in-between’ position, alongside a shared mother-tongue and a similar socio-cultural background, enhances their role and importance as mobile partners for civil society organizations and for a growing number of grass­ roots collectives in Russia and other post-Soviet countries. Accordingly, these multi-located Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ activists have gained important social networks and knowledge not only for Russian-speaking but also for other transnational advocacy networks. Chapter 11, titled ‘Working with Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ Refugees in Berlin,’ continues to explore issues and conditions of forced migration. In their text, Masha Beketova examines the existing support structures for Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ refugees in Berlin. Beketova alludes to their work as a counselor and group facilitator at the Russian-speaking organization Quarteera e.V. (2011–2016) and the lesbian counseling office Lesbenberatung e.V. (2016–2018). Moreover, they analyze interviews with refugees and their personal experience as a queer migrant activist. Seeking relief and protection in Germany, queer refugees repeatedly encounter mul­ tiple and interconnected forms of discrimination and retraumatization – also within their support network. There has been a significant institutional development of support structures since 2015, which Beketova examines

14

K. Wiedlack, S. Shoshanova and M. Godovannaya

with regard to its accessibility for Russian-speaking refugees and migrants. Beketova criticizes the paternalistic existing approach as a ‘working on’ or ‘working for’ in hierarchically structured forms. They propose that effective support needs to be a ‘working with’ in horizontal collaboration between refugees, migrants, and other actors. Thus, this chapter suggests ideas for practical solidarity within NGOs and queer communities. The concluding part of our book, ‘Art-based Research, Artivism, and Other Forms of Resistance,’ gives space to forms of resistance that are based in activist contexts and involve artistic and activist research practices. It presents a non-academic essay, a play/lecture-performance, and a manifesto, implicitly arguing that these forms of writing and presenting are important aspects of queer knowledge production and performances of solidarity and thus need to be put in a conversation with more traditional forms of research. Chapter 12, ‘Boston Marriages in Contemporary Russia and Beyond,’ shows how this unique phenomenon demonstrates Russian society’s resil­ ience and adaptability in the face of the challenges posed by recent sexual and family policies. In their chapter, Alexandra Yaseneva and Ekaterina Davydova introduce their activist online project Живи с подругой/Zhivi s podrugoi [Live With Your Female Friend]. Created in 2014, Живи с подругой promotes and creates awareness of the concept of the Boston marriage, which can be understood as female cohabitation and a form of romantic friendship. It appropriates and translates the American concept of the Boston marriage into the Russian context and demonstrates that these kinds of shared living, community and kinship are worthy of recognition in the modern world. Most importantly, the project connects women who seek these kinds of relationships with each other. Chapter 13, ‘Queer Kinship or Queering Kinship: Starting Points, Methodological Speculations, Overcoming, Searching for Art Practices and Language,’ is a play based on a lecture-performance by the queer-feminist affinity art group ‘Unwanted Organisation’ (qffag UO), which was presented during the ‘Fucking Solidarity’ conference. The text was based on poetic and academic writings as well as personal correspondences between the qffag UO’s members in preparation for the conference. Its multidimensional structure provides queer commentaries on kinship, nuclearity, mother­ hood, power, gender, and solidarity. The shredded collage of voices presents evidence and traces of what emerges after the destruction and escapes the

Introduction

15

description. It marks a process of searching for a form in order to express the experience of collective knowledge production, affects, traumas, and labor. The last chapter of the book is a poetically reworked version of a solidar­ ity manifesto that the editors of this book, together with their coorganizers and friends presented at the ‘Fucking Solidarity’ conference in September 2017 at the University of Vienna. It is an expression of gratitude to the many indigenous authors, women and queers of color, scholars, and activists from the global South whose writing inspired and helped our thinking through solidarity and the East/West divide. In its current form, the manifesto is a product of many discussions, the collective work on the conference as well as the present anthology. As editors of the latter, we made a collective deci­ sion to publish this manifesto, to reflect on the extensive and challenging work-in-progress of our transnational solidarity and community organizing across the East/West divide. The version of the manifesto published here is reworked by the means of blackout poetry. On the one hand, it resembles a heavily redacted document belonging to secret government files and, on the other, it frees and distills the message, allowing it to emerge on the surface of the text more clearly.

Bibliography Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2013. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Ammaturo, Francesca Romana. 2015. ‘The “Pink Agenda”: Questioning and Challeng­ ing European Homonationalist Sexual Citizenship,’ Sociology 49(6), pp. 1151–66. Amnesty International. 2017. ‘Former Soviet states entrenching homophobia and demoralizing LGBTI rights activists,’ December 22, available online at (accessed May 16, 2019). Arit, John. 2013. ‘The Year in #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen and Twitter Feminism,’ The Atlantic, December 31, available online at (accessed May 16, 2019).

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Bakker, Isabella, and Gil, Stephen (eds.). 2004. Power, Production and Social Reproduction: Human In/security in the Global Political Economy. London: Palgrave. Banulescu-Bogdan, Natalia, and Benton, Meghan. 2017. ‘In Search of Common Values amid Large-Scale Immigrant Integration Pressures,’ Migration Policy Institute Europe, Bosch Stiftung, available online at (accessed May 16, 2019). Binnie, Jon, and Klesse, Christian. 2012. ‘Solidarities and Tensions: Feminism and Transnational LGBTQ Politics in Poland,’ European Journal of Women’s Studies 19(4), pp. 444–459. Bouteldja, Houria. 2010. ‘White women and the privilege of solidarity,’ Decolonial Translation Group, October 22, 2010, available online at (accessed May 16, 2019). Caple James, Erica. 2010. Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma and Intervention in Haiti. Berkeley: University of California Press. Debating Europe. 2016. ‘Should refugees take mandatory “Western values” classes?,’ Debating Europe, November 7, 2016, available online at (accessed May 16, 2019). Dhawan, Nikita. 2013. ‘The Empire Prays Back: Religion, Secularity, and Queer Cri­ tique,’ Boundary 2 40(1), pp. 191–222, doi:10.1215/01903659–2072918. Durkheim, Émile. 1893. De la division du travail social. Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France. Feder, J. Lester; Schulte, Addie, and Deen, Kim. 2017. ‘The Man Who Taught Donald Trump To Pit Gay People Against Immigrants,’ BuzzFeed, March 4, 2017, available online at (accessed May 18, 2019) Griffiths, Kate Doyle. 2018. ‘The Only Way Out is Through: A Reply to Melinda Cooper,’ March 26, 2016, available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Hann, Chris (ed.). 2002. Postsocialism. Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Euroasia. London: Routledge. Hennessy, Rosemary. 2006. ‘Returning to Reproduction Queerly: Sex, Labor, Need,’ Rethinking Marxism 18(3), pp. 387–395. Hernandez, Jillian, and Wallace, Anya M. 2014. ‘Nicki Minaj and Pretty Taking All Fades: Performing the Erotics of Feminist Solidarity,’ The Feminist Wire, avail­ able online at (accessed May 16, 2019).

Introduction

17

hooks, bell. 1986. ‘Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women,’ Feminist Review 23, pp. 125–38. hooks, bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press. Khoshgozaran, Gelare. 2012. ‘Regarding Our Pain and Others,’ Wild Gender, available online at (accessed May 16, 2019) Kolářová, Kateřina. 2017. ‘The Inarticulate Postsocialist Crip On the Cruel Optimism of Neoliberal Transformations in the Czech Republic,’ Culture – Theory – Disability 8(3), pp. 257–74. Kulpa, Robert. 2014. ‘Western Leveraged Pedagogy of Central and Eastern Europe: Discourses of Homophobia, Tolerance, and Nationhood,’ Gender, Place & Culture 21(4), pp. 431–48. Kulpa, Robert, and Mizielińska, Joanna. 2012. ‘Guest Editors’ Introduction: Central and Eastern European Sexualities “In Transition”,’ Lambda Nordica: Journal of LGBTQ Studies 4, pp. 19–29. Lazarevic, Krsto. 2019. ‘My Europe: Misogynists, homophobes no “family” supporters,’ DW, April 7, 2019, available online at (accessed May 16, 2019). Lewis, Sophie. 2019. ‘World Health Organization removes “gender identity disorder” from list of mental illnesses,’ CBS News, May 28, 2019, available online at (accessed May 29, 2019). Majewska, Ewa. 2015. ‘Between invisible labor and political participation: Women in the Solidarność movement and in today’s politics in Poland,’ Baltic Worlds 8(1–2), pp. 94–97. Mendoza, Breny. 2002. ‘Transnational feminism in question,’ Feminist Theory 3, pp. 313–332. Milstein, Cindy. 2015. Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism. Edinburgh: AK Press. Mishchenko, Kateryna. 2015. ‘Sacrifice is just another word for solidarity in Ukraine today,’ Baltic Worlds 8(1–2), p. 103. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. ‘“Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Soli­ darity through Anticapitalist Struggles,’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (2), pp. 499–535. Neufeld, Masha, and Wiedlack, Katharina. 2016. ‘Lynchpin for Value Negotiation: Lesbians, Gays and Transgender between Russia and “the West”,’ Queering Paradigms VI: Interventions, Ethics and Glocalities, pp. 173–194. Pedwell, Carolin. 2012. ‘Affective (self-)transformations: Empathy, neoliberalism and international development,’ Feminist Theory 13(2), pp. 163–179.

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People For the American Way Foundation. 2014. ‘Globalizing homophobia: How the American Right Supports and Defends Russia’s Anti-Gay Crackdown,’ Right Wing Watch, available online at (accessed May 16, 2019). Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Riabov, Oleg, and Riabova, Tatiana. 2012. ‘The Decline of Gayropa?’ Eurozine, pp. 1–9, available online at (accessed May 16, 2019). Rivkin-Fish, Michele, and Hartblay, Cassandra. 2014. ‘When Global LGBTQ Advo­ cacy Became Entangled with New Cold War Sentiment: A Call for Examining Russian Queer Experience,’ The Brown Journal of World Affairs 21(1), pp. 95–111. Roediger, David. 2016. ‘Making Solidarity Uneasy: Cautions on a Keyword from Black Lives Matter to the Past,’ American Quarterly 68(2), pp. 223–248. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. London: Routledge (Taylor & Francis). Scholz, Sally J. 2008. Political Solidarity. University Park: Pennsylvania State Univer­ sity Press. Schreck, Carl. 2018. ‘Russian Asylum Applications In U.S. Hit 24-Year Record,’ Radio Free Europe, May 2, 2018, available online at (accessed May 29, 2019). Sharoni, Simona; Abdulhadi, Rabab; Al-Ali, Nadje; Eaves, Felicia; Lentin, Ronit, and Siddiqi, Dina. 2015. ‘Transnational Feminist Solidarity in Times of Crisis,’ International Feminist Journal of Politics 17(4), pp. 654–70. Stella, Francesca. 2013. ‘Queer Space, Pride, and Shame in Moscow,’ Slavic Review 72(3), pp. 458–80.

Part I

Queering Paradigms, Challenging the Western Gaze

Katharina Wiedlack

1 Fucking Solidarity: ‘Working Together’ Through (Un)pleasant Feelings

Introduction In this chapter,1 I will work through some of my very personal experiences of solidarity to come closer to a working concept of solidarity that could be meaningful or helpful to the already existing queer solidarity communi­ ties across Western Europe, the U.S. and Canada, post-Soviet spaces, and the global South. I use the method of queer autoethnography (Holman Jones & Adams 2010) to reflect on some of my experiences with solidarity actions, especially during three events that I organized collaboratively with and for queer feminist activists and scholars from the post-Soviet region,2 postsocialist spaces, and other places between 2013 and 2017: the D.I.Y. festival kvir_feminist_actziya in 2013 and 2014, as well as the queer theory

1 2

I thank Masha Godovannaya, Masha Neufeld, and Saltanat Shoshanova for their valu­ able support, advice, love, and care but also for their friendly criticism that helped me to think about the issue of solidarity. Thank you for your generosity, time, and patience. My definition of post-Soviet spaces is informed by my own connections and networks with people from former Soviet republics. While I have extensive connections with groups in Russia because of my personal background, my connections to other postSoviet countries remains rather limited, and most of the content discussed in this chap­ ter refers to solidarity actions with people and communities from Russia. Although my solidarity projects often include people living and working in former so-called Soviet satellite states such as Poland, Romania, Hungary, or the Czech Republic, I want to emphasize that the post-Soviet and the postsocialist context must not be confused or treated as the same. And although I am not suggesting that the post-Soviet space is a uniform space, the label seems useful to addresses a form of relationality that goes back to the Soviet history and the continuing influence of Russia on the region.

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Katharina Wiedlack

and activism conference Fucking Solidarity: Queering Concepts on/from a Post-Soviet Perspective in 2017.3 My search for a working concept of solidarity is urged by my own trans­ national activism, friendships, and romantic relationships as well as a reac­ tion to the broader and international solidarity discourses that emerged in the wake of the so-called ‘anti-gay propaganda law’ in Russia in 2013. Since then, many public figures and Western NGOs have publicly declared their solidarity with post-Soviet LGBTIQ+,4 including the Vienna-based Aids Hilfe and the campaign To Russia with Love Austria (Neufeld & Wiedlack 2018: 166). While I am skeptical about the effects of these and other public and symbolic acts of solidarity, I am interested in solidarities of the every­ day, the rather banal and habitual acts of ‘making life’ together. This might include public and private acts, mediatized statements and gestures, but must not be limited to those. I decided to employ the method of autoethnography for my reflection on solidarity, in order to make my personal involvement and the subjective standpoint from which I speak as well as my analysis of structural hegemo­ nies visible. It is an attempt to produce knowledge while at the same time laying bare the hegemonies involved in knowledge production and allowing for their deconstruction. Taking a cue from the decolonial studies scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos and his seminal book Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide, I aim to highlight that knowledge production in solidarity with LGBTIQ+ individuals across the East/West and North/ South divide must not happen as a ‘knowing about, explaining, and guiding’ (2014: ix), from the position of a superior and distanced analyst. It needs to

3 4

The conference was part of the Queering Paradigms conference series. I use the abbreviation LGBTIQ+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer) as an inclusive term for sexualities, gender expressions, and physical sex configurations that are perceived as outside of the social norm. I am aware of the implication that the term queer emerged in the North/Western framework and that its use within the context of post-Soviet countries does not come without problems, as outlined by many artists and scholars. Therefore, I use ‘queer’ and the inclusive abbreviation ‘LGBTIQ+’ as fluid proxies for post-Soviet lived realities of non-normative sexual and gender identities, practices, embodiments and bodily expressions rather than a unified definition.

Fucking Solidarity: ‘Working Together’ Through (Un)pleasant Feelings

23

be understood and executed as a ‘knowing with, understanding, facilitating, sharing, and walking alongside’ (ibid.) between collaborators. Using autoethnography and paying attention to the personal is an attempt to make the complexity of inter- or transnational queer solidarity visible through concrete examples. It is the humble attempt to address some concrete problems, rather than speak in abstractions. It is an acknowledgment of the successes of the already existing solidarity work of queer community building that creates more livable lives for queer people. However, it is also a recognition of failures in such attempts. Taking a cue from Judith ( Jack) Halberstam’s Queer Art of Failure (2011) and speaking to my own failures not only as personal shortcomings but also as structural problems, I want to conceptualize a form of queer solidarity that fails better. I use the linguis­ tically ambiguous title ‘fucking solidarity’ for my thinking through queer solidarity to emphasize critical scrutiny in a playful way that I understand as a necessary mode of reflection. I decided to use the term ‘fucking,’ rather than queering, to hint at the frustration, disappointment, and feeling of failure that are part of every attempt at queer solidarity. No less importantly, ‘fucking’ additionally addresses components of sexual desires, encounters, acts, and relations that are, in my experience, always part of queer solidar­ ity, just as much as other political aspects. The recognition of desires, acts, and relationships arguably distinguishes queer solidarity from any other form of solidarity that aims to support people who identify as LGBTIQ+. Following queer feminist scholars (Pedwell 2012; Caplan James 2010), I understand queer solidarity as structured through feelings and affects, as well as an action or sequence of actions. Furthermore, I suggest that the collective recognition and analysis of the feelings and affects of solidarity is one of multiple ‘actions’ necessary for sustaining queer solidarity. Taking a cue from the queer studies scholars Jon Binnie and Christian Klesse, I suggest understanding solidarity ‘as intergroup coalition work’ (2012: 445). Although Binnie and Klesse framed their concept with regards to specific transnational feminist and LGBTIQ+ spaces and movements in Poland, their approach can be equally used for trans-regional or interna­ tional solidarities. Conceptualizing solidarity as ‘working together’ can help to recognize its emotional as well as material aspects. Such a ‘work­ ing together’ is a ‘critical practice’ (Binnie and Klesse 2012: 453) that is not always or not exclusively pleasurable. It ‘is dependent on a sound

24

Katharina Wiedlack

understanding of the positioning of social actors in the complex web of social divisions (such as race, class, gender, sexuality, age, disability) and the acknowledgement of shifting and multiple identifications and affili­ ations’ (453). Queer solidarity as ‘working together’ is not an attempt to optimize processes or increase efficiency. Rather, I understand queer solidarity as a shared labor process that requires resources and skills, a redistribution of these, and a sharing of privileges. Such a ‘working together’ requires a col­ lective and personal analysis of the individual emotional, physical, intellec­ tual, and economical, etc., privileges, abilities, and hegemonies between all involved parties. Thinking solidarity as ‘working together’ in addition to or instead of a moral, affect-driven, or identity-based unity offers an oppor­ tunity to consider differences not as obstacles but as necessary aspects of such shared labor. While morally motivated solidarities imply that there is a ‘giver’ and ‘receiver,’ solidarity as ‘working together’ suggests that there are two or more parties that collaborate towards a collective goal. Such an understanding highlights the necessity of negotiating or defining a shared interest or goal, and setting clear rules of engagement, taking into consideration the aspects of care and support. Such a ‘working together’ should aim to be highly col­ laborative, non-hierarchical, respectful, and dialogical. Part of the ‘work’ of ‘working together’ should, furthermore, include a ‘working through’ the failures and fuck-ups of the attempts. I want to highlight that including failure is a necessary part of solidarity that is often absent in international solidarity efforts. In my own experience, failing to forge meaningful and last­ ing solidarity was often felt as shame and guilt that made it hard to continue or finish solidarity projects or start new ones. Speaking from a position of white privilege, a change of perspective with failure as an inevitable part of solidarity might help to make it less likely that solidarity ends in a paralysis of white shame or guilt. Combining an understanding of solidarity as a structure of feelings with a concept of solidarity as ‘working together’ could offer an oppor­ tunity to understand a working through affects, feelings, and desires as part of the shared labor that is solidarity. Such work needs to happen collectively and take hegemonies into consideration. This work, however, cannot ignore power relations. It cannot allow privileged collaborators

Fucking Solidarity: ‘Working Together’ Through (Un)pleasant Feelings

25

to celebrate their white fragility. On the contrary, such work needs to answer questions such as whose feelings are getting how much space, and on whose terms and under what conditions does the processing take place. Does everyone have the agency to participate or to refuse? How much is at stake for whom? What happens if the project of working through feel­ ings fails? What consequences will it have for the larger solidarity project? Positionality and self-reflexivity in regards to these questions might enable us to reveal these complex interrelations and help us to understand why we want to form connections and be in solidarity with each other in the first place. Thinking solidarity as ‘working together’ allows us to acknowledge the laborious, unpleasant, and ‘hard’ aspects of solidarity, without under­ standing the occurrence of feelings of frustration and disappointment as signs of failed solidarity. Moreover, thinking queer solidarity as ‘working together’ allows us to draw on queer theory talking to affect and emotions (Pedwell 2012; Caplan James 2010) in a conversation with queer materialism (Griffiths 2018; Hennessy 2006; Bakker & Gil 2004) and queer post-Soviet/post­ socialist critique (Kulpa 2014; Binnie & Klesse 2012; Kulpa & Mizielińska 2012; Stella 2015 and 2013). Feminism and queer materialism has a long history of reconfiguring the concept of work to include all sorts of sexual, domestic, and reproductive labor from a queer and decolonial perspective. Redefining queer solidarity with regards to materialism helps to emphasize it as a productive ‘doing’ or activity, rather than a moral imperative, and again distinguishes it from charity or benevolence. In the following chapter, I will first introduce the broader context of issues around homosexuality, Western solidarity activities, and post-Soviet and postsocialist spheres. Thereafter, I will clarify my research methodol­ ogy and introduce scholarly approaches on solidarity, especially from the fields of queer materialism and feminist and queer theories on affect, which I find inspirational for my thinking about queer solidarity and the East/ West divide. Thereafter, departing from my own involvement with different academic, pedagogical, and activist initiatives over the last fifteen years, and by providing some ‘anecdotes’ from my personal experience as an organizer and participant of the two kvir_feminist_actziya festivals and the Fucking Solidarity conference, I will explain why I find a conceptualization of soli­ darity as ‘working together’ useful.

26

Katharina Wiedlack

Finding a Basis: Analyzing the Status Quo of Solidarity My search for a working concept and form of solidarity was motivated by the increasing oppression of oppositional groups (Wiedlack 2014) shortly before 2013 as well as by the discussions surrounding the soon to be implemented anti-gay propaganda law in the context of Russia, as previously mentioned. Outraged and worried about the human rights violations and concerned about some of my friends and (ex)lovers who lived in Russia at that time, I searched for an opportunity to express my solidarity with the persecuted and oppressed. Yet, analyzing the strong interest in and public support of Russian feminists (ibid.) and the LGBTIQ+ community (Wiedlack 2017; Neufeld & Wiedlack 2018) from U.S.-American and Austrian activists, journalists, and other public figures, I came to the conclusion that these well-meaning efforts perpetuated notions of Western superiority and Eastern backwardness rather than empowering Russian political and sexual or gender minorities. Queer solidarity efforts that emerged within my surroundings, in places such as New York or Vienna, equally reiterated the notions of this East/West divide (see e.g. Wiedlack 2014; Wiedlack & Neufeld 2018). Most of the Western solidarity efforts I encountered used public protest to create visibil­ ity for Russian LGBTIQ+ people and feminists, often in an effort to make their national governments exercise pressure on Russia (The Observer 2013; Ermac 2017). This protest was ‘symbolic [since it did] not directly engage in opposition to unjust or oppressive practices or peoples’ (Scholz 2008: 117). These Western efforts in solidarity with the Russian LGBTIQ+ move­ ment need to be understood in the broader context of sexual East/West politics. Western LGBTIQ+ solidarity predominantly operates within a visibility-oriented framework and is based on an LGBTIQ+ identity that follows neoliberal concepts of the self and recognition and employs strate­ gies such as ‘coming out’ or ‘gay pride.’ Using this LGBTIQ+ identity as an unquestioned, seemingly universal reference point, such efforts locate the struggles around sexual and gender non-conformity in the paradigm of modernity and progress (Kulpa & Mizielińska 2012; Wiedlack 2017; Stella 2015). Within this paradigm, Western LGBTIQ+ visibility and public (legal and social) participation are seen as high point of modernity and progress. The strong focus of Western solidarity on LGBTIQ+ visibility supported

Fucking Solidarity: ‘Working Together’ Through (Un)pleasant Feelings

27

forms of Western homonationalism that signified the (partial) inclusion of LGBTIQ+ people into the mainstream society as progress, hence designated Russian society as backward. Moreover, it created a paradoxical situation where queer political visibility of pride marches, street protests, and other forms of visible actions are marked as something that is highly sanctioned by the Russian state and public yet at the same time required from or pre­ scribed to the Russian queers by Western actors in order for them to be intelligible as LGBTIQ+ actors ‘worthy’ or ‘in need’ of ‘receiving’ queer solidarity. Consequently, visibility-oriented activities such as Pussy Riot’s actions or the unsuccessful attempts to hold Pride Parades are the only ones that gain recognition from Western actors (Wiedlack 2017; Neufeld & Wiedlack 2018). Additionally, public solidarity protests within Western countries, together with the support of international NGOs such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or European organizations such as ILGA to realize visibility-oriented actions such as the Moscow Pride (Stella 2015 and 2013) or the involvement of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in gay rights struggles, were increasingly framed in Russia as unjustified involvement from outside power players and transformed into discourses of a degenerate ‘Gayropa’ and a morally superior Russia (Riabov & Riabova 2012). This way, Western solidarity supported the polarizing discourses of a geopolitical East/West divide that signified queer issues as ‘lynchpin for value negotiations’ (Neufeld & Wiedlack 2016). The intro­ duction of the Russian ‘foreign agent’ law that requires NGOs receiving foreign donations and engaging in ‘political activity’ to register and declare themselves as foreign agents increased the precarity for Russian LGBTIQ+ people and made queer solidarity arguably both more necessary and more difficult. Within the concept of Western superiority or hegemony, (queer) soli­ darity is not only a prerogative of the West but instead, the post-Soviet space ‘figures as an object of Western pedagogy’ (Kulpa 2014: 432). Moreover, it also seems inconceivable to think of the Soviet or socialist past as offering valuable experience or models for contemporary issues, such as collective struggle for more livable lives and alternatives to global capitalism. Rather, everything Soviet and socialist is connected to feelings of resentment and discomfort or associations with repression, trauma, or nostalgia. Such a view dismisses the

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Katharina Wiedlack

post-Soviet queer subjects’ agency and experience, making them ‘obliged’ to accept and assimilate to Western values and models of activism, resistance, and everyday lives. Postsocialist and post-Soviet migrants living in the West are rarely seen as ‘experts’ within Western LGBTIQ+ solidarity campaigns and their voices are mostly ignored. In Vienna, for example, local Austrian LGBTIQ+ organi­ zations organized various solidarity actions, such as the above-mentioned To Russia with Love Austria, in support of the Russian LGBTIQ+ movement, but they rarely sought a dialogue with the local Russian-speaking queer community (Neufeld & Wiedlack 2018). If Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ migrants were invited to certain solidarity events, then mostly in the role of voluntary and unpaid translators for speakers invited from Russia. Thus, Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ migrants are often times deprived of their agency and are forced into the role of cultural mediators and facilitators in the East/West encounter. At the same time, this specific local expertise is dismissed not only by Western actors as a part of Western hegemony and is not just passively accepted in postsocialist or post-Soviet spaces, it is also actively invoked and cultivated there. Rather than referring to the experiences of their ‘closest neighbors’ and taking into account the similarity of contexts of the post-Soviet and postso­ cialist spaces, activist groups tend to refer to Western experiences and people (Акулова 2013). Thus, activists implicitly or actively re-construct and confirm notions of their own inferiority and backwardness (Neufeld 2018).

Methodology: (Re)Imagining Solidarity, Labor, and Affective Work I analyze my experience as a coorganizer and active participant in two doit-yourself festivals and an academic conference, and as a member of the transnational networks that emerged in connection with those events, using queer authoethnography, following Stacy Holman Jones and Tony E. Adams (2010). Queer autoethnography ‘is an effort to set a scene [that] makes witnessing and testifying possible and puts pleasure, difference and move­ ment into productive conversation’ (Holman Jones & Adams 2010: 199).

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Through queer autoethnography, I can approach the structural hegemonies and problems of queer East/West solidarity and analyze them through indi­ vidual experience. It allows me to combine queer ethnography with feminist standpoint theory (Harding 1992; England 1994), which offers a possibility to speak to my personal experiences with solidarity while making my standpoint visible. It makes transparent that I am speaking from the position of a white, female, queer, Western academic who has lived in Vienna, Berlin, Oakland, New York, and other Western cities during the last years and participated in queer feminist punk and other clandestine communities. Additionally, I have spent some significant amounts of time working in Russian academic and East/West grassroots activist settings. My queer autoethnographic analysis is part of the constant working through feelings, affects, desires, identifications, hegemonies, and privileges that I understand to be necessary parts of queer solidarity. Such work needs to consider all aspects of transnational queer solidarity – the pleasurable, productive, and enriching, as well as the unpleasant feelings and traumas, injuries, and disappointments, break-ups and split-offs. Working through those feelings needs to be recognized and analyzed as part of the everyday practice of solidarity in order ‘to fail better.’ Understanding such a working through feelings and hegemonies as affec­ tive labor in materialist terms can help to distance them from the demands or processes of neoliberal self-optimization or/and white fragility. Before further elaborating on solidarity as ‘working together,’ I want to touch upon another important aspect of queer transnational solidarity that is rarely discussed: sexual desire and relations.

Queer Solidarity and Sexual Desire I argue that we need to accept and theorize sexual attraction and romantic feelings as legitimate reasons for solidarity just as much as we do empathy for the suffering or support for political cause. However, doing so implies that specific hierarchies and power structures need to be worked through. In my experience, queer feminist political contexts rarely consider sexual

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attraction, desire, and romantic love as categories or reasons for solidarity efforts, despite the fact that such efforts more often than not facilitate or result in cross-cultural sex, sexual affairs, and relationships. This seems para­ doxical, since political queer communities focus on sexuality and the free articulation and enjoying of sexuality and love as part of their core politics. Rather than judging or ignoring intimate relations between Western and post-Soviet LGBTIQ+ communities, I suggest including queer desire as one aspect of queer solidarity that needs to be reflected and analyzing. Without attempting to simplify the complexity of sexual attraction, desire, and love or suggesting that all three are the same, I want to suggest that transnational sexual encounters and relationships between consenting LGBTIQ+ people could be or are already a central part of queer solidarity efforts. Queer solidarity that acknowledges the sexual component of queer communities could be a ‘working together’ as a working with and working through sexual desires and relations. Such a queer solidarity could be thought with Susanne Scholz as ‘a thick relation with substantial bonds’ (Scholz 2014: 207), which requires ‘diligence’ and ‘sustained commitment’ (ibid.: 125). Intimacy creates different hierarchies and power relations than those that structure East/West solidarity as such. In this sense, sexual and love encounters and relationships, in my view, have the potential to change power dynamics. An engagement with queer desire, sexuality, and love can be part of a ‘working through’ individual and shared wishes and desires. As an intensive engagement with each other, such encounters have the potential to build or strengthen the connection between Western and post-Soviet queers as well as to expand the network by including members of other queer diasporas. However, I do not want to romanticize sexual desire as part of queer soli­ darity efforts. American critical race studies scholars such as Sharon Patricia Holland (2012) or bell hooks (1992) criticize white allies who articulate and realize the desire to transgress racial and cultural segregation through a sexual desire within anti-racist movements. Following hooks, sexual desire is not the same as the colonizers’ desire to fully dominate the bodies of the racialized Others; yet, the desire to be with the Other often ‘is [a desire] to be changed by this convergence of pleasure and Otherness’ (hooks 1992: 24), to become better ‘truly anti-racist,’ ‘truly progressive’ (white) subjects through the sexual encounter.

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Referring to hooks and Holland, I would like to think of solidarity as work that necessarily involves ‘confront[ing] racism and the conflicts that it engenders’ (ibid.) in all aspects of our encounters. The analysis of forms of Othering is thus necessarily part of anti-hegemonic and anti-racist work. Acknowledging that our sexual queer desires are equally structured through processes of Othering does not delegitimize these desires, but it could help us to fight racialized hegemonies and find common ground upon which to share privileges and power.

Solidarity as Shared Labor My thinking about solidarity as shared labor is influenced by critics and scholars such as Kate Doyle Griffiths (2018), Rosemary Hennessy (2006), and Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill (2004), who have re-conceptualized materialist notions of labor and social reproduction to include queer expe­ riences of life-making. Social reproduction, in materialist terms, frames human survival as depending ‘on social relations that span political econ­ omy and juridical and cultural forms’ (Hennessy 2006: 387). Moreover, ‘[s]ocial reproduction under capitalism takes place through the making, exchange, and consumption of commodities’ (ibid.: 389). The concept of queer social reproduction does not only highlight the reproductive aspects of non-normative sexual and non-sexual relations but also allows for a rec­ ognition of the revolutionary potential of queer social relations to change society (Griffiths 2018). Referring to the concept of queer social relations, I want to suggest an understanding of queer solidarity as shared reproductive labor that includes actions and emotions that satisfy what Hennessy calls ‘outlawed affective needs’ (Hennessy 2006: 389). Hennessy points to the fact that many human needs remain unmet by capitalism, because capitalism depends on exploita­ tive social relations and the disregard of some people’s needs in favor of others.’ The sphere of these unmet, or ‘outlawed need[s]’ (ibid.), however, has the potential to constantly threaten capitalist interests. ‘It is the monstrous outside to capitalism that haunts it. Affective needs that are organized into

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[…] “sexuality” are only one aspect of much broader affective and sensate relations that feature in everyday life’ (ibid.). They are essential to social reproduction and to the formation of resistence against the capitalist rela­ tions and their violence. The labor of queer solidarity can accordingly be understood as care work, redistribution of resources, sex, and sharing involved in queer social reproduction. Moreover, they need to include affective and emotional work, empathy, love, and desire but also, as already mentioned, the work­ ing through and dealing with feelings of disappointment and frustration. Applying materialist concepts of labor and work to a queer feminist solidarity context necessarily includes a reconceptualization of labor power and labor value. Disability studies scholars such as Sarah Phillips and Cassandra Hartblay have shown that the Soviet ideological apparatus historically applied the materialist concept of labor in a way that reduced the value of a person to their economic productivity. Such an application stigmatized and socially excluded people with disabilities as unproduc­ tive and as burdens to society (Phillips 2009: 10; Hartblay 2006: 52). Queer solidarity as ‘working together’ beyond the East/West divide needs to consider the violent history of Soviet and capitalist ableism as well as its neoliberal mutations. Moreover, queer feminist solidarity efforts often perpetuate compulsory ablebodiedness through the evalu­ ation of individual’s productivity. A queer feminist anti-racist ‘working together’ needs to emphasize accessibility and participation rather than efficiency. Playfully referring to Marx’s labor theory of value, which ‘centers on the category of abstract labor’ (Bellofiore 1989: 5), could help to rethink labor value not in terms of outcomes but in terms of difference. Marx conceptualizes ‘[l]abor as a measure of the difficulties that must be overcome, as real social cost, […] whatever the historical mode of pro­ duction’ (ibid.). Accordingly, the value of queer solidarity would not be measured by its outcomes, but on the difficulties it dealt with and – as I suggest – by its failures. In the following chapters, I will write about my personal experiences and failures with queer solidarity and suggest how a concept of queer solidarity as ‘working together’ could allow queer allies to fail better.

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Taking Action: Kvir_feminist_actziya and More… Unhappy with the status quo of Western solidarity actions for Russian feminists and LGBTIQ+ people in 2012, I shared my opinions with queer migrants from post-Soviet and postsocialist spaces in Vienna. Together, we came up with the idea to organize the first kvir_feminist_actziya in spring 2013, a four-day-long do-it-yourself art and culture festival that included workshops, exhibitions, performances, and lectures from individuals and groups from many different regions across Eastern Europe and Eurasia. What seemed only logical to me at that point – to approach queer migrants from Russia and other postsocialist and post-Soviet spaces who were already doing queer activism in other capacities in Vienna – turned out to be an almost exceptional move among Western solidarity initiatives for the Russian LGBTIQ+ movement. Together, however, we aimed to contact as many Russian LGBTIQ+ individuals as possible and facilitate networks not only between Russian and Western activists, scholars, and individuals but also with as many other post-Soviet and postsocialist actors as possible. The creation of a network throughout post-Soviet and postsocialist spaces seemed impertinent given the spaces’ shared histories and the increasing visibility of international rightwing groups that propagated homophobia (Rivkin-Fish & Hartblay 2014). Thus, the non-commercial festival aimed at bringing post-Soviet and post­ socialist feminists and queers to Vienna, to exchange facts and experiences of their living conditions, share strategies and tactics against oppression, and create sustainable support networks. Vienna was chosen as a festival location, among other things, due to its geographic positioning and the availability of resources to fund the visitors’ traveling and accommodation costs in the city, the availability of a community space as well as enough support from the queer community in organizing free food, etc. The first kvir_feminist_actziya5 took place in June 2013, the second in July 2014. The festivals brought together more than 100 activists, artists,

5

The term ‘kvir’ is a critical modification of ‘queer,’ which can be understood as a hegemonic ‘Western’ project. ‘kvir is the attempt to critically reflect “Western” biases,

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and researchers from the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe, and Eurasia to Vienna. They were intense and exciting gatherings. Many participants shared with me that they did not only enjoy the festivals and profit from the shared knowledge, they also felt personally and emotionally empow­ ered, connecting to so many queer and feminist self-identified academics, activists, and artists from postsocialist and post-Soviet spaces. Moreover, some found lasting friendships, romantic and/or sexual relationships, and communities through the festivals. As enjoyable and productive as these festivals had been, the experience also showed that a more thorough critical reflection on the question of how to do and sustain meaningful solidarity across the East/West divide was needed. Hence, in September 2017 some of the main organizers of the two DIY festi­ vals, including myself, collaborated with the Queering Paradigms network to organize the queer theory conference Fucking Solidarity: Queering Concepts on/from a Post-Soviet Perspective at the University of Vienna. More than the festivals, the conference tried to forge a conversation and solidarity between activists, artists, and academic researchers. Reacting to the rapidly increas­ ing systemic violence against LGBTIQ+ individuals in Russia, Azerbaijan, and other post-Soviet regions, we focused especially, but not exclusively, on solidarity with these locations. Rather than creating a safer space for exchange, we wanted to use the resources connected to academia to develop concepts and approaches to create meaningful solidarity between Western and post-Soviet queer scholars, activists, and artists and at the same time challenge hegemonies. To put it differently, the conference was an attempt to appropriate queer theory and academic spaces by and for post-Soviet LGBTIQ+ individuals and groups and their Western allies. privileges and positions and to decenter the “Western” canon of knowledge and prac­ tice. Therefore, kvir works against the invisibility, marginalization and exploitation of kvir_feminisms from the “East.” [T]he concepts of the “West” and the “East” are highly problematic [concepts], always relational and perpetuating unequal power relations. [U]sing these terms repeats the violence of simplification of very different regions and politics under two labels, but for now it seems essential to use those labels in order to make visible the hegemonic power structures within queer and feminist theory, art and activism. The underscore in KVIR_FEMINIST also stands for the variety of different approaches, groups, countries, bodies, activisms and initiatives from the imagined space the “East”’ (kvir_feminist_actziya 2014).

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The conference, the festivals, and other smaller efforts and events that I coordinated collectively with friends and colleagues from post-Soviet and postsocialist regions over the course of the last seven years created a loose network of queer feminist activists and scholars that runs predominantly between the U.S.A. and Canada, Russia, Austria, and Germany, and includes individuals and groups from Kazakhstan, Kirgizstan, Belarus, Ukraine, Armenia, Estonia, and Latvia as well as from postsocialist countries such as Romania, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, and others. Since 2013, individual members and groups of this network have supported many queer individuals who had to relocate due to oppression and increasing dis­ crimination in their countries of origin or residency.

Queer Solidarity as a Structure of Feelings From my experience with the festivals and the conference, affect and emo­ tions played a major role in the realization of the events and within the emerging networks. The open articulation of empathy with Russian feminists and queers, and anger about their suppression, but also the anger about the public discourses instrumentalizing Russian homophobia through homona­ tionalism (e.g. in the U.S.A., see Wiedlack 2017) or about homotolerance (e.g. in Austria, see Wiedlack & Neufeld 2018) connected me to activists in Vienna and beyond, with whom I had previously had no connections but shared the same concerns. The involvement of affects and feelings was not only apparent in the enthusiastic and empathically driven support but also in the strong rejection of some of the critique. At times, it created emotional responses that I was not prepared for. In a panel discussion on racial and sexual hegemonies in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, for example, a white heterosexual male Western academic ally, who arguably had more privileges in terms of age, gender, and sexuality as well as class, economic, social, and cultural means than most other participants, was asked to check his Western privilege and gaze by a non-Western queer and female-identified person. The problem was not that he had said anything offensive but rather that he had dominated the panel,

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speaking for or about Eastern European gays, silencing the white women* and women* of color at the panel and especially marginalizing the topic of racial inequality. The intervention came from the ranks of the audience, was brought forward very emotionally, and could have been perceived as rude. Yet, it was a very important intervention into a discourse that should have been about issues of racialization and homophobia in post-Soviet and postsocialist spaces, featuring women* and queers of color from those spaces, but ended up being dominated by a male and Western point of view. Most importantly, the intervention brought up the important perspective of Roma and Sinti people who are among the most oppressed and silenced groups within the current racist and homophobic climate. While the participants from the post-Soviet and postsocialist spaces that I spoke to after the discussion all appreciated the intervention, the person who had been addressed as well as some other white Western participants focused exclusively on the ‘rudeness’ of the intervention and demanded an apology, not only from the person who intervened but also from the organ­ izers of the event. The content of the intervening speech act was mostly lost on them. The addressee of the intervention left the conference, uttering feel­ ings of being hurt and disrespected, and shaming the speaker and organizers for ‘having alienated another heterosexual ally.’ Another example was the reaction of an Austrian friend and colleague who approached me, in connection with the conference, with the intent to publish an article about homophobic oppression in Russia for a local left-wing magazine. The friend wrote the article from the perspective of a queer person, focusing on homophobic injustice, relying on third-hand reports of violence and the anti-gay propaganda law, completely disregard­ ing the particularities and international dimension of Russian homophobia or the experience of it by actual Russian LGBTIQ+. In the end, the article presented Russia to a prospective allegedly homo-tolerant, left-oriented Austrian audience as an inherently homophobic space where queer lives cannot live and as a space in need of Western pedagogical intervention. Due to my and others’ interventions, the article was not published in the end, but the author refused to understand why his empathetic attempt to create visibility for Russian homophobia was not appreciated from the perspective of post-Soviet queers and their allies and finally, disappointed and hurt, gave up all attempts of support.

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I suggest that one reason for such and other emotional responses to and rejections of critique might be that the solidarity with post-Soviet and postso­ cialist LGBTIQ+ individuals is based primarily on the outrage about homoand transphobic oppression and empathy with the victims of injustice, without understanding how these identities and subjectivities are formed and lived through in this context and without thorough reflections of Western privi­ lege, gaze, and colonial practices of Othering. This empathy arguably emerges through the assumption of a shared identity.6 In most cases, the assumed shared identity is an LGBTIQ+ identity. In my first example, however, it is the iden­ tity of a queer studies scholar and academic, which does not necessarily mean that the person lives a non-normative sexuality himself. Yet, in both cases, solidarity is the effect of the affects that arise in the face of the maltreatment of ‘someone like me’ in a distant or not-so-distant (post-Soviet) space, either for a self-identified queer, a pro-queer, or a queer studies academic. The fact that not all of the offered solidarity was helpful or welcomed by post-Soviet and postsocialist LGBTIQ+ people irritated the Westerners, because it questioned the existence of a shared identity, addressed their situatedness, and resulted in an end of the feelings of sameness and of empathy as such. Although I understand affects and feelings as important part of every politics of solidarity, in my experience, the overemphasis on empathy within queer activist, academic, and other groups risks the loss of a more thorough investigation into the power dynamics between Western LGBTIQ+ activists and allies and people from post-Soviet and postsocialist contexts. Feeling empathy creates the assumption of a shared identity, connected to a shared (identity) politics among the individuals or groups they are in solidarity with, thus projecting expectations and certain kinds of behavior and responses from others. While sociologists argue that a shared identity is a precondition for establishing ‘emphatic solidarity’ (Heise 1998: 199), I argue the opposite – feelings of empathy evoke a shared identity rather than build on one, often without any further questioning this kind of relationality. 6

The Native American activist Cindy Milstein points out that even if ‘[t]he complex interplay of race, gender, sexuality, and class’ is similar or if there is some sense of shared identity, this does ‘not automatically create a shared political vision, even though it may create a shared sense of oppression and linked fate among a people’ (Milstein 2015: 82).

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Carolin Pedwell views the ‘transnational politics of empathy’ as being embedded in colonial politics and the logics of global economies. She warns against a premature praise of empathy within feminist and anti-racist litera­ ture and argues that empathy is a technology of neoliberal self-transformation of Western subjects and exercise of colonial power. Her ‘analysis looks spe­ cifically at how affective rhetoric figures in professional development and training literatures created and used by Northern/Western international development agencies and the transnational aid networks in which they participate’ (Pedwell 2012: 164). Yet, I think Pedwell’s thinking about the colonial aspects of empathy can be interesting in the context of East/West solidarity grassroots activism such as the kvir_feminist_actziya festivals or the academic Fucking Solidarity conference as well. Pedwell understands empathy as an affect that promises progress for the privileged subject: ‘from self-transformation, to acknowledgement of complicity and responsibility, to wider social action and change’ (Pedwell 2012: 164). Aside from perpetuating a neoliberal logic of progress and bet­ terment through personal efforts, empathy renders the encounters between privileged and marginalized subjects ‘as offering access to “felt truth”’ (ibid.). Such a misunderstanding suggests that the identification is based on real experience rather than imagination, which essentializes the marginalized community as much as it absolves the privileged subjects from any suspicion of projection or appropriation. To put it very simply, the idea that I can feel another’s pain suggests not only that I ‘know’ the other person but also that there is a bond between us. I was confronted with my own projections of a shared identity due to my empathy with victimized people with same-sex desires and relations when trying to support individuals seeking asylum in Austria on grounds of homo­ phobic violence in their home countries. Driven by a desire to help them connect with local groups, I proposed to the individuals to put them in touch with other community members and to visit places and groups designated for LGBTIQ+ individuals in Vienna together. It was a learning process for me to not feel disappointed when those individuals politely declined my offer, reluctantly explaining that their identities are not grounded exclusively on their same-sex desires and relationships, and that they were not necessarily seeking a community among LGBTIQ+ identified people.

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My projection was not based on a lack of knowledge. Of course I knew that not all same-sex oriented or gender non-normative people build their identities and feelings of belonging primarily on sexuality or gender. Nevertheless, my feelings of empathy and solidarity made me assume a shared identity, against my better knowledge. The question that arises from this reflection is how queer solidarity can be maintained beyond (feelings of ) shared identifications. I want to emphasize the importance of working through feelings of distance and negative feelings, since they are, in my experience, usually the end of solidarity. I encountered many negative feelings during my solidar­ ity efforts, for example in the context of the Fucking Solidarity conference. I, together with the organizing team, had failed to adequately consider hierarchies and colonial structures within the broader post-Soviet context and was, unsurprisingly, met with understandable anger and utterances of frustration for that. Our first mistake was that, although we had intended to appropriate the academic setting to support activists and artists, as well as non-academic forms of knowledge productions, we rather incorporated the latter into the exclusionary format of an academic conference, treating theatrical perfor­ mances, plays, films, etc., the same way as academic presentations. With regards to hegemonies within post-Soviet spaces, this practice became espe­ cially problematic when we scheduled a film about female survivors of war in Armenia as the last event on a long day of presentations and in the same room as a lecture-performance by a group from Saint Petersburg, which occurred immediately prior to its screening. After the conference, some of the participants expressed their frustra­ tion with the programming: the film about such an underrepresented and emotionally challenging topic should not have been the last point of the long program in the first place and should not have been programmed after the rather unconstrained and playful format of a lecture performance, which was already delayed because some presenters had been allowed to present much longer than originally planned throughout the day. By the start of the film, most of the conference’s participants had already left. Thus, those participants who approached us later felt the organizers had privileged the Russian conference contributors through the programming and favorable

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treatment and therefore supported Russian hegemony among the post-Soviet participants. For me, the criticism was unexpected, and I felt ashamed. As one of the organizers, I agree that the programming unintention­ ally marginalized the Armenian participants and their film in comparison to the Russian participants. As organizers, we did not thoroughly consider that a performance would need an adaptation of the lecture room and that the space needed to be readjusted for a film presentation later on. We did also not thoroughly consider that a lecture-performance might not end on time as precisely as a regular academic presentation. Most importantly, we neither adequately considered the symbolic weight of the Armenian film within post-Soviet discourses nor the symbolic weight of our disregard and carelessness in connection with the broader relations between Russia and the South Caucasus as well as other post-Soviet spaces. It was a learning process for me not only to fully acknowledge and respect the anger and disappointment of the participants, but to admit and accept my feelings of shame and guilt as part of my solidarity practices. As a result of this working through, I came to the conclusion that solidarity cannot end in a white fragility that is often the result of autoethnography analyses by white privileged Westerners (DiAngelo 2018). Such a working through of one’s own feelings can only become the basis for the further and broader deconstruction of privileges. I argue that this work needs to seriously consider the hegemonies that structure post-Soviet spaces, including queer and feminist spaces, such as white Russian cultural, economic, and racialized hegemonies, and the ways in which Western supporters perpetuate these hegemonies.

‘Working Together’ Through Privilege Working through privileges cannot start and end with working through feelings. It needs to take material inequalities seriously and result in a redis­ tribution of economic and symbolic capital. In the final part of this chapter, I want to come back to materialist approaches in order to connect my critical thinking of solidarity as a ‘structure of feelings’ to the material conditions of inequality as well as to the material conditions of solidarity (Crosby et al.

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2012; Griffiths 2018; Hennessy 2006; Bakker & Gill 2004). When asked why she turned to feminist materialism in her queer work, Heather Love quotes Cherríe Moraga: ‘If you have enough money and privilege, you can separate yourself from heterosexist oppression. You can be sapphic or something, but you don’t have to be queer’ (Moraga qtd. in Crosby et al. 2012: 130). Without suggesting that money and privilege completely free individuals in the global North/West from homophobic violence, their privilege to live freely and happily needs to be acknowledged, especially in the context of international collaborations. Moreover, Moraga’s quote additionally suggests an under­ standing of queerness as non-normativity and outside of social acceptance that is not easily incorporated into neoliberal discourses of individuality. With the kvir_feminist_actziya festivals and the Fucking Solidarity confer­ ence, we tried to imagine queer solidarity as a labor of redistributing economic and symbolic capital. Concretely, this meant that the organizers applied for third-party funding and more privileged participants paid conference fees in order to financially support less privileged participants with travel funds, accommodation, etc. We also tried to privilege minority voices by actively inviting activists and scholars from post-Soviet central Asia as well as people from the so-called peripheries, that is, outside of major capitals such as Saint Petersburg, Moscow, or Kiev. We also tried to privilege gender non-normative and female-identified groups and individuals from the post-Soviet spheres over cisgender men. While the redistribution in terms of financial support was relatively successful, the projects failed in varying degrees by perpetuat­ ing racialized and colonial inequalities in terms of thematic representation. Queer feminist solidarity efforts need to consider racialized power relations not just between the East and West but also throughout postSoviet spaces. We can draw on works by the post-Soviet feminist theorist Madina Tlostanova, for example, who analyzes the persistence of hegemonic thinking within post-Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus, which assigns meanings through the ‘difference between the Second World and the Third World’ (Tlostanova 2018: 34). Moreover, Tlostanova argues that today’s Russia pursues a ‘neoimperial’ cultural politics that ‘is an imperial Soviet self-affirmation at the expense of blackening the stronger imperial rivals and racially stigmatizing the entire former colonial others – its own and someone else’s’ (ibid.). Such politics centers ‘an ethnic Russian who practices white supremacy in front of any non-Europeans, and resents being rejected by the

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Western society which does not see him as part of its racial sameness’ (ibid.). It distributes discourses of ‘civilized white Christian’ post-Soviet people and ‘Muslim savage’ (ibid.) outsiders Others, and frequently ‘interlocks with National Bolshevism and its aftermath or balances on the verge of openly fascist, ultra-right ideology’ (Tlostanova 2018: 34). Although a further elaboration of this aspect would go beyond the scope of this chapter, I want to emphasize that queer solidarity projects that want to challenge the East/West divide need to engage with the racialized hegemonies that structure the post-Soviet space since they are a continua­ tion of historic Western hegemony (for example with regards to the Second and Third World divide) as well as a counter-reaction to them. Moreover, we have to address the fact that pro-gay political discourses in Western Europe more often than not align gay rights activists with anti-migrant politics, especially through anti-Muslim sentiment (Haritaworn 2012; Huber 2013) but also through bias against Eastern Europe (Wiedlack 2017; Neufeld & Wiedlack 2016). Anti-migrant forces in (Western) Europe (Travis 2016) and the U.S.A. (Davidson 2015) create fears around issues of employment and wealth in order to mobilize populations against migrants. Additionally, they support their anti-migrant sentiments by claiming that the migrants do not share the same values and are hence a double threat to white citizens, especially women (Taub 2016) and LGBTIQ+ individuals (Ammaturo 2015). Regarding the current solidarity movements in support of LGBTIQ+ people in the post-Soviet regions of Chechnya, the Donbass (Ukraine), or Azerbaijan, we need to reflect on this intersection. There is a real danger, for example, of affirming Western and white post-Soviet sentiments against Muslims in general, by identifying Islam as the source for the horrible crimes against LGBTIQ+ individuals committed in the region of Chechnya. Equally problematic is the negative focus on tradition and history as being necessarily homo-, trans-, or queerphobic, resulting in its dismissal. The perpetual re-narration of Chechen (as well as Russian) tradition and his­ tory as anti-LGBTIQ+ by various solidarity groups and individuals only shows a pejorative sentiment towards them, at the same time confirming and reinforcing the state-sanctioned erasure of queer histories and lives from these cultures and traditions altogether, focusing exclusively on damage and pain rather than on resistance and resilience. It therefore also reinforces the position of LGBTIQ+ movements as lynchpins for the negotiation of

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Western (pro-LGBTIQ+) versus traditional values (Neufeld & Wiedlack 2016). Moreover, it reaffirms the idea that anti-LGBTIQ+ sentiments are a necessary part of a tradition-conscious and/or religious stance. So how do we react when anti-Muslim, anti-Roma, or any other racist and/or nationalistic politics suddenly emerge and resurface in our forms of alliances and solidarity communities? How do we address and resist these occurrences? In the context of the kvir_feminist_actziya in 2014, I completely failed to react to a public performance of Ukrainian nationalism during a presentation on queer-feminist activism during the Euromaidan.7 I was perplexed when a dozen Ukrainian participants and presenters suddenly took Ukrainian national flags out of their bags and wrapped themselves in them to show their allegiance to their nation, shouting nationalistic paroles. As a self-identified anti-national queer-feminist activist and scholar who fights border regimes, I should have discussed this incident, not by calling out or policing the activists, but by providing a space for a critical reflection on the incident. Instead, I felt shame about my non-reaction and totally ignored the topic and simply stopped doing solidarity activism with those flag-carrying queer-feminists (as did the other organizers and participants, as far as I know). A queer solidarity as ‘working together’ should fail better than that. We need to collectively find language to address nationalism and racism without exercising white Western hegemony.

Concluding Solidarity, or The Hope to Fail Better In this chapter, I tried to draw on my own autoethnographic experience with the transnational festivals kvir_feminist_actziya in 2013 and 2014 and the Fucking Solidarity conference 2017 to come to a working concept of queer solidarity between North/West and post-Soviet and postsocialist 7

Euromaidan was a series of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine, which began on November 21, 2013, with public protests in Maidan Nezalezhnosti [Independence Square] in Kiev and led to the 2014 Ukrainian revolution and the resignation of President Viktor Yanukovych.

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individuals and groups and address some issues and concerns regarding solidarity actions. I suggested understanding queer solidarity as ‘working together’ or shared labor. Queer solidarity as ‘working together’ means acknowledging the oppression of LGBTIQ+ individuals from post-Soviet spaces without reducing them to the status of victims and without want­ ing to ‘save’ them. Such a notion of solidarity clearly distinguishes itself from charity. Drawing on queer materialist, decolonial, and critical race studies approaches, queer solidarity as ‘working together’ can be understood not only as a joint (knowledge) production process but also as a joint sharing and caring in the form of reproductive labor of everyday life. Framing solidarity as shared labor offers a possibility to create mean­ ingful and actually helpful bonds, but only if privileges and knowledge, history and special belonging as well as the special perspectives coming with them are reflected on and understood as resources in terms of labor resources. A post-Soviet heritage would be an advantage rather than a burden within such solidarity-based labor unions, since it is a resource of valuable knowledge – knowledge and traditions that Westerners have to catch up with. Coming from a Western context would be a disadvantage in this regard. Westerners’ access to funding and other resources, and knowledge about Western contexts would mean a valuable contribution to the work process and not any kind of superiority. Equally, belonging to a minority or having a disability would mean providing different perspec­ tives, experiences, and knowledge that could contribute to the labor of solidarity rather than being perceived as a vulnerability or disadvantage. The process of thoroughly getting to know each member of a solidarity union to determine their resources, abilities, wishes, and desires would also necessarily entail the perspective of longevity. Queer solidarity as ‘working together’ is attentive to the microcosms of everyday encounters and the way feelings and bonds structure subjectiv­ ity and belonging. It is an active act of doing to reach not only a particular political, cultural, or artistic goal but also to care for each other and collec­ tively create livable and enjoyable lives. It acknowledges that all involved parties have personal interests and will gain from the activity of solidarity in different ways as well as that this activity entails effects, influences, and transformations that go beyond the personal.

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It would allow working through positive feelings and shared subjectivi­ ties as well as a shared sense of queer belonging, which are all crucial for mobilizing solidarity. It would also entail a thorough acknowledgment of sexual desire as being crucial in queer solidarity activism and community building. At the same time, such a shared queer labor would allow for working through negative feelings such as frustration, disappointment, differences, and distance. It would allow for an understanding of these negative feelings not as a complete failure of solidarity but rather as a necessary part of solidarity. The inclusion of negative affects and feelings as part of solidarity could potentially make solidarity more sustainable since it would not automatically mean its end. I tried to address and discuss issues and aspects of and for solidarity that need to be dealt with in order to relate to one another in meaningful and useful ways across borders of languages, nations, and cultures. The implementation of such a concept of queer solidarity as ‘working together’ under recognition of all the involved abilities and wishes would mean acknowledging them in the first place. In other words, it would mean a clear awareness of all involved privileges and vulnerabilities. Such awareness would also entail a questioning of the gaze towards the subject of solidarity, post-Soviet queers in our case. Solidarity cannot fulfill itself through visibility, through a highlight­ ing of other people’s pain through punctual public outreach or protest, etc. No matter what form solidarity takes on, when it comes to visibility, it should depend on a longer and lasting critical reflection on the condition for a ‘working together,’ on a reflection of privileges, access to resources, and speaking positions. This reflection includes a deeper understanding of development paradigms that position gay rights as the epitome of progress and modernity and locate post-Soviet and postsocialist spaces in a position behind the West. Solidarity politics as ‘working together’ means creating less unequal power relations, sharing privileges and resources, not only in the form of a materialistic redistribution but also in the form of learning and acquiring skills and knowledge and, most importantly, in the form of shared labor. This labor is a labor of mutual care, which could include taking care of sexual desires and romantic feelings. Fucking (in) solidarity might fuck up queer solidarity, might lead to failures, but at least it will do so with pleasure, dignity, and respect.

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Milstein, Cindy. 2015. Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism. Edinburgh: AK Press. Mole, Richard C. M. (ed.). 2019. Soviet and Post-Soviet Sexualities. London: Routledge. Neufeld, Masha. 2018. ‘We Will Get There, but We Have to Grow as High as That: Spinning the Narrative of Backwardness in the Russian LGBT Movement,’ in: Scherer, Bee (ed.). Queering Paradigms VII: Contested Bodies and Spaces, Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 83–103. Neufeld, Masha, and Wiedlack, Katharina. 2016. ‘Lynchpin for Value Negotiation: Lesbians, Gays and Transgender between Russia and “the West”,’ in Scherer, Bee (ed.). Queering Paradigms VI: Interventions, Ethics and Glocalities, pp. 173–194. The Observer 2013. ‘“To Russia With Love”: a global kiss-in for gay rights,’ The Observer, September 9, 2013, available online at (accessed September 10, 2013). Pedwell, Carolin. 2012. ‘Affective (self-)transformations: Empathy, neoliberalism and international development,’ Feminist Theory, 13(2), pp. 163–179. Phillips, Sarah D. 2009. ‘There Are No Invalids in the USSR. A Missing Soviet Chapter in the New Disability History,’ Disability Studies Quality 29(3), pp. 1–33. Rivkin-Fish, Michele, and Hartblay, Cassandra. 2014. ‘When Global LGBTQ Advo­ cacy Became Entangled with New Cold War Sentiment: A Call for Examining Russian Queer Experience,’ The Brown Journal of World Affairs 21(1), pp. 95–111. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. London: Routledge (Taylor&Francis). Scholz, Sally J. 2008. Political Solidarity. University Park: Pennsylvania State Univer­ sity Press. Scholz, Sally J. 2014. ‘Transnational feminist solidarity and lessons from the 2011 pro­ tests in Tahrir Square,’ Global Discourse 4(2–3), pp. 205–219. Stella, Francesca. 2013. ‘Queer Space, Pride, and Shame in Moscow,’ Slavic Review, 72(3), pp. 458–480. Stella, Francesca. 2015. Lesbian Lives in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia: Post/socialism and Gendered Sexualities. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Taub, Adam. 2016. ‘Portraying Muslims as a Threat to Women, Donald Trump Echoes “Us vs. Them” Refrain,’ The New York Times, August 17, 2016, available online at (accessed May 19, 2019). Toscano, Alberto. 2018. ‘Solidarity and Political Work,’ Historic Materialism, available online at (accessed November 22, 2018).

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Travis, Alan. 2016. ‘Are EU migrants really taking British jobs and pushing down wages?’ The Guardian, May 20, 2016, available online at . Wiedlack, Katharina, and Neufeld, Masha. 2014. ‘Lost in Translation: Pussy Riot Soli­ darity Activism and the Danger of Perpetuating North/Western Hegemonies,’ Religion and Gender 4(2), pp.145–165. Wiedlack, Katharina, and Neufeld, Masha. 2018. ‘Wir sind Conchita, nicht Russland, oder: Homonationalismus auf gut Österreichisch,’ ÖZG 29(2), pp. 153–175. Wiedlack, M. Katharina. 2014. ‘“Free Pussy Riot!” & Riot Grrrlsm: International Solidarity, or the Incorporation of the “Eastern Other” into North/Western Dis­ courses?’ LES Online 6(1), pp. 79–94, available online at (accessed July 9, 2019) Wiedlack, M. Katharina. 2017. ‘Gays vs. Russia: Media Representations, Liberal Values, and the Construction of a (Post)Modern West,’ EJES 21(3), pp. 241–257.

Veda Popovici

2 Solidarity in Illegality: How the Corrupt East Is Already a Queer East

Based on my own experiences as part of local radical leftist collectives in Romania, this chapter explores the tensions between a critique of Westernizing narratives about how queer politics should be organized in the semiperipheral territories of Eastern European society and the possibili­ ties for forging new solidarities that emerge from such a critique. I analyze recent local developments in social movements in the Romanian context, with a special focus on the LGBTIQ+1 movement, from the position of a situated scholar-activist. By analyzing understandings of the politics of respectability through legality, I identify legality as a node of convergences and divergences between various civic actors, ranging from social movements, liberal NGOs, and neo­ conservative organizations. I show that discourses of legality bring together anti-communist narratives, respectability politics, and aspirational tropes. I propose a redefining of illegality through ideas of queerness and corrup­ tion in order to affirm the possibility of a queer post-socialist subjectivity. By anchoring such a subjectivity in a new temporal frame outside of the neoliberal time of Western becoming, my intention is to reveal the notion of queer as corrupt as a radical category of subjectivation.

1

The LGBT/LGBTIQ+ distinction is between a liberal, label- and coming-out-oriented approach vs. a wider commonality that also includes anti-capitalist, queer-as-political tendencies.

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Lending a Helping Hand to a Backward Periphery: Thank You, Google! Thank You, IBM! ‘But we are not there yet,’ a key organizer of the 2018 Bucharest Pride pointed out to me in a mildly condescending tone. The reaction was part of a conver­ sation about organizing the program of the 2018 Bucharest Pride and came as a response to my suggestions about the agenda. It is time – I argued – to firmly disavow cooperation with corporations for this year’s Pride. Instead, we could use the platform to create visibility for the exploitative conditions of labor that various queers have to endure and thus make labor rights an overarching theme, while focusing on the protection of trans workers and sex workers as the highlight of the 2018 Pride events2 (Lerca-Duda 2017; Transgender Day of Remembrance 2017). In the opinion of this organizer, however, such a change was untimely: the local LGBTIQ+ cultural and activist scenes have not reached the level of their Berlin- and London-based counterparts, the level needed for us to pull this off. We do not yet enjoy the kind of diversity within our activism that could accommodate radical anti-capitalist messages, she continued to explain. The conversation ended quickly when my arguments – despite being anchored in concrete examples and conditions already made visible by the trans community – were dis­ missed as being part of a ‘radical,’ ‘idealist’ category of unrealistic demands. Unexpectedly, this exchange of opinions between us, although we had clearly divergent positions, did not ignite a conflict. The liberal posi­ tion represented by the organizer wittingly undermined my position in a two-fold move: firstly, it suggested that a queer anti-capitalist position is just another color in the rainbow of diversity. Secondly, it implied that the articulation of this kind of politics lies somewhere in the very distant future, which the ‘advanced’ West has already reached, while the ‘backward’ East has not. Radical politics becomes appropriated within the discourse of liberal

2

Protection and support of trans workers and sex workers has become a topic of utmost importance in the local queer scene especially in the aftermath of the murder of Laura Ursaru. She was a trans woman sex worker from Romania stabbed to death on November 10, 2017, in Rome.

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politics as a signifier for the diversity of a highly progressive environment, one in which anti-capitalist queer positions co-exist with neoliberal and citizenship-based LGBT politics. In this developmental model, radicalism is undermined by its portrayal as just another political color in the liberal rainbow of diversity. The corporate sponsoring of the Bucharest Pride that I was arguing against is a recent phenomenon. Only in the last few years have mega-corpo­ rations such as Google or IBM begun showing up at the Pride with branded banners of ‘support,’ while barely actually financially supporting the event. Instead, Pride has historically relied primarily on the support of Western embassies, some meager foreign aid funds, informal social networks, support from local bars and clubs, and the infinite resourcefulness of local artists. Emerging in 2004 under the name GayFest, Bucharest Pride has tra­ ditionally been organized by the NGO Accept, the largest organization within the local post-socialist LGBT movement. Accept has historically been focused on legal struggles. It crucially contributed to the fight for the decriminalization of LGBTIQ+-identified individuals, a battle won in 2001 (Nachescu 2005). In June that year, the infamous Article 200, a piece of common law that criminalized various same-sex sexual practices, was abrogated. Generally considered a consequence of pressure exercised by foreign (European and U.S.) transnational structures (Nachescu 2005), the decriminalization of Article 200 of the Penal Code has been heavily discursively monopolized as a human rights victory, thus depoliticizing the repression and potential organizing of formerly targeted communi­ ties (Woodcock 2004: 5). Anchored in human rights ideology, the Accept mode of organizing has also defined the aesthetics and discourse of Pride: a celebration of diversity, the event is supposed to ensure visibility of sexual and gender minorities. Considered the main activist and cultural event of the year, Pride remains the primary research object of most analyses of the LGBTIQ+ movement. Within the diverse funding structure of Pride, corporate support remains quite marginal, which means that funding is not yet dependent on corporate sources in Romania, in contrast to many Western countries. As the most important LGBTIQ+-related event of the year, it could still become a platform for highlighting issues of violence and exploitation that the most vulnerable of us are confronted with. It can still grow to

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be a space for international solidarity and action against homonational­ ist policies, corporate pinkwashing,3 and racist cooptation. Such a move, however, would mean to stop comparing our local context to Western ‘pro­ gressive’ politics and reading the differences as backwardness. Instead, we could read them as markers of another temporality negatively influenced by the post-socialist global reconfiguration of capitalism. Because endors­ ing a corporate-oriented approach to Pride means reaffirming a neoliberal temporal narrative of progress and development, resisting such cooptation is also the only way to facilitate an actual rupture with the backbone narra­ tive of the dominant Westernizing approach in the LGBTIQ+ movement (Hoad 2000: 133–158). A neoliberal inclination seems to have grown stronger in recent years, as was visible in the 2018 Pride program organized by Accept, most notably through the presence of three sponsors that stand out amongst dozens of other partners: IBM, Google, and Accenture. These companies are three of the leading megacorporations to have found their ‘playground’ in the booming Romanian IT industry (Macdowell 2017). One of the most vis­ ible events in the program was the one-day-all-day Diversity & Inclusion Business Forum, ‘dedicated to big employers for the development of recruit­ ment and management of HR policies that would bring to the fore inclu­ sion and diversity to the workplace’ (Bucharest Pride 2018). The event, which meant to forge alignment and agreement with management of said corporations, can not only be interpreted as pinkwashing on behalf of the sponsors but also as an active gesture towards depoliticizing employee issues. By actively taking the side of the employer through this special event, the organizers sent a clear message to any queer worker: gender and sexuality issues are to be separated from labor issues and, indirectly, such labor issues are rendered irrelevant. By taking up this position, Accept aligns itself with the dominant tendency in a postcommunist neoliberal imaginary of employment, namely one that forges the good worker as necessarily detached from any critique of labor conditions. By doing so, 3

Pinkwashing is a term modeled on the term whitewashing, and used within queer discourses to describe a variety of marketing and political strategies aiming to promote products or countries through the rhetoric of gay-friendliness in order to be viewed as tolerant, progressive, and modern.

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they prove their detachment from a communist past and leftist ideology (Simionca 2012). The actual 2018 march featured large groups of what seemed to be happy and proud corporate employees sporting Google balloons and IBM t-shirts, presenting a quite uniform sign of ‘diversity.’ Representing their employer and not themselves, these groups made sure that the parade had also a very Western European air to it, echoing – although poorly – the corporate-powered Western Prides of cities such as London or Amsterdam. By embodying normative, respectable workers from the IT industry, the presence of such groups created a connection between progressive LGBT politics and the most technologically advanced industry sector, which can be understood as a neoliberal affiliation. Advancement in technology cou­ pled with advancement in economy becomes equated with advancement in progressive politics. Performing the good behaving worker, a white, civilized, and progressive character, this year’s Pride made a step forward on the timeline of progress according to a Westernizing model, towards incorporation and visibility in the flows of global capital. Catching up so as to not lag behind the West thus becomes an excuse for neoliberal com­ plicity, a position where respectability politics meet the colonial impera­ tives of a Western becoming.

Colorful but Mostly Blue The 2018 Bucharest Pride proved to be one of the biggest parades so far for the local LGBTIQ+ movement. As always, colorful banners and mes­ sages of love and acceptance made up most of what the march looked like. Amongst them, a black banner stood out, reading ‘Marea Unire 2018: LGBT + anti-capitalism + anti-rasism + anarhism + feminism + antifa = ♥’ [The Great Union 2018: LGBT + anti-capitalism + antiracism + anarchism + feminism + antifa = ♥]. The banner refers to the nationalist state celebration of 100 years since the unification of several administrative regions of Romania and was meant to both challenge the rising nationalist sentiments exacerbated by the centenary and affirm

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a critical claim to the one-sidedness of the local LGBT perspective. It was made by a radical affinity-based collective I myself am part of, and its message is quite typical of the politics of a larger community loosely organized around the cooperative theatre-bar Macaz and the feminist reading circle Dysnomia in Bucharest. A queer space and a workers’ cooperative, Macaz has become a local hub for radical organizing and political art, following the anti-authoritarian and autonomous politics of a radical leftist collective. Pride, with its focus on visibility and celebration seemed to be the perfect space to invoke an inconvenient and divergent reading of what 2018 means for us: a union of radical positions that are already organized locally and read in terms of simultaneity and solidarity. Presented both as a task for the year 2018 and a coming-out – we are the anti-racist, feminist, etc., queers – the message of unity across radical positions goes against the narratives of progress that dominate local social movements. If such progress can be achieved by a relative complicity with neoliberal policies, an anti-capitalist position associated with queer and feminist positions becomes incompat­ ible with the desired future of a Western becoming. Another banner my collective showcased at this year’s pride was one that simply read ‘Queers Against Capitalism.’ Flanked to the right by Google balloons and to the left by IBM t-shirts, the banner almost drowned in the sea of free advertising masqueraded as corporate support. An experience that happens time and time again: radical messages that we bring to the Pride program and march every year are made invisible within the colorful ‘diversity’ of neoliberal ‘progress.’ After all, black is not really a color. The tensions between the radical anti-capitalist queer positionality and the dominant liberal and rights oriented approach of Accept have become a stable part of the yearly Pride. If our message is not rendered invisible by its incorporation into neoliberal diversity rhetoric, it occasion­ ally triggers violent reactions from the organizers. During the 2014 Pride, for example, one of the main organizers and the head of the NGO Accept asked us insistently to put down our banners on account of being inap­ propriate and harmful to the cause. When met with refusal, this person proceeded to call the police on us. One officer, who was already present with the purpose of providing ‘safety’ for the Pride participants, concluded

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that our banner had no offensive message and that an intervention is unnecessary. Notwithstanding such and other tensions, my collective has chosen year after year to come back to Pride and leave a mark with our own political vision. The 2014 episode speaks to the stark increase in policing observed by Shannon Woodcock, which already began with the 2007 Pride (Woodcock 2011). Dubbed as the March of the Jandarms,4 the 2007 GayFest had a one to thirty rate of participants and police. Since then, organizers have increasingly relied on police ‘protection’ against the far right, thereby legitimizing the institution of the Jandarmerie, which is known locally for its violence against working-class male youths. Calling the police on other participants of the Pride is an act against one’s own community, so to say. Disciplining the bodies of the deviants of society at large through a robust police force became, from the perspective of the dominant ten­ dency in the movement, a necessary means of protection by 2007. Seven years later, it had developed into a necessary tool of policing one owns’ deviations, directed against the ones who do not embody and perform the politics of gay respectability. The dominant rights-oriented approach, with its historical justification of putting an end to criminalization, is inextricably linked to an endorsement of the state as both a granter of rights and a regulatory force of intervention. As such, it nurtures a wider legalist perspective in activism: according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, such an approach is one that considers issues from especially a legal standpoint, placing emphasis on legal principles or on the formal practices and structures of state institutions. This has become more and more apparent as the approach has metamorphosed into a tendency of disciplining deviant bodies within the ‘LGBT community,’ namely those that do not fit a narrative of respectability as Western becoming. Diversity is allowed, as long as it can be contained through an actual police force. In this way, the promotion of diversity as colorfulness is eclipsed through the dominating blue of the Romanian police force.

4

The Jandarmerie is a military body dealing with civilian unrest, the local equivalent of riot police.

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The Rise of the Haunted New Right Endorsing the state as a granter of rights and as an enforcer of respectable body politics is coherent with one of the most important targets of the move­ ment’s agenda: marriage. The long-standing legal efforts for civil partnership (Rettman 2018) that continue the legalist approach of Accept were met with unprecedented resistance when the Coalition for the Family (Coaliția pentru Familie – CPF) entered the political and civic arena in 2013. An organization consisting of a network of neoconservative, cryptofascist groups associated primarily with the Romanian Orthodox Church, CPF relies heavily on funding and legal counseling from evangelical U.S.based structures, namely the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Liberty Council (Viski & Nachescu 2017). CPF is not only a vast network of rather scattered groups but also a well-organized structure that emerged as a seri­ ous and powerful civil society actor, appropriating organizational methods and vocabularies from the emerging liberal civil society of the 1990s (Cârjan 2017). Supported by powerful U.S. organizations, CPF is part of the new cross-border alliance of the radical right wing in which Eastern European nationalist, neoconservative religious parties and groups such as the Croatian U Ime Obitelji or the Hungarian Fidesz party have efficiently been included (Cârjan 2017). In 2013, CPF launched a complex campaign organized around the request for a referendum to change Article 48 of the Constitution from stating that marriage is between spouses to stating that marriage is between a man and a woman. The campaign was purely symbolic, since the Romanian Civil Code does not permit the marriage between persons of the same gender anyway. However, it proved to be a four-year-long educational and radical­ izing context for the right-wing movement. The campaign effectively tar­ geted already vulnerable LGBTIQ+ people and their assumed lifestyles, portraying them as agents of decadent change associated with a perverse, modernizing Western Europe. Bringing forth a socially conservative agenda centered on demographic issues and the protection of the patriarchal Christian family, CPF has man­ aged to reorganize the social and political space of Romanian society: by mid-2017, anyone engaging in the debate was perceived as being either on

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the traditionalist conservative side or on the Westernizing one (Cârjan 2017). The tension between traditionalist versus Westernizing paradigms is organized around the argument of indigenous legitimacy: the traditionalist position makes references to a ‘deep Romania,’ a so-called historical victim of the anti-Christian and anti-religious authoritarian rule of communist regimes. The Westernizing force lacks such legitimacy and, although not associated with communist regimes, it is defined in this ideological frame as a foreign, interest-led intervention, similar to the imperialist policies associated with the U.S.S.R. After successfully fulfilling the conditions for organizing the referen­ dum, CPF’s program and members enjoyed much exposure in mainstream media and thus became a priority in the agenda of the LGBT movement. Following a number of debates on what tactic to best use in light of the issue, many voices throughout the movement emphasized the necessity of saying NO at the ballot. Although present in the debate, the argument of the ille­ gitimacy of the referendum itself was overshadowed by a sense of civic duty coupled with the imperative of visibility. It was suggested that we must go to the referendum to show how many we are and that we are citizens as well. Failing to address the moral illegitimacy of the CPF’s initiative served to render the CPF a valid civil society actor. Additionally, approving of the initiative by intending to cast a vote reinforces a subjectivation within queer communities based on civic concern, citizenship, and the logic of stateassociated respectability politics. Recognition is claimed from society on the basis of the fact that queer persons are citizens too, part of the national body. The initial tendency to opt for the strategy of casting a NO vote at the referendum was gradually marginalized in favor of a boycott strategy, sup­ ported in particular by the MozaiQ organization. MozaiQ, a communityoriented NGO, appeared within the LGBT movement with a diverse agenda that seeks to connect more directly with concrete queer individuals and communities that are scattered around the country but increasingly visible in the online environment (mozaiqlgbt.ro 2018). The choice for the boy­ cott tactic emerged both through reaching out to a more diverse multitude of queers and through a strategic thinking that identified the boycott as a more powerful position to affirm in the public space. The campaign acquired momentum in the weeks preceding the vote and proved to be a platform for solidarity and alliances throughout various movements.

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The CPF’s referendum took place on October 6 and 7, 2018, and was unsuccessful: about 21 percent of eligible voters showed up, thus failing to meet the 30 percent threshold for validation. The low turnout was a surprise to most actors involved in the issue: the aggressive, nationwide campaign backed by the Orthodox Church and the ruling party stirred the popula­ tion into suspicion, fear, and hatred towards anyone targeted as queer. Such sentiments were increasingly normalized in the month preceding the vote, leading most activists involved in LGBTIQ+ and queer struggles to feel already defeated. Far from showing that society is not homophobic, the failed referendum rather pointed to the reality of a very significant distrust in the ruling party and governmental structures (Mateescu 2018). In the context of the rapid global ascension of the radical right, the Romanian referendum for the redefinition of the family is a point of ref­ erence: it proved successful in normalizing feelings of distrust and hate towards anyone identified as queer and it put Romania on the map – albeit on a marginal position – of countries with an ascending institutionalized far right. Pointing out the rise of the radical right has been an important issue for my collective in the past seven years: Our black ‘Marea Unire’ banner from Pride is part of a longer history of interventions targeting the radical right, not only with banners during Pride, but also with interventions in public spaces and counter-demonstrations. As expected, our banner stirred a rampant anti-communist reaction online from various neoconservative and radical right-wing groups. Such reactions are part of current (crypto-)fascist trends in the local online environment. They are expressed through popular slogans such as ‘Jos Ciuma Roșie’ [Down with the Red Plague], a historical fascist denomina­ tion for the radical left that can be traced back to Die Rote Pest, used by the Nazis or the infamous term ‘sexo-Marxism,’ another adaptation of a Nazi term used to refer to people seeking equality between men and women in marriage, which is now used to designate a person associated with LGBTIQ+ issues (Dezarticast 2018). The term sexo-Marxism is frequently used in the Romanian context. It is a hybrid reference to both ‘cultural Marxism’ and ‘gender ideology,’ the two catchwords anchored in the English-speaking world that the new radical right and its leading figures such as Jordan Peterson have chosen as their primary enemy concepts. Targeting any Marxist-linked ideology or group, the ideological vision of this Western-based network

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strongly resonates with the Romanian and regional Eastern European radical right, be they associated with anti-abortion NGOs, informal fascist-nostalgia groups, or conservative church-funded organizations, united as they are since 1989 by a hatred of communist and socialist ideologies and groups. As elsewhere, anti-communist discourse in the Romanian context is not solely the territory of the radical right. It entered the mainstream after 1989 with the rise of postcommunist intellectual elites, associated with liberal and westernizing values (Țichindeleanu 2010; Ban 2015). Such elites have insti­ tuted an imperative of anti-communist positionality to any public discourse attached to democratic values. In the past few years, anti-communist slogans have experienced a particular new, robust radicalization, mainly brought about by the anti-corruption movement that erupted in the public sphere in January of 2017 (Atanasoski & McElroy 2018). Although the organizing structure of the anti-corruption movement, the ‘Rezist’ network, had an anti-referendum position, it disturbingly shares vocabularies and ideological ideas with the online radical right and the CPF network. With its rapid development based on an urban middle-class aspira­ tion ethos, the anti-corruption movement is best known in Western media as a mass anti-establishment protest movement powered by high-tech gear, smartphone technology, and online petitions, often dubbed as ‘the Light Revolution’ (see for example Mayr 2017). Its vocabulary has largely relied on anti-communist slogans directed at the ruling party, which is associated with the neo-communist elites of the 1990s (Ravna collective 2017). Such anti-communist vocabulary made the movement accommodating enough for the radical pro-life organization ProVita to proudly join the protests on several occasions. The strength of the anti-communist rhetoric is so appar­ ent that it also created the formal consensus in which Accept stands as a co-signing organization with the ProVita on an anti-corruption petition (Voices for Democracy and Justice 2017). The movement’s ideology revolves around the concept of corruption, which it wants to fight against through the rule of law. It is strongly based on the idea that the state’s justice system is independent and hence able to establish justice by eliminating corruption. Identified as the single most important issue in society, corruption is defined in pathological orientalist terms as an old mentality prevalent in all levels and realms of Romanian society and incorporated very deeply into local customs and social practices.

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According to the discourse, corruption is normalized in this backward coun­ try and it is the main reason why society is lagging behind in the civilizational competition (CrimethInc. 2017). A circular argument, corruption is both the cause and the effect of being behind the Western world. It also becomes a key issue, situated at the crossroads of all major social problems and thus, containing and subsequently dismantling it will ensure the dissolution of all such problems. Any analysis of social or labor issues, for example, becomes superfluous if anti-corruption is placed at its core (Țichindeleanu 2017). This narrative assimilates very different practices into the same overarch­ ing pathology of corruption, ranging from practices of everyday getting-by to high-level official briberies. The actual fight against corruption is envisioned mainly through discretionary means, centered around calls for the consoli­ dation of the National Directorate for Anticorruption (DNA) or support of the Jandarmerie. A favorite of the EU, the DNA is a juridical institution that takes action against high corruption offences by preventing, investigat­ ing, and prosecuting officials and others suspected of bribery, patronage, or embezzlement. The idea of justice is conflated with statist disciplinary and punitive means: its proper exercise can only rely on the strengthening of judiciary and punitive institutions such as the Jandarmerie, courts, and the DNA. Justice in the sense of social justice is incompatible with this perspec­ tive, forging further conditions for strengthening the neoliberal retreat of the social state. Anti-corruption, as an ideological device derived from anti-communism, reproduces anti-communism’s foundational contradiction: while built on the imperative to overcome the communist past, it rigidly fixates post-socialist subjects in Cold-War meanings and identities from the perspective of the liberal capitalist West. This contradiction defines the post-socialist subject’s sole possibility of moving forward as being assimilated in the Western world. Additionally, anti-corruption enhances the imperialist narrative even further by depoliticizing and pathologizing difference. It portrays corruption as a disease that includes the deviance of socialism and links it to nineteenthcentury Orientalist imaginaries. Both anti-communist and anti-corruption discourses present the rule of law as a positive organizing and value system and thereby reiterate the state, and with it citizenship, as being first and foremost a Westernizing apparatus. In such a context, civil society’s legalist efforts can be understood

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as ‘bringing categories of victims into the time of the nation’ (Woodcock 2011: 65), that is, the neoliberal, post-socialist order of the world. Reframing legality thus becomes a necessary step when articulating any radical critique or resistance to a Westernizing paradigm. We can consider the combination of references to the rule of law, anticorruption, and anti-communism as an ideological referential triptych mapping out a vast territory where the ‘haunted’ right experiences a new resurgence. ‘Haunted’ by pasts of communist domination and unruly regimes, neoconservative religious groups intersect with radical right-wing groups and neoliberal paradigms of the respectable Western citizen. Although often in open conflict, these groups are pulled together in uncanny alliances, accom­ modations, and associations aligned with a Westernizing axis.

The Comeback of the Corrupt East Rigid narratives of progress that position the Western world as a ‘model’ were implemented in Eastern Europe, among others, by NGO structures after 1989. They are loyal to both single-issue politics and to the developmental Eurocentric narrative of identity politics, suggesting that there are certain stages of ‘growing-up’ to be accomplished in order to attain the status of a democratic and progressive nation. By affirming economic and geopoliti­ cal imperialist narratives of development and democratic evolution, such institutional identity politics have become necessary for the efficient imple­ mentation of the modernization project – that is, the imposition of liberal capitalism – in Eastern European regions (Woodcock 2011). Eastern Europe has been understood as a derivative and backward newbut-old global (semi)periphery since 1989. Its temporality rearticulated as ‘lagging behind,’ marked by the imperative of catching-up, Eastern Europe serves to consolidate the moral and political hegemony of the Western World. The emerging literature exploring this complex range of discursive and material determinations has gained new momentum in recent years, espe­ cially in texts focusing on the intersection of post-socialism as an analytical category and decolonial thought (Țichindeleanu 2013; Tlostanova 2014).

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Such literature argues against analyzing Eastern Europe or postsocialist and post-Soviet societies with methodologies of area studies, instead advocating for the use of situated methodologies of radical political thought associated with the decolonial field. Through a decolonial lens, the postsocialist subject is analyzed both in terms of what it reveals about the global coloniality of power and in terms of what resources it has to dismantle such a coloniality. Along these lines, Madina Tlostanova identifies the neoliberal imperative of erasure of the past: the postsocialist must forget all cultures, all subjectivations, all memories from communist and socialist times (2017: 6). A continuous disavowment of the communist past is needed for such a subject to be incorporated into the post-Cold War era of victorious liberal capitalism. Erasure is then seconded by the discursive imperative of derivative devel­ opment (Starosta 2016). In this ‘all-encompassing discursive construction’ (Starosta 2016: 7), the only possible scenario for Eastern Europe to be part of historical time is to adopt a belated, secondary, catching-up approach to all domains of social life: political, cultural, economical. A perpetual teenager ‘transitioning’ to adulthood (Buden 2010), the postsocialist world is evalu­ ated only in terms of fidelity or failure: it becomes fixated in a catching-up paradigm. Though a recurring trope attached to the region throughout modern history, the catching-up paradigm became especially important after the 1989 revolutions, as Jürgen Habermas’ (1990) reading of the events shows. The 1989 revolutions came to be understood as a uniform event and foundational political moment for the postsocialist subject. Moreover, they were read as ‘die nachholende Revolution’ [the catching-up revolution], and this idea influenced all further understandings of both the analysis of and organizing within regional social movements. This means that not only scholars analyze social movements emerging from postsocialist spaces in terms of catching up with their Western counterparts, activists also measure the validity of their organizing by comparing them to Western histories of resistance and even radicality (Popovici 2017). Caught between ‘annihilation or progressivist appropriation’ (Tlostanova 2014: 3), the postsocialist subject and, implicitly, postsocialist social movements are confronted with the imperative of amnesia of socialist time so that they may become visible to or begin to exist for the Western

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gaze. Dissatisfaction and frustration with staying behind are addressed by intensifying the fight against the communist past and its assorted patholo­ gies that set back societies in the region. Corruption has emerged in the Romanian context as the most important pathology associated with the communist past. By understanding it as more than a mentality, as a social and psychological determination that conditions the subject beyond its agency, it fits perfectly into the rescuing narrative of a humanitarian and human rights discourse. The postsocialist backward subject, once cured from corruption, can be put back on the modernizing Western track of progressivist development. The ‘haunting’ communist past is exorcized and the unbearable present is saved through pursuing a second-hand future, a future past that has already happened in the Western world. Such narratives of temporal interwovenness are often employed by scholars engaged with the postsocialist context. Concerning the context of queer/LGBT movements in Eastern Europe, Robert Kulpa and Joanna Mizielińska propose the concept of temporal disjuncture to explain differ­ ence within the development of sexual politics (Mizielińska & Kulpa 2011: 11–27). Subsequently, they use the concepts of ‘time of sequence’ – the pro­ gressive, linear time of the West – and ‘time of coincidence’ for the knot­ ted temporality with its temporal interwovenness of Central and Eastern Europe. The temporality of this periphery becomes a more complex, even ‘queer time’ marked by a heterogeneity that encapsulates difference. While breaking the hierarchical distinction between ‘East’ and ‘West,’ this analysis reproduces a model of difference based on the same Western hegemony: the ‘East’ is redeemed and the hegemonic frame defined as a misinterpretation (Navickaite 2013: 84–116). While managing to provide an articulate explanation for the perpetual frustration of Eastern European LGBTIQ+ activists with the temporal dis­ junction, the frame provided by Kulpa and Mizielinska fails to account for the neoliberal imperatives hiding behind the temporal narratives of backward­ ness, communism as a historical void, and moralized nostalgia that create the sense of general ontological confusion surrounding the postsocialist subject. The figure of knotted time thus manages to aesthetically represent such confusion, failing however to address the political necessity of amnesia and confusion that comes with a neoliberal, neocolonial pedagogy. The postso­ cialist subject, while constantly jumping back and forth between antagonistic

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times, loses its grounding and becomes a confused, lost infant that needs direction. As such, while human rights discourses continue to produce the reality of such colonial temporalities, a radical re-organizing of history and contemporary time becomes a decolonial imperative (Țichindeleanu 2013). The decolonial postsocialist subject, while refusing the amnesia impera­ tive, also has to account for the passage from socialist real time to the post­ socialist time of real neoliberal capitalism and neocolonial subjectivations. One suggestion for such direction can be found in the anti-capitalist reading of history as proposed by Bogdan Popa (2018: 264–267). He proposes depro­ fessionalizing our analysis of history by invoking a broken pre-1989 history that fails to fit the rigid disciplinary frames of institutionalized scholarship. Such a reading, when applied to the history of queer communities, enables us to ‘look at what is considered trash by white capitalism, […] where the past reveals itself through its aberration’ (Popa 2018: 267). Such aberrations or corruptions become queer identities and subjectivities emerging from a complex Eastern European history only to render the progressive time of liberal capitalist democracy incoherent. Opening up the historical narrative to subjectivities that fit neither the respectability frame nor the progressivist sequence is to effectively break the Western imperatives of liberal democratic becoming. Critically acknowledg­ ing the temporal disjunctures that come with the postsocialist neocolonial distribution of our societies does not mean reveling in a lefty nostalgia for the communist past. It is rather about dismantling rigid neoliberal time through a multiplicity of temporal fragments such as the corrupted Greater Union banner: celebrating the union between anti-racism, anarchism, anticapitalism, and queerness by radically resignifying a nationalist scenario of the past.

Counter-narratives and Queer Temporalities A similar approach to recent history can be found in the project ‘Adrian Newell Păun Queer Archive’ (Arhiva Queer 2019). Launched about a month after the Marriage Referendum in several cities in Romania, the project

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consists of mostly post-1989 queer local culture artifacts from Adrian Păun’s personal archive, which has been digitized for greater public access. A longterm member and activist in queer movements in the Romanian context both before and after 1989, Adrian Păun collected hundreds of items pertaining to local queer culture, including whole series of gay magazines, newspaper cutouts, and personal letters, spanning three decades. All items have been digitized and made accessible via an online platform, and can be studied, reviewed, and expanded. Comprised of a great diversity of artifacts, the archive was started by Păun in the 1990s, a decade characterized by the intense resignifying of the politics of memory. In such a context, where everything associated with the communist past had to disappear and be forgotten, an archive proving the continuity and important changes that queer communities went through in 1989 and the subsequent decades has the potential to offer new and alterna­ tive accounts to a mainstream history of local queer culture. Initiated and coordinated by Adi Păun and Vlad Viski and based on the support of MozaiQ members, the queerarchive.com project is entirely independent from institutional funding or funding structures typical within the NGO system, rendering it autonomous from indirect pressures to align with narratives of respectability and Westernization. Welcomed by activists, researchers, and artists alike, this archival project is an extremely valuable resource, not only for consolidating the collective memory of local queer histories but also for affirming a critical position towards the Western-centric developmental model of LGBT politics. Through its dense content and open processing, the archive has the potential to develop cohesive coun­ ter-hegemonic narratives of peripheral and marginal queer cultures that undermine the respectability pattern of liberal, citizenship-based ‘progress.’ It attests to the existence and expressions of queer lives before 2000, the moment of their decriminalization, and questions the year’s significance as a marker for progress. Considered by all within the LGBT movement and queer communi­ ties as a foundational moment, 2000 is surely an important threshold to consider within an alternative narrative of the history of the local queer community. However, different perspectives on what this threshold means can be explored. A widespread approach in both the analysis and the organ­ izing of the LGBT movement, an approach that uses human rights ideology

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as its main analytical framework, signifies the 2000 moment as a victory of the oppressed and a coming out into the public sphere of real but hidden elements of society (Nachescu 2005). Such a narrative, while treating trans­ national (mostly) European institutions as messianic agents of change, por­ trays local communities as agency-deprived victims that had no possibility to live queerly before the moment of salvation. The queer subject becomes a political subject solely through this coming out and it effectively exists as a human, citizenship-oriented subjectivity only after this moment. As a sole axis for queer identities, this understanding of decriminalization effectively erases all of the queers that are still illegal in many other ways: through their bodies, their labor, their citizenship status, etc. A quite different narrative of the significance of the 2000 moment can be read in the story of 89 – Dreptate Nouă [89 – Justice for Us], a grassroots campaign initiated in 2001 and meant to further the efforts of the struggle around the decriminalization. 89 – Dreptate Nouă draws its name, on the one hand, from Decree 89, the governmental emergency act through which the Article 200 was abolished and, on the other, from the foundational moment of the 1989 Revolution. Members identifying with non-normative genders and sexualities that had been legally persecuted were at the front of the campaign and associated their experience with the 1989 contestation of the state regime. Their main aim was to reframe the injustices done to them by both the socialist state and the postsocialist, capitalist state by articulat­ ing an anti-authoritarian position based on the experience of said injustices. Sparking a movement based on autonomous organizing and social rights, 89 – Dreptate Nouă reclaimed a historical moment hegemonically defined as an anti-communist event – the 1989 Revolution – as part of a social jus­ tice agenda while at the same time pointing out the continuity between the pre-1989 communist state and the post-1989 capitalist one through concrete oppressive practices. Because 89 – Dreptate Nouă draws its legitimacy from the disciplinary and carceral practices of both regimes, the campaign pro­ poses a local critical narrative towards the state in its various forms that does not associate liberation or dignity with Western intervention or narratives of liberal salvation. Moreover, it articulates a critical subjectivity based on the experiences of local queer communities anchored beyond the rigid nar­ ratives of Western democratic progress.

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89 – Dreptate Nouă is also an art work of speculative fiction. Created in the framework of political art projects I created, Desired Histories and how to write them and Post-revolutionary histories (together with Mircea Nicolae), 89 – Dreptate Nouă is one of the several stories that speculates about a pos­ sible past that is both plausible and desirable (Popovici & Nicolae 2018). In Desired Histories and Post-revolutionary histories, Nicolae and I developed a methodology of collective introspection and production, which, applied through workshops with groups of activists, sociologists, and artists, is meant to excavate political dreams and utopias of the post-89 period in Romania. Speculating on what could have happened, the methodologies developed reveal how close concrete people were to taking a different historical path for their political needs and desires. Proposing fictions that do not need to pass as realities, the two projects evoke a past future for real dreams, a tem­ porality outside of progress and democratic transition, in which a decolonial postsocialist subject may reside. Although fictional, 89 – Dreptate Nouă tells a story framed by the very concrete experience of the 1989 revolution’s contestation of the state’s legiti­ macy. This experience can be considered a foundation for the widespread practices of getting-by, which were typical for the 1990s: the cluster of social and economical practices developed to avoid formal and legal surveillance and limitations in the everyday, based on informal networks of relations. 89 – Dreptate Nouă links the extra-ordinary experience of the 1989 revolution as a contestation of state structures with the ordinary getting-by ethos, thus forming a solid basis for an undercurrent of distrust and disidentification with the state in all its neoliberal postsocialist glory. The fiction is based on and wants to articulate the ideas of a movement coming together in common social spaces and networks of informal barter and services, framed by and for the ‘degenerates.’ It is a movement that, on the basis of its own experience of illegality, claims to not have trust or find resolution within the state. On the basis of the experience of being outlawed, it does not refrain from claiming rights, but also does not base its struggle solely on that. The queer temporalities formulated in Arhiva Queer and 89 – Dreptate Nouă offer different yet complementary methods of producing counter-nar­ ratives about the history of queer communities. The first attests to the world of past queer communities, shaped by marginalization and non-compliance to standards of respectability in times of being outlawed, through concrete

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artifacts. The second expresses the desires and dreams of queers activists in a similar time frame. By decentering and resignifying the 2001 decriminali­ zation and by reclaiming the period and spaces of illegality, both projects articulate a new postsocialist subjectivation. Bringing new temporalities to the fore, such a subjectivation is consistent with a queer postsocialist condi­ tion ‘that bypasses the linear understanding of normal ‘straight’ white time and has a utopian potential to gesture to an unknown time’ (Popa 2018: 48). Unfitting any conventional westernizing paradigms of progress and development through the rule of law, queer as corrupt emerges as a specific postsocialist condition.

Solidarity in Illegality Be Gay, Do Crime is a slogan that has recently gained outstanding online and offline popularity, especially in the English-speaking sphere (Hudson 2019). It has been put into a broader and more in-depth context by some of its initia­ tors, the Mary Nardini Gang in their homonymous publication (2019). The Nardini Gang, a group known in U.S.-based anarcho-queer communities for their radical manifesto Toward the Queerest Insurrection (2014), have been long associated with anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian queer practices. In the context of the LGBTIQ+ mainstreamization in the West, their contribu­ tions join the ranks of movements such as Queers Against Israeli Apartheid or Gay Shame in building resistant queer cultures that refuse capitalist, imperial, and gentrifying complicities. Thus, their endeavor goes beyond the meme-like capacity of the slogan to playfully hint towards a history of divergence, illegal­ ity, and underground culture associated with non-normative sexual and gender identities. By taking the Stonewall riots as its foundational moment, the text of Be Gay, Do Crime affirms the reality and the continuity of a culture and a history of experiencing outlawness, illegality, and lack of citizenship. Affirming a divergent queer identity that opens up other spaces and tem­ poralities beyond those of the nation-state or the imperial state, such interven­ tions offer active tools for dismantling the dominating politics of respectability within and across LGBTIQ+ movements and communities; a politics that

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erases not only our criminalized pasts but also all of us that need to break or bypass the law to survive. It is in a context of linking the radical Western his­ tory of the Stonewall genealogy to non-Western histories of resistance against legal obligations that the transnational solidarity potential of Be Gay, Do Crime transpires. Through such operations of linkage, a decolonial positionality can be affirmed within Eastern European queer politics. This decolonial position­ ality, while breaking with imperialist narratives and practices of subjectivation that internalize the non-Western, can entail solidarity and belonging with the radical histories located in this same West. One of the key figures in the local Romanian LGBT scene, the activistturned-socialite Marius Munteanu aka Maurice, would certainly strongly disagree. An out presence on local mainstream televisions, Maurice initiated an online campaign against the Macaz cooperative earlier in 2018 (Popa & Sandal 2019, forthcoming). Triggered by his dissatisfaction with ‘customer services’ at our bar on a very busy night, Maurice went on an intense rampage on several social media pages that he manages in order to call us out on our supposedly lousy service and tax evasion. As a dissatisfied customer turned concerned citizen, he proceeded to threaten to report us to the National Fiscal Authority for allegedly not issuing receipts. When an experienced gay activist summons the states repressive institutions – like the Jandarmerie or the Fiscal Authority – on another queer, you know that a big split has happened. When the authoritative voices of the LGBT movement such as Accept or Maurice Munteanu call the state to discipline the divergent queer, to shut their mouth and their spaces, such actions evoke the era before decriminalization as a conquered resource: if they achieved legality for us, they can also revoke it. This implies that accomplishing the decriminalization of who we are has only been for the gain of power and leverage for the most passable and respectable gays within the social field. Was fighting state violence meant only to capture it and unleash it on other Others? An effective homonor­ mativization that bridges the gap to homonationalism, such a position relies on the reinforcement of hegemonic ideologies about how a body can speak for itself and where it belongs. One cannot but wonder how people go from being actively and officially persecuted and abused by the state to having faith and identifying with its most repressive institutions, the only ones that can exercise legitimate violence. Surely, this points to a radical split inside local

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LGBT and queer social structures and activism but also to a more important split: the one between the dominant neoliberal agenda and the so painfully recent history of illegality. Solidarity and connection across the region between postsocialist Eastern European subjects and radical cultures situated in the Western World need to be reciprocal and dialogical. Romanticizing illegality while forget­ ting difference by seeing ourselves as some punk kids fighting the system will not take us far. Rather, illegality is a material and concrete condition uneasy to inhabit: expanding its significance toward the concept of the corrupt, solidarity in illegality signifies an intentional togetherness with the category of those excluded from norms of the rule of law paradigm. Such a category includes both the ones that do not fit concrete legal prescriptions (or the ones normatively considered illegal and criminal) and the ones that do not fit the implicit prescriptions of the ideology of the rule of law. The experience of being outlawed and under permanent risk of violence through criminalization is not the exclusive territory of queers in Romania nor of queers altogether. Building radical solidarity with other Others, like the ones targeted next by CPF, the ones situated at the edges of empires or in the heart of them, is not only necessary but can also prove to be a libera­ tion from the single-issue imperative prevalent in liberal identity politics. While it is probably less relevant if we issue receipts or not at Macaz, the bigger stakes lie in strengthening our communities and exercising our poli­ tics away from the aspiration to pass as legal – in other words, refusing to be part of the legal body of society as articulated through the neoliberal state. Being queer as corrupt means reclaiming a counter-role that positions the individual in a distance to being civilized, white, and abiding to the role that a global matrix of coloniality has distributed to our societies.

The Future of an Already Corrupt Queer In the wake of the erasure of a socialist past or the erasure of a future for the postsocialist subject, the corporate (IT) worker has become the fittest body able to claim the title of a civilized, European, white prototype. It is

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the only body that promises some form of dignity while being incorporated in the global flows of capital. And, finally, it is the privileged archetype that Eastern European subjectivity can evolve into at the end of the transition period from the dark communist era to the LED-lit neoliberal future. Depoliticized even in its radical version, the queer subject can only exist in neoliberalism as assimilated into the Western version of the world, one in which radicality is just another color in the post-Cold War rainbow of diversity. Considering queers as separate subjects from their labor condi­ tions, citizen status, or racializing histories is necessary for a coherent victory of the post-decriminalization period. Guided by a legalized perspective and based on an identity of not-being-illegal-anymore, the liberal LGBT subject needs to disavow the unrespectable queer others. Disavowment becomes disciplining and disciplining becomes violence when the liberal western­ ized LGBT subject feels entitled to summon the repressive arm of the state. Already entangled in the ideological triptych made up of anti-commu­ nism/anti-corruption/rule of law, such a subject rather participates with than confronts the consolidation of the new global radical right. This radical right, built on the shoulders of liberal Westernizing paradigms that postulate the abject aspect of a socialist past and the backward nature of post-socialist societies, thrives on vocabularies and ideological tools created by neoliberal imperialist capitalism. Breaking from the neoliberal temporality of westernizing progress can be envisioned not only by redefining the socialist past but also by articulating a subjectivity outside of the confinements of the rule of law and the logic of state-associated respectability politics. Such a queer postsocialist subjectivity can be traced in projects (Arhiva Queer and 89 – Dreptate Nouă) that reinstate the material and speculative radical potentials of the pre-decriminalization period. By resignifying the idea of the queer as not conditioned by legality and thus corrupt, this subjectivity articulates a decolonial project aligned with other histories of illegal queerness, even in the heart of empire (Be Gay, Do Crime), actively forging futures for material cultures and utopian dreams.

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Rettman, Andrew. 2018. ‘Case 673/16: An EU (Same-Sex) Love Story,’ EuObserver. com, June 5, 2018, available online at (accessed April 10, 2019). Simionca, Anca. 2012. ‘Neoliberal Managerialism, anti-Communist Dogma and the Critical Employee in Contemporary Romania,’ Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai (Sociologia) 1, pp. 123–49. Starosta, Anita. 2016. Form and Instability: Eastern Europe, Literature, Postimperial Difference. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Țichindeleanu, Ovidiu. 2010. ‘Towards a Critical theory of Postcommunism. Beyond Anticommunism in Romania,’ Radical Philosophy 159, January/February. Țichindeleanu, Ovidiu. 2013. ‘Decolonial AestheSis in Eastern Europe: Potential Paths of Liberation,’ Social Text, July 15, 2013, available online at (accessed July 10, 2019). Țichindeleanu, Ovidiu. 2017. ‘Romania’s Protests: From Social Justice to Class Politics,’ available online at (accessed April 10, 2019). Tlostanova, Madina. 2017. Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art. Resistance and Re-existence. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Transgender Day of Remembrance. 2017. ‘Remembering Our Dead: Laura Ursaru Transgender Day of Remembrance,’ November 10, 2017, available online at (accessed April 10, 2019). Viski, Vlad, and Nachescu, Voichita. 2017. ‘Americans Are Trying to Poison Roma­ nia with Homophobia,’ January 17, 2017, available online at (accessed April 10, 2019). Voices of Democracy and Justice Association (Asociația Voci pentru Democrație Şi Justiție). 2017. Comunicat [Communique], October 17, 2017, available online at (accessed April 10, 2019). Woodcock, Shannon. 2004. ‘The Globalization of LGBT Identities: Containment Masquerading as Salvation or Why Lesbians Have less Fun,’ in: Frunza, Mihaela, and Vacarescu, Eliza Theodora (eds.). Gender and the (Post) ‘East’/‘West’ Divide. Cluj-Napoca: Limes, pp. 171–188. Woodcock, Shannon. 2009. ‘Gay Pride as Violent Containment in Romania: A Brave New EUrope,’ Sextures 1(1), pp. 1–17. Woodcock, Shannon. 2011. ‘A short history of the Queer Time of Post-socialist Romania,’ in: Kulpa, Robert, and Mizielinska, Joanna (eds.). De-Centring Western Sexualities. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 63–85.

Nick Mayhew

3 Queering Sodomy: A Challenge to ‘Traditional’ Sexual Relations in Russia

The assumption that the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah is a tale about the sinfulness of homosexuality has long been a primary feature of Christian homophobia. Similarly, the derivative assumption that the Latin word sodomia meant ‘homosexuality’ has solidified the idea that homosexu­ ality was not tolerated by Christians in premodern Europe. Fortunately, scholars of Latinate Christianity have shown beyond any reasonable doubt that ‘sodomy’ did not unambiguously mean ‘homosexuality’ in the Bible or in the medieval period ( Jordan 1997; Burgwinkle 2004). Such an intervention has not been staged in the Russian context. There are two words for ‘sodomy’ in Russian, if one understands ‘sodomy’ according to its popular definition, as a disparaging, generic, religiously charged term for gay sex. The most obvious word is содомское/sodomskoe and its variants (most commonly содомский грех/sodomskij greh [sodomitic sin]), a term now used to denote both female and male homosexuality. The second word is мужеложство/muželožhstvo, which literally means ‘man-lying,’ now used to refer to male homosexuality in particular. Both terms are used as homo­ phobic slurs. Whilst the word содомское has already been effectively prob­ lematized by medieval Slavonic historian Eve Levin, the term мужеложство is still widely understood as unproblematically connoting anal sex between men. This chapter revises our understanding of both terms, in an attempt to show that Russian Orthodoxy may not have been hostile towards homo­ sexuality in the premodern period. Primarily, I argue that both terms resist monolithic definition. I also tentatively suggest that a plausible working definition for содомский грех might be ‘any act that spills seed in vain,’ and I provide evidence for understanding мужеложство as one specific form of homosexuality, namely pederasty. It may seem contradictory for me to argue that, on the one hand, the two terms cannot be defined, whilst presenting

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hypothetical definitions for them on the other hand. The aim here is to destabilize hegemonic definitions by providing alternate definitions that are additional, not universal. Before moving any further, I would like to offer a few thoughts on the place that men and women, and also male and female homosexualities, occupy within this chapter. The definition I offer for содомский грех as ‘any act that spills seed in vain’ is intended to show how sexual morality in premodern Russia was not necessarily structured around a gender binary. The point has been made by Thomas Laqueur and others that premodern anatomical understandings of male and female bodies were not as distinct as they are today: ‘For thousands of years it had been a commonplace that women had the same genitals as men […]. In this world the vagina is imag­ ined as an interior penis’ (Laqueur 1990: 4). One can productively apply Laqueur’s ‘one sex model’ to premodern Russia, where ideas about male and female anatomies were often less distinct than they are today. For example, in her pioneering work on reproduction in premodern Russia, Rosie Finlinson has shown that there were far fewer distinctions between male and female reproductive organs than today, and that there was not necessarily any clear distinction between male and female ‘seeds’ whatsoever: all bodies were thought to ejaculate seed (Finlinson 2018). Whilst this chapter embraces the theory and ethos of queering the gender binary on the one hand, on the other hand its discussions of homo­ sexuality are rooted in male experiences. In the case of содомский грех, this is because the chapter responds to a theory of ‘sodomy’ that identifies the vice as male homosexuality specifically. In the case of мужеложство, this chapter explores one potential definition of the term as a specific form of male homosexuality, namely pederasty. As a result, this chapter does not deal with female homosexuality. However, it might be possible and beneficial to further queer мужеложство by interrogating the idea that it could be committed by men only, which could help to call into question commonly held distinctions between male and female homosexualities from a histori­ cal perspective.

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Queering Sodomy? When nineteenth-century Russian scholars first discovered a wealth of medieval sources describing ‘sodomitic’ relations among their ancestors, they were alarmed. Orthodox theologian Василий Жмакин/Vasily Zhmakin, for example, writing about sodomy as it was described in the moral tracts of the Moscow Metropolitan Даниил/Daniil (1491–1547), rather indignantly concluded the following: The moral decay of medieval Russian society was not expressed in natural sexual relations alone. In the sixteenth century, the vice of ‘sodomy’, or мужеложство, was common. […] This awful vice of the time was when, as we know, Russians particularly liked plump boys and any other men who looked young or resembled women in their physiognomy. (Жмакин 1881: 538 & 576, trans. NM)

Жмакин understood the terms содомское/содомский грех and мужеложство as synonymous, taking both to mean sexual relations between two males. He categorized this monolithic vice as unnatural, and he identified its per­ petrators as possessing supposedly ‘female’ external features, along with the character traits that those features apparently betrayed. Жмакин’s 1881 publication has long been the only readily available edi­ tion of Metropolitan Daniil’s writings. The edition is problematic because it is hard to distinguish between the viewpoints of Daniil and those of Жмакин himself, since Жмакин not only describes the original texts written by Daniil in the sixteenth century but also interprets them through the lens of his own, nineteenth-century notions of sodomy. Using Жмакин’s edition of Daniil’s writings, scholars writing about Daniil have sometimes reiterated Жмакин’s nineteenth-century point of view. Take, for example, Marianna Muravyeva’s 2012 article on homosexuality in early modern Russia. Although the article is most valuable and thoroughly researched, in part because it utilizes pri­ mary source materials from the medieval period through to the nineteenth century, there sometimes remains uncertainty as to whether the views of homosexuality it discusses are premodern or modern. This distinction is of course not clear-cut, but there is a meaningful chronological and ideological gulf between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus, it is problematic that Muravyeva uses Жмакин’s text to show that содомский грех was one of

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the primary terms used to denote homosexuality in the premodern period (Muravyeva 2012: 210). I would instead suggest that Жмакин’s edition shows how premodern texts were interpreted in the nineteenth century to buttress modern notions of homosexuality. There are (at least) two problems with Жмакин’s definition of sodomy, one ideological and one historical. Ideologically, Жмакин’s definition forces ‘sodomites’ into a binary of the ‘natural’ and the ‘unnatural,’ at once a binary of ‘heterosexuality’ and ‘homosexuality,’ in which homosexuality is denoted ‘unnatural’ through references to pedophilia and gender nonconformity. This dichotomy underpins conservative sexual politics, especially in Russia, as Muravyeva has so rightly noted. Conservative groups and institutions such as the Russian Orthodox Church launch campaigns that propagate the nuclear family and heterosexuality as a normative model, whilst supposedly protect­ ing children from immoral content. These campaigns often refer to ‘the past, especially to the pre-Petrine past, when it is commonly believed morals were high, families were big and strong, and Russia was a paradise well known for the orderly and ascetic behaviour of its people’ (Muravyeva 2012: 206). The ‘awful vice’ of sodomy, whether содомский грех or мужеложство, understood as clearly denoting homosexuality, fortifies common concep­ tions about supposedly ‘traditional’ family values rather neatly: it suggests that although same-sex relations may have been present in medieval Russian society (and even commonplace), they were always despised, denounced, and outlawed by Russia’s most pious ancestral figures, such as Daniil. This narrative paints homosexuality as antonymous to the values of the Russian Orthodox Church. Indeed, in the build-up to Russia’s 2013 law against the propaganda of so-called ‘non-traditional sexual relations,’ conserva­ tive lawmakers argued that ‘in and of itself, мужеложство is a sin and not a crime, but we need to fight against the propaganda of мужеложство,’ using the term to denote ‘non-traditional’ and ‘un-Orthodox’ gay men (Комсомольская правда 2012). The second problem with Жмакин’s definition is historical. He assumes that содомский грех referred unambiguously to sexual relations between men and that мужеложство was its synonym. As I argue in this chapter, neither of these suggestions withstands historical scrutiny particularly well. Both terms could sometimes be read to denote sex between men, but they could denote a range of other sexual acts too and thus were inherently ambiguous.

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This chapter queers sodomy in two ways. First, it challenges the assump­ tion that either содомский грех or мужеложство unambiguously or even primarily denoted homosexual sex in the premodern period, arguing that both terms incorporated a broad range of sexual acts. Second, I apply this broader definition of sodomy to a medieval account of two saints usually held up as exemplary models of ‘traditional’ Russian Orthodox gender and sexuality, namely the married couple Петр/Petr and Феворния/Fevronia. First canonized in the sixteenth century, they were made the patron saints of ‘family, love, and fidelity’ in 2008 and in the process became central figures to the Russian state notion of ‘traditional’ sexual relations. This chapter reevaluates how ‘traditional’ their relationship really is. This chapter shows solidarity with LGBTIQ+ people in Russia by responding to historicized discourses on gender and sexuality. The ‘gay propaganda’ law has brought into everyday parlance the already existent term ‘non-traditional sexual relations,’ which has become a standard (and disparaging) way of talking about queer identities in Russia, especially over the last five years. Conservative voices in media and government legitimize homophobic laws with the idea that history shows homosexuality was never tolerated in Russia, and that this is demonstrated by disgust at sodomy, supposedly signifying homosexuality since the dawn of Christianity in the Slavonic world. This idea intentionally writes queer Russians out of the country’s national story and shores up the notion that homosexuality is incompatible with the Orthodox faith. Queer Russians – and in particular queer Russians of the Orthodox faith – face a cultural battle that is prem­ ised on the interpretation of historical ideas. So, how we interpret medieval terms taken to denote homosexuality is consequential today because these terms often form the basis of an increasingly discriminatory value system. Grassroots initiatives in Russia are trying to counteract hegemonic het­ erosexist interpretations of history, for example the Russian LGBT History Museum. Such campaigns have profited from academic work focused on the modern period, especially the works of Dan Healey and Ирина Ролдугина/ Irina Roldugina. However, there remain few queer interpretations of the premodern period, to which current ideas about ‘tradition’ often hark back. Queer enquiries into premodern history could help carve out a place for LGBTIQ+ individuals within Orthodox ‘tradition.’ They would fortify existent initiatives challenging the idea that (Orthodox) Christianity and

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homosexuality are antonymous, such as the ЛГБТ-служение/LGBT-služenie [LGBT-church service] ‘Nuntiare et Recreare.’

Мужеложство Before a more extensive discussion about the term содомский грех, I would like to start by considering the possible meaning(s) of мужеложство. At present, the most substantial scholarly discussion of the word мужеложство is in Eve Levin’s 1989 book Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, a meticulously researched study that remains the seminal work on premodern Russian sexual history and to which this chapter is very much indebted. Levin defined мужеложство as ‘homosexual intercourse involving anal penetration’ (Levin 1989: 200). Because Levin’s work was a landmark within the field of Russian sexual history, studies exploring мужеложство in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have reiterated Levin’s definition. For example, in her study of homosexuality in early modern Russia, Muravyeva concluded that ‘мужеложство as a criminal offence referred to two persons of the male sex participating in unlawful sexual activities’ (Muravyeva 2012: 212). This definition is underlined in studies focusing on the nineteenth century as well, such as those writ­ ten by Laura Engelstein and Dan Healey, since by then, decrees against мужеложство already seem to primarily denote male–male sexual relations. Thus, the narrative presented in Western publications on homosexuality in premodern and modern Russia is one of consistency over time. Quite by accident then, taken as a whole, the Western scholarly narrative actually underwrites the Russian state narrative of ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ sexualities, implying that regulations against мужеложство were always unambiguously targeted at male–male sexual relations, whether in medieval canon law or in modern imperial decrees. Conservative Russian lawmak­ ers have taken this conclusion to mean that homosexuality is inherently antonymous to Russian Orthodox ‘tradition’ (an idea that the aforemen­ tioned scholars not only most certainly do not endorse but tend to actively and persuasively rally against).

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I would like here to somewhat problematize Levin’s definition of мужеложство, not because I want to suggest that Levin was ‘wrong’ but rather because I would like to argue that the term resists any one precise, uni­ versal definition. Мужеложство is a literal translation of a Greek word found in the New Testament, arsenokoites, which literally means ‘man-lying.’ In the following fourteenth-century Slavonic translation of Corinthians 6:9–10, for example, мужеложници/muželožnici (those who commit мужеложство) renders the original Greek term arsenokoitai. The verse reads: «Ни блудници, ни прелюбодеици, ни идолослужители, ни творяще блудъ рукою ни мужеложници […] царства Божия не наследять» (Срезневский 1902: 188), which translates as follows: ‘Neither fornicators, nor adulterers, nor idolaters, nor masturbators, nor мужеложници […] will inherit the king­ dom of God.’ This is one of the most important verses for discussions about homosexuality in the Bible. The meaning of the original Greek passage has been the topic of extensive debate amongst Biblical scholars, in particular the word arsenokoitai. The term has been translated in a variety of ways in English-language bibles. For example, whereas the New International Version offers the concrete translation ‘men who have sex with men,’ the Revised Standard Version suggests more tentatively ‘sexual perverts.’ Since the end of the twentieth century, it has been argued convincingly by Biblical scholars that the term does not unambiguously connote male homosexuals per se but rather encompasses a potentially broad range of sexual practices. Of particu­ lar relevance to our discussion here is the fact that it has been suggested that arsenokoites refers to a specific form of potentially exploitative homosexual sex between an adolescent and an older man that was widespread across the Mediterranean basin, namely pederasty (Wright 1989: 296–9). This inter­ pretation of the Greek word arsenokoites can be productively applied to its Slavonic translation мужеложство, as I argue below. Before 1700, the word мужеложство appears infrequently and mainly only in canon law. Levin’s definition of мужеложство as ‘homosexual intercourse involving anal penetration’ is rooted partly in her interpreta­ tion of two passages from canon law, one from the thirteenth century and one from the fourteenth century. The thirteenth-century passage reads: «Бестоудие с моужьскимь полемь показавый лето въ прелюбодеянии» (Смирнов 1912: 134), which translates roughly as: ‘If an act of shame is com­ mitted with the male sex, penances will be as for adultery.’ It is reasonable

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to assume that this passage refers to sex between two men, insofar as the majority of canon law seems to be directed at men specifically. However, this passage is actually taken from the nomocanon of John IV (Patriarch of Constantinople, 582–595) from a section entitled ‘On fornicating women’ (‘о женах блудящих’), and so it is in fact addressed to women committing an ‘act of shame’ with a man (Nomocanon of John IV: 16.r), not to men who have sex with men. The second, fourteenth-century passage seems to be a particularly com­ pelling piece of evidence against defining мужеложство as homosexual sex in any general sense and instead as pederasty specifically, as I will now explain. It reads as follows: Мужеложници да запретятся лет 5 сь прочиимь покааниемь. Различия же мужеложьству, написахомъ назади вь писаних Иоана монаха и ищи опасно тамо. Есть же и другы грехь содомьскы еже с женоя лежати вь афедронь блядити еже есть паче естества еже есть велико безаконие, и несытное согрешение […] (Смирнов 1912: 143–4)

which roughly translates as: Those who commit мужеложство are banned [from entering the church] for five years and should be issued penances. The different forms of мужеложство are described in the writings of John the Monk and you can look for them there at your own peril. There are other types of sodomitic sin as well, such as lying with a woman and forni­ cating with her anally, which is unnatural, most unlawful and an unquenchable sin.

Levin’s reading of мужеложство as ‘homosexual intercourse involving anal intercourse’ is certainly one potentially logical interpretation of this passage, insofar as there seems to be a parallel being drawn here between мужеложство (which can imply some form of same-sex activity) and het­ erosexual anal penetration. However, the parallel being drawn is not very distinct, and it could simply be the case that two different forms of sexual sin are listed, one the ambiguous vice of мужеложство and the other anal sex. More importantly, though, is that this piece of canon law alludes to a con­ crete definition of мужеложство found in the ‘writings of John the Monk,’ which refer here to the nomocanon of John IV. The passage is an abridged citation of a canon against мужеложство in John’s nomocanon. The full passage there (in a fourteenth-century Slavonic translation) reads as follows:

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Мужеложество на три части вещь бывает: ино бо есть, еже пострадати насилиемъ от иного, или убожества ради приобрести нечто, ино есть, еже от своего хотения и изволения се горчаиши, ино есть друг друга осквердити. И се злеиши и лукаво паче, иже детища юна осквердивъ. (Nomocanon of John IV: 35.r)

This passage translates roughly as follows: ‘Мужеложство happens for three reasons: rape, poverty/to obtain something, or out of desire, and this desire is most bitter, for you defile one another. And this is most evil and wicked because it defiles a young child.’ It seems, then, that in the canons attrib­ uted to the Constantinopolitan Patriarch, the word arsenokoites denoted not homosexual sex in a general sense, but specifically pederasty: whatever the reason for it, the act is condemned because it defiles a child. This idea is preserved in Slavonic translations from the medieval period, that were repeatedly copied and cited in various forms in Russian Orthodox canon law. There does not seem to be any conflation here of homosexuality in a general sense and sex with a ‘young child.’ Rather, мужеложство is defined specifically as sex with a child. This is a point worth stressing, since in contem­ porary academic literature there is sometimes a tendency (or perhaps a want) to conflate the two. For example, in the Russian Orthodox Encyclopaedia, it is stated that ‘homosexuals cannot hold a church office ( John IV, rule 30)’ (Православная Энциклопедия/Pravoslavnaâ Ènciklopediâ 2011: 43). However, when one turns to the thirtieth rule of John IV’s nomocanon, one reads that ‘if a child is defiled by somebody, then s/he may not hold a church office.’ In these examples, John’s nomocanon does not condemn homosexuality whatsoever by today’s definition. Rather, it condemns sex with a child. And so, if there is a compelling canon forbidding homosexuals from holding a church office, this is certainly not it. The above definition of мужеложство is important because the term is actually very rarely defined, and thus its meaning tends to be somewhat – if not entirely – elusive. Because of the fluidity of sexual terminology in the medieval period in general, it is not convincing to suggest that the term мужеложство always refers to any one sexual practice (much like, as Levin has so convincingly illustrated, the term содомский грех). Hence, when canons are compiled into compendia in Moscow during the seventeenth century, although rules against мужеложство proliferate in number, not only do they not specify what sexual demeanor they concern, the rules also typically contradict one another, with some specifying excommunication for a period of up to three years, others

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fifteen and sixteen years, and others prescribing permanent excommunication (Требник 1658, 481–483). What I want to suggest, on the basis of the four­ teenth-century example, is that one cannot assume that prohibitions against мужеложство necessarily indicate straightforward male homosexual sex, even in instances when the word does indicate some form of same-sex activity. This disrupts the current narrative that implies мужеложство, the sup­ posedly age-old vice of homosexuality, was constantly legislated against throughout Russian history. This idea is ahistorical. One might more con­ vincingly suggest that, prior to the eighteenth century, prohibitions of sexual sin in canon law had an inherently ambiguous character, and мужеложство may have even primarily denoted not homosexual sex in any general sense, but pederasty in particular. Мужеложство may have come to mean male homosexual sex in a less ambiguous sense in the eighteenth century, as the result of a Western influence on Russian law. Петр/Peter I’s 1716 military decree against мужеложство, based on a German prototype, talks about ‘when one man commits мужеложство with another man’ («муж с мужем мужеложствует»), per­ haps implying that the term мужеложство did not on its own adequately describe the crime being legislated against. Might it not be the case, then, that Russian Orthodox homophobia, rooted in historical ideas about gender and sexuality as a marker of ‘good’ Russianness, found its source not in Orthodoxy at all but in imported Western law – which, if anything, marked a break with Orthodox ‘tradition’?

Содомский Грех If мужеложство cannot be used in a straightforward way to uphold the ideological edifice of ‘non-traditional sexual relations,’ then содомский грех cannot either. As Levin rightly notes, ‘the word содомское and its variants carried a general pejorative meaning rather than a definition of specific nonprocreative sexual acts’ (Levin 1993: 45). In her careful treatment of содомское, Levin makes sure not to con­ flate sodomy and homosexuality, cogently illustrating that sodomy and

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homosexuality are not synonymous. In spite of this, her separate discussion of homosexuality has been misread by subsequent scholars as a discussion of sodomy. In particular, Levin’s argument that homosexuality was considered sinful because it ‘was important for men and women to retain their desig­ nated gender roles’ (Levin 1989: 203) has been referenced in later works as an argument not about homosexuality but about sodomy. For example, on the basis of Levin’s book, Laura Engelstein suggested that sodomy was an act of ‘male sexual submissiveness, thus also refusing the established sex-gender hierarchy’ (Engelstein 1992: 56). Where does the conflation of sodomy and homosexuality come from? The issue may stem from the primary sources Levin uses to make her argu­ ment about homosexuality as a perceived form of gender deviance. The evidence for her conclusion lies partly in sources that condemn men for shaving their beards. She writes: Trying to attract a man’s attention for the purpose of initiating a homosexual encounter was no more serious than trying to interest a woman in illicit sex. It was much more serious for a man to ‘make himself resemble a woman’ by shaving his beard. (Levin 1989: 202)

The issue here is that medieval texts do occasionally equate содомский грех with beard-shaving. However, if we accept that this term ‘carried a general pejorative meaning rather than a definition of specific non-procreative sexual acts,’ then it does not follow that medieval texts equate homosexuality with beard-shaving. Levin seems to have concluded that beardless men engaging in sodomy most likely denote homosexuals, but this is not self-apparent in the primary sources. The conflation of effeminacy and homosexuality is first expressed unam­ biguously in Russia in the nineteenth century. For example, it is evident in Жмакин’s 1881 edition of the sixteenth-century works of the Moscow Metropolitan Daniil. Жмакин conflates two separate discussions in Daniil’s writing, firstly about pederasty and secondly about beardless and effeminate men, by placing them both in the context of sodomy. Having defined sodomy as male homosexual sex, Жмакин explains that Daniil advises men to avoid the company of ‘attractive young men.’ Later, when explaining that Daniil berates men who make themselves resemble women by shaving their beards and using cosmetics, Жмакин concludes that Daniil is ‘clearly’ talking about

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‘this awful vice of the time […] when, as we know, Russians particularly liked plump boys and any other men who looked young or resembled women’ (Жмакин 1881: 576). But Daniil is talking about two different phenom­ ena, first pederasty and then, separately, ‘effeminate’ men. The two are not connected by Daniil; Жмакин links them. Moreover, in neither context is Daniil primarily concerned about same-sex sexual behavior or conform­ ity or nonconformity to gender norms; he is more focused on preserving monogamy. For example, pederasty is mentioned in the context of advice on how to maintain monogamous sexual relations within marriage, where Daniil’s main piece of advice is to avoid the company both of young men and women (Жмакин 1881: 541). Similarly, men who ‘resemble women’ are berated primarily not because they fail to conform to gender norms, but rather because they adopt an aesthetic that is sinful, irrespective of gender. For example, for Daniil, makeup was the marker of the seductress and was thus a potential threat to marital chastity regardless as to whether it was worn by a man or a woman (Жмакин 1881: 576). Hair shaving, too, was criticized not only among men; hence, for example, writing in the fifteenth century, Muscovite traveler Афанасий Никитин/Afanasy Nikitin remarked that the practice of hair shaving among women in India was ‘disgusting’ (Пушкарева 1996: 72). Conflation of sodomy and homosexuality is found in studies of other premodern tracts about sodomy as well, which scholars have tended to assume must have been directed against homosexuals. A good example of this is the early sixteenth-century epistle to Василий/Vasily III (the father of Иван/Ivan IV) by the Pskovian monk Филофей/Filofei, in which Filofei warns that Moscow will fall just like Rome did because of how widespread sodomy is. In his commentary on the text published in 2000, Владимир Колесов/Vladimir Kolesov explains that sodomy here refers to «гомосексуа лизм»/‘gomoseksualizm’ [homosexualism] (Колесов 2000: 540). In contrast, I would like to suggest that Filofei might actually be using sodomy here to evoke heterosexual sin. Below is a full citation of the extract in question, in Slavonic followed by an English translation: О третьей же пишу и плача горце глаголю, яко да искорениши из своего православнаго царствия сий горкий плевелъ, о немь же и ныне свидетельствуетъ пламень горящаго огня в содомскыхъ стогнах, о нем же пророкъ Исаия, рыдая,

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глаголаше: «Слышите слово Божие, князи содомстии, и внушите глаголъ Божий, людие гоморьстии.» Да слыши, благочестивый царю, яко пророкъ не мертвым погибшимъ содомляном таковая глаголаше, но живым человеком, творящым дела их. Писано бо есть: «Преступаяй от своеа жены раздираетъ плоть свою, а творяй содомъская, убиваетъ плодъ своего чрева». Богь сотворилъ человека и семя в нем на чадородие, мы ж сами свои семена даемъ во убийство и въ жрътву диаволу. Да сия мерзость умножися не токмо в миръскых, но и в прочих, о нихже помолчю, чтый ж да разумеетъ. (Колесов 2000: 302) [It is with bitter tears that I write about this third concern and ask you to eradicate this bitter weed from your Orthodox kingdom, the one we know of from the flame of the burning fire on the squares of Sodom, about which the prophet Isaiah wept, saying: ‘Listen to the word of God, Sodomite princes, and follow God’s word, people of Gomorrah.’ Hark, pious tsar, that the prophet spoke not to the dead people of Sodom, but to the living who were committing their deeds. For it is written: ‘Whoever forsakes his wife destroys his own flesh, but whoever commits the sin of Sodom kills the fruit of the seed.’ God created humankind and the seed for the birth of children, and we are killing it, our own seed, as a sacrifice to the devil. And this depravity has increased not only among laypeople, but also among others, about whom I will remain silent, but the reader will surely understand.]

Filofei’s epistle was addressed to the Grand Prince of Moscow Vasily III (1505–1533), who in 1525 divorced his first legal wife, Соломония/Solomonia, and remarried several months later. The divorce was the topic of much con­ troversy, since it was alleged that Vasily had divorced Solomonia only because she had been unable to have children, which, according to Muscovite canon law, was not legitimate grounds for divorce. For example, one text from the early seventeenth century, the so-called Excerpt on Vasily’s Second Marriage, recounts how Vasily appeals to an ‘elder’ for permission to divorce and remarry, who refuses to validate the Prince’s request, referring to Mark 10:9: ‘what God has joined together, let no one separate.’ The Moscow Metropolitan then also refuses, as do the Patriarchs of Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Constantinople. Finally, the Patriarch of Jerusalem warns Vasily that if he does re-marry and his wife goes on to bear a child from that marriage, it will be the offspring of ‘beastly and demonic’ adultery («прел юбодеяние»/‘prelûbodeânie’) (Зимин 1976: 148). Given the controversy surrounding Vasily’s marriages, I suggest that Filofei’s letter to Vasily might actually be condemning the Grand Prince’s own acts of sodomy. Vasily is textually linked with ‘Sodomite princes,’ as the

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same imperative calling on the ‘Sodomite princes’ to ‘listen to the word of God’ is immediately afterwards addressed to Vasily himself. This then leads into the narrator’s definition of sodomy, which begins with an ambiguous quotation from Scripture (‘Whoever forsakes his wife destroys his own flesh, but whoever commits the sin of Sodom kills the fruit of the seed’) but gives way to the monk’s own articulation of the sodomitic practices he bemoans. He writes that the seed is meant to be used for the sake of procrea­ tion, which, apparently, kills the devil. When it is used for non-procreative sex, however, it kills the fruit of the seed instead. As Levin has noted, what made sex ‘unnatural’ in Muscovite canon law (and thus also made it liable to be branded as sodomy) was that it ‘precluded procreation’ (Levin 1989: 198). This could include sex with a woman who is infertile. I suggest, then, that sodomy here could refer to non-procreative marital sex in which the ‘seed’ is spilled in vain. There is certainly more contextual evidence for this interpretation of the word sodomy here than there is for a reading of it as connoting homosexuality. Indeed, Filofei’s definition of sodomy as ‘killing the fruit of the seed’ fits in with moral ideas about sex found in other texts from the period. Take, for example, the tract on conception entitled ‘On the conception of mankind’ («О зачатии человечестемъ») that is preserved in several manuscripts dating to the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. The text begins: ‘Никто же да не пщуеть бездушну быти семени, одушевлено бо впадаеть в утробу же множится, яко же железо сражается с каменем, огонь творить, сице от мужеска полу и женскаго плод сотворяется’ (Лечебник 1665: f.1), which translates roughly as: ‘Let nobody think that the seed does not possess a soul, for it falls into the womb ensouled and multiplies. As when iron is struck by a stone, fire is produced, so here the male and female sexes create flesh.’ Whilst one cannot assume that this isolated citation reflected sexual moral­ ity in Muscovy in general, the concept of the ‘ensouled seed’ does seem to be evoked by Filofei here, and it also forms a logical moral justification for the condemnation of any non-procreative sex act, a consistent moral feature in medieval Russian conceptions of sex. Muravyeva has argued that, since sexuality was viewed as having the clear goal of procreation, it was ‘originally heterosexual’ and therefore ‘all those indulging in same-sex relations threatened the very foundation of social order’ (Muravyeva 2012: 218). But the ‘ensouled seed’ could be spilled

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in any non-procreative sex act, homosexual or heterosexual, and thus – as we may see in Filofei’s epistle – even marital sex could ‘threaten the very foundation of social order.’ It risked doing precisely this in the first account of Russia’s first married saints, Petr and Fevronia.

Sodomy in Traditional Culture Petr and Fevronia were first canonized in 1547, around the time the first writ­ ten account of their life was recorded. This first story of their life, written by a Pskovian monk named Ермолай-Еразм/Ermolai-Erazm, marked the first time marriage was the subject of a Russian hagiography. Petr and Fevronia were popular, their hagiography extant in at least 350 manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Дмитриева 1979: 119–45). The basic narrative of the original sixteenth-century text runs approximately as follows. Petr is the brother of the Prince of Murom, called Павел/Pavel. A serpent tries to seduce Pavel’s wife and tempt her to commit adultery. Petr is given a magical sword to slay the serpent, which he does, saving his sisterin-law from fornication. Petr is infected with the serpent’s blood and falls ill. He is taken to find a doctor, but no doctor is able to heal him. On his search for a doctor, Petr meets Fevronia, a peasant girl. She offers to cure Petr if he agrees to marry her. After initial resistance, Petr has no choice but to agree to her demand, since his recovery depends on her. The couple marry and become Prince and Princess of Murom. They return to the town, but Fevronia is disliked by the boyars’ wives. The boyars issue Petr an ultimatum to either leave his wife or to leave Murom. The couple flee the town. In Petr’s absence, the boyars descend into conflict, and eventually they find Petr and Fevronia, begging them to return to Murom. The couple makes a triumphant return and rules over the town for the rest of their life. Petr and Fevronia then both perish in quick succession. Before their death, they are tonsured as monk and nun. They are buried separately, but, miraculously, the dead bodies of the saints are discovered lying together in one grave. Their bodies are separated once more, but yet again they are found lying side by side. At last they are left in peace in their communal grave.

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In 2008, Petr and Fevronia’s feast day was re-worked into a state festival called the ‘Day of Family, Love, and Fidelity.’ During the festivities, Petr and Fevronia are celebrated as the patron saints of the nuclear family. The pair have also become the cover couple for the official anti-abortion campaign «Подари мне жизнь»/‘Podari mne žizn’ [Give Me Life]. In short, stories about the saints have been disseminated widely throughout state media in order to show that monogamous heterosexuality, institutionalized in mar­ riage and evidenced by procreation, is an intrinsic part of Russian Orthodox ‘tradition’ stretching back to the middle ages. But what does the original story of their life tell us about the saints? A close reading of Ermolai-Erazm’s text suggests that, far from being models of ‘traditional’ Orthodox values, Petr and Fevronia were originally venerated for subverting ecclesiastical norms of marriage. The saints are not described as producing any children, and yet there are textual indications that they practice marital sex. As we have discussed, marital sex that was not procrea­ tive could fall within the confines of sodomy, so the following reading of the saints’ hagiography is a somewhat subversive interpretation of the saints that the Russian state has chosen to bolster so-called ‘tradition,’ again showing that the lines between supposedly ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ sexual relations are blurred. Ermolai-Erazm’s narrative about Petr and Fevronia includes two euphe­ mistic references to sex, implying that the saints practice non-procreative marital sex. First, when Petr sets out on his journey to find a doctor that eventually concludes with his marriage to Fevronia, he is ‘unable to mount his horse because of his terrible illness’ («не мощен на кони сидети от великия болезни») (Дмитриева 1979: 216). The phrase used here – ‘to mount his horse’ – is the same as the phrase found in contemporaneous penitential sources, where, as Levin has noted, the expression serves as a euphemism for sex in the missionary position (Levin 1993: 48). Petr is contaminated with lust, the ‘illness’ he has contracted from the blood of the salacious serpent, and so he is unable to perform sex in the only position deemed acceptable. When Petr is cured of his affliction by entering into marriage with Fevronia, he is once more well enough to ‘mount his horse.’ What the text tells us, then, is that Petr is cured of lust by marrying and henceforth only having sex in the missionary position. But no children are produced.

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Second, later on in the text, the already married Fevronia finds herself in a boat with another married man who tries to seduce her. She tells him to try the water from either side of the boat and asks him if the water from one side tastes sweeter than the other. He answers that they taste the same. To this, Fevronia retorts: ‘And so is the essence of all women the same’ («И едино естество женское есть») (Дмитриева 1979: 466). As Levin points out, «естество»/‘estestvo’ [essence] served as a euphemism for genitalia in Russian penitential and medical texts (Levin 1993: 49). Fevronia is telling her seducer here that her genitals are the same as those of his wife. Fevronia thus compares her genitals directly to those of another married woman. In so doing, she presents marital sex as the antidote to adultery in a black-andwhite view of sex as either marital or non-marital, a moral binary different to the one of procreative and non-procreative sex found in canon law. Fevronia’s conception of sex is further uncanonical since, according to church law, when performed for pleasure instead of procreation, marital sex could be just as ‘unnatural’ and sodomitic as adultery, bestiality, or мужеложство. There is a debate among scholars as to why Ermolai-Erazm’s narrative about Petr and Fevronia was not incorporated into the official canon of Russian hagiography compiled by the Moscow Metropolitan Макарий/ Macarius in the mid-sixteenth century. Some have suggested that it was not included for chronological reasons, since the text was written after the canon had been compiled (Рызин/Ryzin 2014: 8). Others insist that the text was not incorporated, because it failed to adhere to the norms of the hagiographical genre (Гладкова/Gladkova 2008: 538). I suggest that, if one accepts a broad definition of sodomy, it is possible to argue that the first account of Petr and Fevronia’s union fell within the confines of sodomitic sin. It is plausible that this is why they were excluded from the hagiographi­ cal canon in the sixteenth century. At any rate, when Petr and Fevronia’s hagiography appeared in the official canon of saints’ lives compiled by Дмитрий Туптало/Dmitriy Tuptalo, Bishop of Rostov, published in the early eighteenth century, the two euphemistic passages were omitted, and in their place the saints were venerated for being ‘separate in body and united by grace for the sake of their chastity’ (‘разделеныхъ теломъ и совокупленыхъ бл[а]г[о]д[а]тию, яко целомудрия сохранницу, сего ради сошедшеся’) (Туптало 1711: f.30).

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By the dawn of modernity, then, Petr and Fevronia’s hagiography had been stripped of its subversive sexual connotations. The use of Petr and Fevronia as the cover couple for monogamous, child-bearing heterosexuality and the apparently ‘traditional’ Orthodox nuclear family is curious, considering that the saints were never ascribed any children. What is more, the first written account of the saints’ mar­ riage subverts the framework of sexual morality prescribed in canon law, implying that they were joined together in a non-procreative sexual union. In other words, by the canonical standards of the time, Petr and Fevronia were united in sodomy, and ironically, this sodomitic union formed the basis of their hagiography in the sixteenth century. Over the centuries that followed, different re-tellings of their hagiography were used to promote entirely contradictory sexual mores. In contrast to the sixteenth-century text, for example, in the early eighteenth century, the saints were venerated for their chastity. In further contradiction, the twenty-first-century venera­ tion of Petr and Fevronia has become a celebration of the nuclear family.

Conclusion The idea put forward by the church and the state in contemporary Russia, namely that there has always been a clear-cut distinction between ‘traditional’ heterosexuality and ‘non-traditional’ homosexuality in Orthodoxy, rests on ahistorical assumptions about the terms мужеложство and содомский грех. The association of sodomites with homosexuals first appears in academic literature of the nineteenth century, and it has now become a cornerstone in the history of sexuality as presented by conservative Russian opinion-makers. A black-and-white narrative of the normative and the deviant has been but­ tressed using Orthodox history, and this narrative still remains to be fully scrutinized. On the basis of this chapter, however, suffice to say that in the premodern context of Orthodox sexual morality, the genders and sexualities we take for granted as nonconforming today – and that have been painted as ‘non-traditional’ in Russia – do not appear to have been as queer then as they seem now. On the one hand, the canons and tracts that scholars tend

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to think must have been directed against homosexuals are more ambiguous than is often assumed. On the other hand, the figures generally assumed to be the most chaste, ‘traditional’ models of Orthodox sexual morality might have been queerer than they appear today.

Bibliography Manuscripts and Old Printed Books Лечебник 1665. Archive 228. Collection of manuscripts of Д. В. Пискарев, ТроицеСергиева Лавра. Class mark: 196. Требник (Moscow, 1658). Old printed books collection of the Троице-Сергиева Лавра. Class mark: IV-1221 TSL. Nomocanon of Иоанн Постник, fourteenth century. Archive 304.I. Main collection of the Троице-Сергиева Лавра. Class mark: 209.

Secondary Sources ‘Виталий Милонов: я грешник больше, чем многие голубые,’ in: Комсомольская правда May 14, 2012, available online at (accessed February 3, 2019). Дмитриева Р. П. 1979. Повесть о Петре и Февронии. Подготовка текстов и исследование. Ленинград: Наука. Гладкова, О. В. 2008. ‘К вопросу об источниках и символическом подтексте Повести от жития Петра и Февронии Ермолая-Еразма,’ in: Менделеев, Д. С. (ed.). Герменевтика древнерусской литературы. Москва: Знак. Жмакин, В. И. 1881. Митрополит Даниил и его сочинения. Москва: Издание общества истории и древностей российских. Зимин, А. А. 1976. ‘Выпись о втором браке Василия III,’ in Труды отдела древнерусской литературы, Том 30. Ленинград, pp. 132–148. Колесов, В. В. 2000. ‘Послание старца Филофея,’ in: Библиотека литературы Древней Руси, Том 9. Санкт-Петербург: Наука, pp. 300–305. ЛГБТ-служение. ‘Nuntiare et Recreare,’ available online at (accessed February 3, 2019).

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Музей истории ЛГБТ в России, available online at (accessed February 3, 2019). Пушкарева, Н. Л. 1996. ‘Сексуальная этика в частной жизни древних русов и московитов (X–XVII вв.),’ in: Секс и эротика в традиционной культуре. Москва: Ладомир. Рызин, И. М. 2014. ‘Почему Повести о Петре и Февронии нет в Великих Минеях Четиих,’ in: Электронный журнал Язык и текст langpsy.ru 3. Смирнов, С. И. 1912. Материалы для истории древнерусской покаянной дисциплины. Москва. Срезневский, И. И. 1902. Материалы для словаря древне-русского языка по письменным памятникам. Санкт-Петербург: Издание отделения русского языка и словесности императорской академии наук. Туптало, Дмитрий. 1711. Книга житий святых, Том 4, Третье издание. Москва. Burgwinkle, William. 2004. Sodomy, Masculinity and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050–1230. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Engelstein, Laura. 1992. The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Finlinson, Rosie. 2018. ‘The construction of sex in early Russian medical texts,’ Gender and Sexuality History Workshop. University of Cambridge, February 21, 2018. Healey, Dan. 2001. Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Jordan, Mark. 1997. The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology. Chicago: The Uni­ versity of Chicago Press. Laqueur, Thomas. 1990. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Levin, Eve. 1989. Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900–1700. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Levin, Eve. 1993. ‘Sexual Vocabulary in Medieval Russia,’ in: Costlow, Jane; Sandler, Stephanie and Vowles, Judith (eds.). Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 41–52. Muravyeva, Marianna. 2012. ‘Personalizing Homosexuality and Masculinity in Early Modern Russia,’ in Muravyeva, Marianna, and Toivo, Raisa Mari (eds.). Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. London: Routledge, pp. 206–218. Wright, David. 1989. ‘Homosexuality: The Relevance of the Bible,’ EQ 61(4), pp. 291–300.

nadiya chushak, Yulia Serdyukova and Irina Tantsiura

4 ‘We’ll Be Fine, and You Just Hang in There’: A Queer Critique of the Imperial Gaze in Gaycation Episode ‘Ukraine’

When I heard they were launching a series named Gaycation, I thought it would be a political satire. That it would be about global neoliberal sex tourism … (Z.)

In 2016, two years after the Euromaidan and the beginning of the war, Ukraine, a country with many contradictions in both the social and politi­ cal arenas, became a popular destination for Western media and documentary filmmakers. In March 2016, Gaycation, a show from the North American digital media and broadcasting company Vice Media, chose Ukraine as a part of their mission ‘to explore LGBTQ cultures around the world.’1 What drew them here, and what kind of representation of local LGBT+ lives did they produce? Despite its pretense of being a travel show with a noble cause, Gaycation episode‘Ukraine’ presents a distorted version of the life of the LGBT+ community. In this chapter, we contest the show’s claim to solidarity with the Ukrainian LGBT+ population and analyze it as a mani­ festation of the neoliberal ‘queer’ imperial gaze. We would like to show how the Gaycation episode ‘Ukraine’ reproduces a broader set of practices that reinforce inequality under the mask of global queer solidarity.

1

Gaycation was launched in 2016 as one of the original shows of the newly created multinational TV channel brand Viceland, owned by Vice Media. Viceland shows are mostly lifestyle documentaries for a young, male audience (Hale 2016) and con­ sequently have a format of ‘preppy hosts’ (ibid.) traveling around the world or the United States and channeling various, often challenging, experiences to viewers in an easy-going manner.

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This chapter was developed from our presentation at the conference Fucking Solidarity: Queering Concepts on/from a Post-Soviet Perspective (Vienna, September 2017), where we presented an edited video of excerpts from Gaycation episode ‘Ukraine’ with voice-over comments from Ukrainian queer activists, including several protagonists who took part in the show. Comments were collected during a collective screening of the episode and the ensuing discussions. This chapter is based on these discussions (all quotes, if not otherwise attributed, are taken from there) as well as our own analysis of the subject. Therefore, we consider our interlocutors2 as collaborators in the process of creating the chapter and call them such accordingly. This text aims not only to critically engage with the show, but also to create some space for the highly underrepresented Ukrainian queer3 cri­ tique that engages both with the colonizing Western gaze and with local homonormative discourses. A note on terminology. Gaycation’s creators use the terms ‘LGBTQ’ and ‘queer’ as interchangeable synonyms. This masks the split between NGOized LGBT+ and grassroots queer activists in Ukraine, which we will dis­ cuss below. Thus, except when quoting or referring to statements made in Gaycation, we have decided to use the term ‘LGBT+’ to describe lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and non-binary people, and people with other non-conforming sexualities and gender identities. We have deliber­ ately excluded the letter ‘Q’ from the acronym to distinguish the usage of the word ‘queer’ as an umbrella term for LGBT+ from to queer as a verb or a method which implies a constant questioning of hierarchies and power imbalances permeating social and political structures. Since queering voices were excluded from the episode, as we argue in the chapter, and since they 2

3

During the last several years, we have witnessed increasing bullying and belittling of Ukrainian queer activists by some of the leaders of local mainstream LGBT+ and feminist movements (see Popova 2018). To protect our collaborators, we therefore refer to them using pseudonyms. However, Fritz von Klein has agreed to openly participate in the project and share his experience as a former employee of the Insight NGO and one of the protagonists of Gaycation episode ‘Ukraine.’ The term ‘queer,’ along with the whole framework of queer critique, is sometimes con­ sidered to be an imported Western concept alien to the local Ukrainian context. We use it here because it is the word that our collaborators and ourselves use to describe our positionality in relation to local hegemonic discourses.

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are being deliberately erased from the mainstream Ukrainian discourse of LGBT+ lives, this omission seems only consistent. Gaycation is hosted by two presenters: Ellen Page, a popular actress who came out as a lesbian in 2014, and her gay friend Ian Daniel. The opening scene of the Ukraine episode takes us down a staircase to a gay nightclub, with Ellen’s voice-over explaining that they have come ‘to meet members of the Ukrainian queer community and learn about LGBTQ experiences here’ (Gaycation episode ‘Ukraine’ 2018). So, whom do Ellen and Ian meet, and what and how do they learn? Although it claims to be a documentary, the show does not use ‘indepth’ techniques, such as observations of everyday situations or long-term research. Such an approach would, of course, require a lot more involvement and investment than any documentary series created specifically for TV. Instead, the show relies on information, contacts, and situations prepared by ‘fixers’ (local people who claim to have a thorough knowledge of the context and serve as mediators). As a result, the attention is focused either on the most obvious or the most exotic – anything that will easily fill in the show’s main plot: the struggle of ‘out and proud’ LGBT+ leaders and activ­ ists against a conservative homophobic society on their way to a democratic future (of which LGBT+ rights seem to be the main gauge) and therefore progress. Gaycation in general relies mainly on interviewing local people, and the Ukrainian episode is no exception. The episode introduces the viewer to a number of protagonists who share stories of their lives, tell the interviewers about their past experiences or ongoing projects, and expound their ideologies. Ellen and Ian meet and talk to prominent local LGBT+ NGO activists – two gay men (Zoryan Kis and Yuri Yourski), one lesbian woman (Olena Shevchenko), and one transgender man (Fritz von Klein). Additionally, they also talk to an out gay journalist (Maxim Eristavi), a local drag performer (Vlad Shast aka Guppy Drink), a queer displaced artist (Misha Koptyev), and a lesbian couple (Marina Lemishcenko and Marina Kosteska) who is living in a shelter for displaced LGBT+ people. A significant amount of the episode’s time is dedicated to conversations with representatives of far-right/conservative ideologies. The far-right menace is the backdrop against which the episode occurs. Early on in the show, the narrator recounts that there has been an increase in the activity of ‘fringe groups’ of right-wing activists who present a threat to local LGBT+ people.

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However no broader contextualization of the rise of the far right is provided. The audience does not learn about the causes of their popularity or about their relations with the rest of the society and the state (on the recent rise of far-right activism in Ukraine, see Gorbach 2018). In the episode, the ultranationalists themselves describe what kind of threat they pose to the LGBT+ population: from physical violence to attempts to introduce a law banning ‘gay propaganda.’ The main narrative of the episode revolves around the struggles of LGBT+ people against this right-wing threat. Very briefly we get to hear about some of the other issues – discrimination against transgender people, displacement caused by war, the absence of a state-sponsored system of civil partnerships. However, many other grave issues that the Ukrainian LGBT+ community faces are either not discussed at all or only mentioned in passing: poverty, the lack of anti-discriminatory legislation, and societal prejudice not limited to right-wing extremists. The episode’s exclusive focus on the LGBT+ agenda ignores other intersections of oppression: We do not hear about the sexism, racism, classism, or ableism of Ukrainian society. This narrative complies with discourse that ignores deeply rooted discrimina­ tions on the basis of race, class, and gender, spanning more than a couple of decades. The episode reaches its climax with the footage of the 2016 Kyiv Pride march. We see happy people shouting the slogan ‘Human rights above all’ (a play on a popular nationalist slogan ‘Ukraine above all’) and one of the protagonists, Olena Shevchenko, commenting that there is a ‘political will to prove that Ukraine is a civilized country.’ Thus, the episode is a story about Ukraine’s progress from the ‘barbaric’ homophobic present towards the ‘bright future’ of neoliberal democracy, as laid out by Western trailblazers.

Gaycation as a Travelogue You know, this looks like the [travel] diaries of the 18th and 19th century, when for­ eigners discovered Eastern Europe for themselves. Here they can do whatever they want. Even this … Ian – as I understand, a normative cis-boy – decides to do drag! … They have absolute freedom to transform themselves, transform their identities. And

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this goes along with the understanding that ‘we as Western people can do whatever we want’ … in Eastern Europe, without any of the consequences that [local LGBT+ people] can experience … (L.)

Gaycation’s creators are not shy about the fact that it was conceived, first and foremost, as a travel show. Yet they have ambitions to transgress the traditional limitations of the genre and aim for much more than recrea­ tional content: [T]he show explores the triumphs and the joys, or even the nightlife. But sadly […] it also […] has to focus on how much discrimination affects people’s lives. [P]eople just don’t […] know the ways in which people struggle. Hopefully the show could poten­ tially – in sharing these stories – reflect that in some way. (Laws 2017)

Nevertheless, Gaycation questions neither the very premise of travel shows and the powerplay involved in creating them nor the effects of the modern tourist and media industry on the global division of power and privileges. As other critics have pointed out (Rault 2017), the show can be interpreted as a manifestation of benevolent imperial domination techniques. It continues the legacy of ‘producing’ the rest of the world for Western viewers/readers via travelogues as well as producing the ever-evolving concept of the West in relation to the rest (Pratt 2008). Gaycation episode ‘Ukraine,’ in particular, is a contemporary transmuta­ tion of the problematic epistemological practices of invention of the Eastern European Other by European Enlightenment (Wolff 1994). After all, the ‘imperial thinking continues to renew itself and mutate with great resilience’ (Pratt 2008: xiii). As earlier travelogues have done, it positions Ukraine as ambiguous and contradictory, having still to prove that it belongs to European civilization; yet now, respect for LGBT+ rights becomes a decisive marker of this belonging. Homophobia is one of the main features of the imagined ‘barbaric’ Other against which the ‘civilized’ West has positioned itself since 9/11 (Puar 2007). As Kulpa (2014) demonstrates, the West still constructs Eastern Europe as inherently homophobic, thus underscoring its permanently transitional and not-quite European status. The episode we analyze here is both a result and an instrument of such ‘leveraged pedagogy’ (ibid.). The constant yet fruitless drive of certain groups in Ukraine and other Eastern European countries to achieve the ideal of the protection of LGBT+

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rights imposed by this leveraged pedagogy is one of the main components structuring both the plot of this travelogue and the dynamics of the relation­ ships between Western ‘enlightened’ travelers and locals. Homonormativity, homonationalism, and overarching neoliberal ideology are its other defin­ ing elements. Neoliberal ideology cements the privatized and consumerist notion of citizenship and shifts the focus away from attempts to radically and col­ lectively change the system towards the struggle for certain chosen minori­ ties to gain inclusion within it (Murphy, Ruiz, & Serlin 2008; Duggan 2002). Duggan connects neoliberal ideology with homonormativity – a conservative agenda that does not challenge heteronormative assumptions and institutions, while ‘shrink[ing] gay public spheres and redefin[ing] gay equality against the “civil rights agenda” and “liberationism,” as access to the institutions of domestic privacy, the “free” market, and patriotism’ (2002: 179). This agenda defines what kinds of activism are right and appropriate, and which ones ‘distract’ activists from the chosen goal. Homonationalism (Puar 2007) arose after 9/11 on the basis of homonormativity and serves as a marker for a distinction between ‘civilized’ countries and cultures (i.e. ones that ostensibly support LGBT+ rights) and ‘barbarian,’ homophobic ones. Queer criticism of neoliberal ideology, homonationalism, and homonor­ mativity is sometimes rejected as being borrowed from the West and irrel­ evant to the local context (Гриценко 2018). However, in our opinion, all three phenomena are highly pertinent, as they are the main structural ele­ ments of local mainstream activism. That is why Gaycation found fertile ground for their episode here: it was easy to find local homonationalist and homonormative activists who mirrored the subjectivity and thinking of the show’s creators, thus supporting existing hierarchies. The show’s creators see only certain kinds of subjectivity; the protagonists they chose reproduce the same dynamics, driving out any dissenting otherness on the local level, as we will demonstrate in our analysis of the episode. As our conversations with collaborators demonstrate, for people from the (semi)periphery who reflect on the politics of representation used in the show, Gaycation episode ‘Ukraine’ is, first and foremost, a flawed and unethi­ cal travelogue that solidifies the unequal relations between the privileged West and the Rest. One of our collaborators R. comments:

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This is like a vacation to them; they are having fun. When we [Ukrainians] choose where to go on vacation, we consider things like proximity to the seaside, accommodation … In their case, the ideal location is the place where they can find the most exoticized gays. Well, OK, they will also give us a sneak peek at local lesbians. This is their main adventure: ‘I had a vacation in Ukraine.’ – ‘Where?!’ ‘You’re kidding!’ ‘You’ve eaten a pig?!’ or ‘Your cameraman was touched by a wild man, OMG! Ultimate survival!’

L. agrees with R. and adds: They put on masks that help them travel comfortably and experience being in Eastern Europe with safety and impunity. ‘We will leave after one week, and we’ll be fine, and you just hang in there.’

In the following chapter, we highlight two main interconnected problematic features of the show. Firstly, it belongs to the genre of so-called dark/risk tourism. Secondly, it’s an example of the ‘imperial gaze,’ although this time, the gaze does not belong to a white European hetero male (or occasionally female) traveler, as used to be the case in classical examples of the travelogue genre, but instead to a ‘queer eye.’ Yet, what is queer about this eye? As we will elaborate in detail later, there are a lot of problems with optics adjust­ ment in this show, and the gaze, despite belonging to self-proclaimed ‘queer’ people, is still imperial, with all its violent consequences.

Risk/Dark Tourism The term ‘dark tourism’ refers to a type of tourism focused on observing phenomena related to death, disaster, and destruction. It grew rapidly in popularity towards the end of the twentieth century, thanks to the develop­ ment of commercial tourism and accompanying technologies. Until recently, it was mostly associated with places where tragedies had happened in the past. Yet, now that traveling has become more accessible, and extensive media coverage of ongoing conflicts and atrocities happening around the world on a daily basis has become routine, we can observe a new type of tourism

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flourishing: people visiting places of ongoing conflicts and therefore directly endangering themselves as a kind of attraction.4 This kind of commercial risk tourism is interconnected with what we call documentary risk tourism: documentary crews traveling to conflict zones in order to create more ‘titillating’ products that allow their audience to expe­ rience a thrill from the safe distance of their couches. This, in turn, creates more demand for live-risk tourism (Lisle 2006). This kind of documentary tourism is further stoked by the willingness of filmmakers and journalists to actively experience the thrill themselves – often under the noble pretext of solidarity with the suffering locals. In both cases, the phenomenon of dark/ risk tourism is not only about money. It also serves the cause of presenting the subjectivity of travelers as sensitive and empathetic heroes – and by proxy, it does the same for those who witness their dangerous adventures onscreen (cf. Buda 2015). For Lisle (2006), dark tourism has the potential to reduce a perceived ‘civilization gap’ between the ‘civilized us’ and the ‘uncivilized barbaric others,’ characteristic of the typical approach to tourism. Despite unabashed voyeurism, ‘dark tourism disturbs civilizational code’ (ibid.: 342). But is this true for everyone who travels to ‘danger zones’ with the intention to learn and support? We scrutinize this statement using the example of Gaycation episode ‘Ukraine.’ In the majority of the Gaycation episodes, Ellen and Ian go to countries that are constructed as homophobic:5 the first season features Japan, Jamaica, and Brazil. Ukraine is the first destination in the second season, and the first ‘European’ country in the series. Why did they choose Ukraine, as opposed to Serbia or, let’s say, Estonia? The Maidan events of 2013–2014 and the ongoing war supplied Western media, hungry for visually exciting mass protests, violence, and conflict, with plenty of material. Therefore, Vice journalists developed an extensive 4 5

In the spring of 2019 a one-day ‘Donbass Tour: War Experience 1 day’ was advertised online (Lonelyplanet.com). The only slight exception is an episode about France. It starts with a jolly picture of a country where being gay ‘feels easy.’ In order to create necessary tension, the show’s creators look deeper – and depict the conflict between the local LGBT+ majority and their multinational, often racialized and/or gender non-conforming queer opposition.

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networks of useful contacts in Ukraine that they could draw upon for the smooth filming of the episode: fixers, translators, interpreters, camerapeople, and other technical staff. But the main reason why Vice came to Ukraine to film their first European Gaycation episode, is, in our opinion, because this is a country at war, the first war on the European continent since the wars of the Yugoslav dissolution. When the episode was filmed, the war had been going on for two years and had entered a period of stagnation. On April 15, the BBC labeled the conflict ‘Europe’s forgotten war’ (Burridge 2016), yet people continued to die on a regular basis. Although the attention given to Ukraine from news media had died down by that time, the country was still popular as a source of content for international documentary film festivals and TV channels.6 In addition, the increasing militarization and nationalism in Ukrainian society threatened the local LGBT+ population. So Ukraine was a perfect choice for Gaycation: an ideal opportunity for the hosts to come to a country at war and demonstrate bravery, benevolence, and solidarity with the plight of local LGBT+ people. Throughout the show, the hosts display their bravery and willing­ ness to risk on many occasions – all just to create their fair picture of local LGBT+ life. We are given a titillating taste of this risk at the very beginning of the episode, when Ellen and Ian go to the apartment of local performer Vlad Shast (aka the drag queen Guppy Drink). As Vlad is dressing up for the night, he tells his guests that he is often afraid to get out of a taxi when in drag. Ian asks if he is also afraid to get into a taxi. Ruefully, Vlad adds, ‘Yes, sometimes, yes.’ Very soon, we see all of them (Ian is now also in some version of drag) traveling together in a hired van to a local gay club. The contradiction between the lived real­ ity of Ukrainian LGBT+ people and what we see on screen immediately caught the eye of our collaborators: Great, they aren’t afraid to get inside the hired car [as a opposed to the normal taxi]. (Z.) You mean they recreate his lifestyle but in luxury? … Well, they need to look after their own safety. They have to film in so many more countries! (R.)

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Netflix’s ‘Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom’ (2015), ‘The Russian Woodpecker’ (2015), and ‘Near Far East’ (2015) are just a few of many examples of feature documentaries produced or co-produced by Western countries by that time.

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Later, to better understand the suffering and threats the local LGBT+ com­ munity is facing, Ellen and Ian personally talk to neo-Nazis. They meet with members of the Fashion Verdict, an ultra-right violent street gang, and listen to their homophobic statements and open acknowledgments of their crimes (like beating up those whom they consider to be ‘faggots’). However, when they meet with the founder of the gang, Ellen and Ian decide against disclosing their identities for safety reasons. One of our collaborators noted how these conversations with ultraright radicals fall under the risk tourism paradigm: It’s filmed like an attraction of some kind: ‘We don’t have these things in the States, or nobody mentions them, but here we’ll show you Kyiv – the city of contrasts, where you can go to a gay club or a pride march, or run into guys arranging a [gay] safari.’ (L.)

The risks they take do not stop here. The hosts attend a clandestine unofficial gay wedding ceremony and comment that if LGBT+ propaganda laws were adopted in Ukraine, ‘what we are doing today – filming a same-sex ceremony for television – would be strictly illegal and we could all face up to five years in prison.’ This inevitably drew some ironic commentary from Z: Well look at them, they are really under threat during every second of their visit here! I think they are so brave!

Ellen and Ian are ‘trying on’ many risks that the local LGBT+ commu­ nity really faces in a caricatured manner, with all possible safety measures taken in order to protect them. This show is all about hosts channeling the feeling of risk ‘that is not theirs to feel’ (Rault 2017: 597). The Western audience of the show benefits from this masquerade, receiving a package of both nerve-racking entertainment and a feeling of moral superiority because of solidarity with LGBT+ people somewhere far away. Playing the role of enlightened travelers, the hosts of the show fuel the idea that the new world of equality, visibility, and pink capitalism is possible and Ukraine’s transition towards it has already started. But where does it leave Ukrainian LGBT+ people?

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The Queer Imperial Gaze The show’s uncritical usage of the term ‘queer’ allows us to speak of Gaycation as a manifestation of a ‘queer imperial gaze,’ belonging to a pair of white cis­ gender ‘queer’ people from the West (specifically North America) who are on the lookout for the suffering and struggles of LGBT+ people around the globe. The concept of the imperial gaze is already well known and described: The imperial gaze reflects the assumption that the white western subject is central […]. [A]nxiety prevents this gaze from actually seeing the people gazed at. […] Anxiety, in this case, is displaced into a condescending paternalism. […] The gaze of the colonial­ ist thus refuses to acknowledge its own power and privilege […]. Like the male gaze, it’s an objectifying gaze, one that refuses mutual gazing, mutual subject-to-subject recognition. (Kaplan 1997: 78–79)

Historically, the imperial gaze was attributed mainly to white cisgender men (rarely women). However, since the 1990s, we can also speak of LGBT+ people as the subjects of this gaze. For instance, Puar (2002) describes how gay and lesbian tourist trips organized in the 1990s around the concept of ‘queer solidarity’ used this concept to argue for ‘saving’ queers living at the peripheries and helping them to achieve the ultimate goal of ‘modern queer sexuality.’ Similar practices have been criticized for ignoring the nuances and differences among local queer communities (Cruz-Malave, Manalansan IV 2002) and for using ‘leveraged pedagogy’ to cement ‘a hegemonic and orientalising manifestation of power relations between the “West and the Rest”’ (Kulpa 2014: 443). How does the queer imperial gaze manifest itself throughout Gaycation episode ‘Ukraine’? Like tourists in the 1990s and later operating within the framework of ‘sameness and difference’ (Puar 2002: 124), allowing them to indulge in devouring local ‘queer exotics’ with a missionary attitude, Gaycation has inherited the same ignorance of the power imbalance they reproduce. It only sees what is has been taught to see via the stereotypical understanding of what Eastern Europe is; and it also sees only the signs of LGBT+ culture that the creators recognize as such (missing out on every­ thing that differs from their mirror image).

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We decided to group our analysis of the manifestations of this queer imperial gaze into two main interconnected subsections: firstly, represen­ tations of the geographical, political, and cultural context of Ukraine as a country between the barbaric, uncivilized East/Russia and the enlightened, civilized West; secondly, the portrayal of the Ukrainian LGBT+ community/ movement.

A Country in Transition From the very beginning of the episode, we learn that Ukraine is a ‘country in transition’ (in Ellen’s words) from a corrupting Russian influence and towards a European future. This positioning immediately allows the epi­ sode to dip into a rich and versatile vocabulary of stereotypes, prejudices, and misconceptions about Eastern Europe – ‘a paradox of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion’ (Wolff 1994: 7) – characteristic of Western popular culture and imagination. All the uncertainties and ambiguities about the lesser-known Eastern European country can be masked by generalizations and misinformation. In one of the episode’s scenes, displaced queer artist Misha Koptyev treats Ian with raw chicken eggs, pigs’ ears, the animal’s head, and a hefty dose of obscenities. The westerner’s face is perplexed. All of this is accompanied by a soundtrack: a melody performed on a balalaika – a traditional Russian stringed instrument, which is, in fact, not even popu­ lar in Ukraine. One of our collaborators commented on this balalaika soundtrack: ‘Well, they kind of “got” the context – some sort of Slav country.’ When the show does attempt to be more precise in explain­ ing the settings of the episode, it invariably presents us with clichés that fit the overarching narrative about a country in turbulent transition to Western civilization. This becomes obvious when, early in the episode, they resort to archival footage of Maidan to illustrate this event. Here, we mainly see footage heavily used by other Western media when report­ ing about Maidan: spectacular images of violent clashes. This approach helps to construct a story about the painful and traumatic beginning of

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transition, and about what a dangerous place Ukraine is, but ignores (as many other Western reporters at the time did) the fact that Maidan was not only about violent clashes between protesters and police on the streets of Kyiv (cf. Channell-Justice 2017). Ukraine is depicted in the episode as an ideal destination for risk tour­ ism, which, of course, fits into a stereotypical image of Eastern Europe as a dangerous area for Western travelers. Outside of this narrative, there’s hardly anything in the episode’s portrayal of the country that could chal­ lenge the cliched representation of the region we see so often on TV and movie screens. Problematically, the overwhelming majority of the show’s events happen in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. The way the city is portrayed helps Western viewers to immediately place it somewhere in the realm of ‘barbaric’ Slavs. They get to see typical Orthodox churches, lots of trash, and shabby buildings. I presume they could have found pretty decent-looking places in Kyiv with little effort. But here one can see special location scouting for exteriors and interiors that show us how poor this country is … Disgusting. (Z.)

In the show, the representation of Ukraine as an Orientalized Eastern European country in transition is achieved not only by visual means but, more importantly, through narrative means. Of particular relevance is the show’s positioning of Ukraine as a country between Russia (which stands here for the ‘barbaric,’ homophobic East) and the ‘civilized’ West. This positioning demonstrates that even though the show ideologically supports Ukraine’s course towards Europeanness, it is not capable of thinking about Ukraine as clearly different from Russia, since it is still marked by a corrupting Russian influence. For example, when the episode discusses the possibility of passing legislation banning ‘gay propaganda,’ Russia (the Soviet Union) is used to introduce the viewer to the local Ukrainian situation. First, archival footage from the Soviet era is shown and then, footage of the Russian parliament voting for their version of the legislation. They are so lazy. We’ve got three local drafts of the law against [gay] propaganda and they are showing us the Russian parliament in Moscow passing this law instead … That’s so insulting [irony]. We don’t even have our own local homophobia – all the homophobia comes from Russia. (Z.)

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Gaycation reproduces a common stereotype about homophobia in Eastern Europe in general and in Ukraine in particular – namely that it is a product imported from Russia. This idea that homophobia and far-right national­ ism, along with any other ‘threat’ to the country, have Russian origins is very popular among certain Ukrainian intellectuals and activists. This hypoth­ esis is ideological rather than based on any solid analysis. On the contrary, Paternotte and Kuhar (2018) demonstrate that similar homophobic cam­ paigns indeed have European/Catholic origins. The presence of ‘evil’ Russia in the background of the show, however, helps to underpin the teleological narrative about Ukraine’s departure from its corrupt past towards a democratic future that includes respect for human rights. Yet at the same time, this Russian presence ‘contami­ nates’ Ukraine and leaves it stranded in the in-between zone of Eastern European failure. Throughout the show they are constantly creating the dichotomy: everything bad is a result of Russian influence – war, the reaction of local authorities to Maidan, antipropaganda laws. It’s very symptomatic of our times, that everyone wants to stress how good Ukraine is, good for LGBT+ people as well … And all evil comes [from Russia]. This is the traditional Western gaze on Ukraine as a buffer between the civi­ lized world and Russia … On one hand, this is Europe, [or at least a country] with some European features, but on the other – some guy [makes you eat] a pig’s head, some strange Nazis organize a safari and the society [in general] takes a stand against so-called gay propaganda. (L.)

The Portrayal of the LGBT+ Community and the Movement How does this episode fulfill the declared aim of the Gaycation series – ‘exploring the LGBT+ cultures around the world’? The series is based mainly on interviews and a disproportionately large number of them are with rightwing and conservative activists. The rest of the show’s time is divided between people representing some of the letters of the ‘LGBTQ’ acronym. Yet, special attention is given to well-known local activists, leaders of the NGO-ized movement. Whereas their stories and visions are selected to develop the

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narrative, the LGBTQ stories are sporadically included to create an illu­ sion of parity and rainbow diversity, or even to offer comic relief. The lives, needs, fears, dreams, and aspirations of ‘ordinary’ LGBT+ people are basi­ cally left out. Our collaborator Fritz von Klein pointed out that we get to know about them only via their very exclusion from the show, underpinned by the inclusion of more privileged ‘leaders’ from the community: They show the [more] protected [leaders of the movement] … So then, only through the right-wing radicals do we see the lives of the ordinary community … a commu­ nity that does not exist, because they are afraid [of the far-right] … And this is a huge mistake. (Fritz)

The focus on the leaders of NGOs underlines the mainstream homonorma­ tive and homonationalist agenda of identity politics as well as the demand for visibility of Ukraine’s struggle for a (Western) European future. The ending of the episode shows the Kyiv Pride march (here again, the ordi­ nary participants are excluded, and only a famous NGO activist gets the spotlight), which serves to legitimize this mainstream LGBT+ agenda and politics. This is so problematic. They are showing the movement through NGOs, and obviously they haven’t spoken to grassroots activists … [They] have shown institutionalized stuff, that in their opinion represents the development of the movement in Ukraine. They showed us a guy from GAU [Gay Alliance Ukraine], who is working mostly with gay men; and ‘Insight’ organization, which targets lesbian and bisexual women. And then they show you everybody coming together during Pride, the flashmob and the Equality Festival … I wonder why they didn’t show videos from other street demonstrations. Why didn’t they interview [the feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian grassroots initiative] ‘Rhythms of Resistance’ or show the street protest against pathologizing of transgender people? (L.)

This bring us to another glaring omission of the episode – it does not rep­ resent local queer activism at all. Queerness is often mentioned during the show, but it is mainly used as a synonym for ‘LGBTQ,’ ‘to make the vocabu­ lary of the show more diverse,’ as one of our collaborators noted. Such usage of the term contributes to the erasure of the separate queer identification and, more importantly, obliterates local queer criticism of the mainstream Ukrainian LGBT+ activism/movement.

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n. chushak, Y. Serdyukova and I. Tantsiura They are using the word ‘queer’ … but in reality they only show … homonormative people when using this word and absolutely do not show the queers who exist here … There are zero feminists, zero [grassroots] marches [shown in the episode] … (Fritz)

Gaycation episode ‘Ukraine’ does not register ways of being ‘queer’ that do not fit into the neoliberal homonormative Western linear idea of what the LGBT+ rights movement should aspire to and what methods it should use to achieve those aspirations. Thus, from the gay and lesbian NGO activists included in the episode we learn about the importance of being out, proud, and brave, of demanding rights for civil partnerships/marriage, and of par­ ticipating in street demonstrations and flashmobs organized by NGOs. We only get an unproblematized picture of local activists who heroically strug­ gle with homophobia and right-wing menaces. This picture glosses over the conflicts, nuances, and contradictions within the Ukrainian LGBT+ movement, oscillating between a homonormative NGO-ized majority and grassroots, often anonymous, self-identified queer groups. The image of suc­ cessful activism fits perfectly into a mainstream homonormative agenda, but in Ukraine as well as in other countries, it causes the consolidation of the far-right movement and the silencing and marginalization of more radical and inclusive agendas (Kahlina 2015: 80–81). The show excludes not only radical queer critique and organizing but also everything non-normative. One exception was Misha Koptyev, yet even he was dismissed as someone ‘playing the role of a jester’ (a comment Misha himself found to be very offensive when we discussed the episode). In our opinion, Misha’s appearance contributes mainly to the creation of the image of Ukraine as an exotic, weird country in transition. He both represents queer excess with ‘local flavor’ and serves to introduce the topic of war in Ukraine, hence signaling Ukraine’s turbulent condition. Otherwise, the episode presents a sterile and homonormative picture of local LGBT+ culture. This is achieved by choosing mainly very homonorma­ tive protagonists and editing out elements that do not fit into the picture. A good illustration of this is what we learn from the show about the transgender community in Ukraine and the personal experience of transgender activist Fritz von Klein. At the time of the show’s filming (spring 2016), transgender people in Ukraine were struggling with prejudice, stigma, transphobia from society,

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and the violence of the Ukrainian state. To be able to receive a new ID that matched their name and gender, transgender people had to undergo a discriminatory and violent procedure that involved hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital for a period of up to forty days. During this hospitaliza­ tion, they received a diagnosis of ‘transsexualism’ and were forced to undergo obligatory sterilization. In the episode we hear snippets of Fritz’s conversa­ tion about these issues with Ian. When we talked to Fritz, he commented bitterly on the representation of trans people and trans activism in the show: They included only one trans person, whose air time is limited to one minute. [The episode] doesn’t describe the laws [discriminating against trans people]. We spoke about this issue for a long time, but [in the episode] it sounded like sterilization was only my personal concern and not a systematic oppression. The topic of gay marriage is covered in full, but there is practically zero information about trans people. What does a psychiatric ward look like, and why did they not go to film one? Why didn’t they cover … the laws on the prohibition against having children, forced sterilization, and divorce, etc.?

In the episode, Fritz also states that, since he refuses to let the govern­ ment control his body, he cannot get a new ID. This is the only moment in Gaycation episode ‘Ukraine’ when someone voices criticism towards the post-Maidan Ukrainian state and the government’s ongoing violation of human rights. Yet the viewer does not get a chance to dwell on this criticism. The brisk editing (they even cut off the ending of one of Fritz’s sentences) takes us to another part of the conversation – Fritz shows Ian pictures of his daughter who lives with another father of hers in Latvia. Without docu­ ments, Fritz cannot travel there to see her. He was very critical of Gaycation’s representation of his personal story: Everything is so normative: here we have two boys, here we have two girls sitting together – certainly not a polyamorous family or a slutty club … Here we have a ‘proper’ trans person … But I told them that I have a polyamorous family! I told them that the kid has three dads …

The show edits out any mention of non-normative kinship and emotional attachments. Instead, it celebrates homonormativity. In one of the pivotal scenes of the show, Ellen and Ian ‘are invited’ to a clandestine gay wedding. This subplot proves the bravery of the shows’ hosts and the people getting

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married, and illustrates another important dimension of the constructed ‘ideal subjectivity’ of the Ukrainian LGBT+ activist. The room and the outfits of both grooms are decorated with blue and yellow, the colors of the Ukrainian national flag. A declaration of love for the Ukrainian state via inclusion of its national symbols into an intimate ceremony. Throughout the episode, we can see other examples of loyalty to the Ukrainian national state from some of the LGBT+ protagonists. Olena Shevchenko prominently displays the Ukrainian flag during the street flashmob. Maxim Eristavi tells us that LGBT+ people sacrificed their own interests for the overall national struggle when deciding not to bring their agenda to the Maidan protests (for more on the homonationalist strategies of LGBT+ leaders during Maidan see, for instance, Mayerchyk 2014; Martsenyuk 2016). Even Misha Koptyev muses that he wants to live only in Ukraine. All of this helps to construct a certain image of the LGBT+ activist/ person in Ukraine who is loyal to the state, to its symbols, ideas, and strug­ gles. By doing so, the episode erases the conflict between and within the Ukrainian LGBT+ population and society in general. It ignores different opinions on the Ukrainian state, its current politics, and the ongoing conflict. They are proud to be nationalists and to cooperate with government, to be useful to the state or society. They say that ‘we need to draw a line between us and the enemy,’ as if all LGBT+ people supported Maidan and participated in ATO [Anti-terrorist operation]. They are not admitting that there are a lot of LGBT+ people on the other side too. There is a huge shitstorm against them in the Ukrainian media. I recall an article about LGBT+ people in Crimea. Those who left [Crimea] are ‘good’, while those who stayed are … [silent pause] (L.)

Homonationalism plays an important role in structuring the political and emotional lives of the Ukrainian LGBT+ community, especially since the Maidan events. Maidan and the consequent conflicts made visible the rift in Ukrainian society between patriots/nationalists and others. Like in many other conflict-driven societies, the dominant nationalist ideology demands support of the Ukrainian state and its politics. Dissenters are considered to be traitors to the nation and can be stripped of access to citizenship, human rights, and even humanity. In the context of such polarization, the criticism of militarization, nationalism, and the rise of far-right forces in Ukraine, as expressed by some queer and feminist activists, is equated with ‘separatism’

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and extremism. For example, in 2017–2018, we witnessed a heated discussion within the LGBT+ community about the legitimacy of using the slogans ‘Make love, not civil war’ and ‘Death to the nation, queer the enemies’ (a play on the local nationalist slogan ‘Glory to the nation, death to the enemies’) during the Kyiv Pride 2017 demonstration. Nationalists, who at the moment are the most vocal within the local LGBT+ movement, unequivocally con­ demn these slogans as treason against Ukraine’s struggle for independence (Усманова 2018). This sentiment is shared by some of the show’s protago­ nists who, in their public speeches and writing on social media, help to cement the idea that only nationalist and patriotic LGBT+ people deserve the right to be considered members of community and society as a whole. This conflict is a very important marker of the struggles currently happen­ ing within Ukrainian LGBT+ culture. Yet the queer imperial gaze of Ellen and Ian glosses over it because of their own projections and expectations. Thus, this episode clearly affirms the loyalty of the Ukrainian LGBT+ ‘community’ to the ideals of a homonormative and homonationalist LGBT+ movement as articulated in the West. Gaycation, by focusing on the expres­ sion of nationalism by its LGBT+ protagonists, erases all other facets of LGBT+ lives that fall out outside of the constructed neoliberal narrative of ‘normative’ LGBT+ citizens.

Who Is the Subject and Who Are the Objects of this Travelogue? … it is a power play, after all. I’m a person with a camera who came to film you. So are you asking me to film you because you indeed want it or because I have a camera? (Fritz)

Most of the previous episodes of Gaycation dealt with heavily exoticized/ Orientalized countries. Rault (2017) points out that there is an obvious distinction in the episodes between the subjectivity of the white liberal hosts and the show’s subjects. Despite the fact that the latter get a chance to express themselves, the show’s editing and politics of representation still use them mainly to construct the ‘white liberal hyperconsciousness’ (Rault 2017: 588) of Ellen and Ian. Even though this pair of queer travelers seems

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to regret the mistakes of colonialism and racism, their behavior – although benevolent and expressing solidarity – serves to underpin systems of global injustice. Can we observe similar power dynamics between the show’s hosts and protagonists in the Ukrainian episode or is it different, because Ukraine is considered to be a ‘European’ country? While in earlier episodes, Ellen and Ian occasionally express condem­ nation of racism and colonialism, we never get to see any reflection on the power dynamics between Western and Eastern Europe in Gaycation episode ‘Ukraine.’ On the contrary, when depicting Ukraine, the show eagerly resorts to Orientalist stereotypes and generalizations. For example, this country is mainly thought of as white, yet this is a racist and nationalist assumption that ignores the presence of racialized people in Ukraine. The show depicts only ‘white’ Ukrainian LGBT+ activists speaking to the hosts. However, even white local Ukrainian members of the LGBT+ community are still treated as objects by the white, anglo, cisgen­ der, homonormative hosts of the show. Thus, Gaycation episode ‘Ukraine’ continues the problematic legacy of treating Slavs as objects of the Western imperial gaze and as not quite white or not as white as Westerners (Wolff 1994). Stereotypes about Ukraine influenced the showrunners’ ideas and pre­ conceptions about what they wanted to see and to film here. Moreover, a lot of events/scenes were specifically staged for the purpose of the show. The methods they used to implement these preconceived ideas about Ukrainian LGBT+ culture demonstrate their agency and how it relates to local people. To film the episode, the crew staged a number of events: Misha Koptyev’s show, the photoshoot with Fritz von Klein, the ‘Insight’ flashmob. We don’t see the fact of staging scenes for the episode as problematic per se – this technique is often used in documentary filmmaking and journalism – but we rather take issue with the manner in which these scenes were prepared and filmed. The attitude of the crew towards protagonists and even local freelancers is a telling illustration of their problematic approach. For instance, this is how Fritz described the crew’s behavior in the office of the NGO ‘Insight’ while filming scenes for the show: They came with a huge crew and stormed into our office without asking any permis­ sions … as if we should organize everything for them right away. They took up a lot

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of space. They were with us for two hours and pissed off everyone, so we were glad when everything was finally over.

For one of the scenes, the Gaycation crew asked ‘Insight’ to organize a ‘com­ munity event’ with a screening of the film ‘Juno,’ supposedly to be followed by a discussion and photo session with the star, Ellen Page. Ellen never showed up for the screening and the crew did not explain her absence or apologize. Many people left the community center disappointed. The crew was even more pushy and manipulative when arranging a photoshoot with Fritz. Nevertheless, he agreed to all of their demands, partly because they covered all the expenses for the process (he had wanted to take these photographs for a long time) and even bought him a pet carrier to bring his two cats on set. At the time, Fritz could not afford these things. This is how he describes his feelings about that situation: ‘We will buy everything,’ and because you are being bought, you are going there, that’s it … It is a classic story: ‘We came with money, we will buy you.’ This is very hard to deal with, because although you can answer: ‘You won’t buy me,’ but after that you return home and have nothing to eat.

The Gaycation crew not only put pressure on protagonists, they also manipu­ lated the results of protagonists’ creativity as they pleased, not treating their work with respect. This is illustrated by their use of different music for Misha Koptyev’s show, which was added during post-production without his knowledge, for example. Misha was very upset when he learned about this change because for him, the music he chooses is an integral part of his performances. Misrepresentation is one method the show uses. Erasure is another. As noted by Rault (2017), Gaycation episodes exclude all the local technical staff (translators, fixers) without whom it would be impossible to produce such a show. Instead, apparently knowledgeable Western travelers smoothly and effectively traverse the slippery terrain by themselves. Ellen and Ian just walk into the offices and rooms where they talk to people. Conversations with protagonists who speak Ukrainian or Russian happen without any visible translation: the show’s hosts smile when needed, nod when relevant, and express concern at sad moments of the conversation.

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n. chushak, Y. Serdyukova and I. Tantsiura I think their facial expressions show a sincere concern. (R.) [laughter] After all, she’s an actress! (Z.) And they are nodding all the time. Well… even if they can’t understand, they are really trying to … (R.)

As a result, in Gaycation episode ‘Ukraine,’ Ellen and Ian are knowledgeable, affective, and sensitive as they translate and channel the experience of the Ukrainian LGBT+ people they meet for the audience of the show. They are always the ones to introduce and/or summarize all the problems that the episode touches upon, becoming rational subjects who have the legitimacy to explain to viewers of the show what is going on in Ukraine and in the lives of local LGBT+ people. But what about the locals? Famous and friendly gays, activists, and lesbians turn up here and we don’t get the chance to say: ‘Fuck off !’ The community is pressured to show how we look so that we can be rescued afterwards … (R.)

Conclusions Gaycation pretends to be spreading knowledge about the joy and suffering of different LGBT+ communities, often reporting from far-away and dan­ gerous (from a Westerner’s point of view) places. Ian explains the labor and responsibility that – they perceive – are invested in creation of the show in an interview: We are working very hard […] to make sure that we are covering as many basics as pos­ sible, that we are being as fair as possible, that we’re being as responsible as possible, that we are being as progressive as we can […]. And so we’re underground trying to be as immersive and intimate and as engaged as possible. And that requires a lot of effort. (Laws 2017)

This mask of hard-working educators documenting the lives of ‘LGBTQ communities’ using thoughtful and understanding optics crumbles because of their paternalistic queer imperial gaze. To a large extent, Gaycation episode

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‘Ukraine’ is not a story about Ukraine and its LGBT+ population, but about Ellen and Ian and for people like them. It is a story about a privileged pair of white, anglo, cisgender people, who also happen to be gay, observ­ ing the ‘exotic’ lives of others and ‘western-splaining’ (a term used by Fritz von Klein) them to their audiences. They aim for solidarity with oppressed ‘LGBTQ’ communities, but their act of solidarity has its limitations. It extends mainly to G(L) people and their stories of suffering from far-right homophobia but avoids tackling the broader issues of structural inequality and systemic oppression such as a discriminatory legislative system, other unjust state mechanisms, or economic inequality. On closer inspection, this superficial solidarity serves a minor function in this episode (and the show as a whole) compared to the other process, namely the construction of the idea of the ‘civilized’ West in opposition to the ‘(semi)barbaric’ Other. This is evident in Gaycation episode ‘Ukraine,’ in which the European belonging of Ukraine is constructed as volatile and provisional until the country can overcome its homophobic tendencies. In the episodes that unfold in ‘Western’ countries (such as France or the U.S.A.), the homophobia (or trans*phobia, lesbophobia, and racism) of more conservative parts of society is portrayed as a ‘barbarity’ that must and will inevitably be overcome by democratic processes via visibility and identity politics; in other words, on the terms set by neoliberal ideology. In measuring the world by the gauge of the queer imperial gaze, Gaycation aims at picturing neither the nuanced lives of local LGBT+ communities nor the complex negotiations between their agenda and local social-political power structures. A large part of what we have analyzed here is simply a result of Gaycation being an example of mainstream entertainment TV – characteristically uncritical and unwilling to examine its own stereotypical assumptions. This does not mean that its premises and conclusions should not be questioned. The images the show produces and distributes both derive from and feed into an Orientalist understanding of Ukraine as an Eastern European country. To produce yet another example of such misinterpretation and misrepresenta­ tion without critical examination is to cement these biases and stereotypes. As Pratt (2008: 7) observes: ‘people on the receiving end of European imperialism [do] their own knowing and interpreting, sometimes […] using the Europeans’ own tools.’ Our collaborative project of creating an ‘honest

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trailer’ for the Gaycation ‘Ukraine’ episode and later writing this chapter is precisely an attempt to talk back. This is not only a critical engagement with a failed demonstration of solidarity on behalf of benevolent Western subjects but our way of creating space for the representation of the multiply erased local queer ways of knowing.

Bibliography Гриценко, Анна. 2018. ‘Что не так с квир-критикой марша 8 марта?’ February 16, 2018, available online at (accessed May 1, 2019). Усманова, Марина. 2018. ‘О правом феминизме, гуманистическом национализме и других химерах,’ Гендерные исследования 23, pp. 176–180. Buda, Dorina Maria. 2015. Affective Tourism: Dark routes in conflict. London: Routledge. Burridge, Tom. 2016. ‘Ukraine Conflict: Daily Reality of East’s “Frozen War”,’ April 15, 2016, available online at (accessed August 9, 2018). Channell-Justice, Emily S. 2017. ‘We’re Not Just Sandwiches: Europe, Nation, and Feminist (Im)Possibilities on Ukraine’s Maidan,’ Signs: Journal Of Women In Culture & Society 42 (3), pp. 717–741. Cruz-Malave, Arnaldo (ed.), and Manalansan IV, Martin F. (editor of the series). 2002. Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism. New York: New York University Press. Duggan, Lisa. 2002. ‘The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism,’ in: Castronovo, Russ, and Nelson, Dana (eds.). Materialising Democracy: Towards a Revitalized Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 175–94. Gorbach, Denys. 2018. ‘Entrepreneurs of Political Violence: The Varied Interests and Strategies of the Far-Right in Ukraine,’ available online at: (accessed April 26, 2019). Hale, Mike. 2016. ‘Viceland, a New Cable Channel, Aims to Stand Out,’ February 28, 2016, available online at: (accessed January 27, 2019)

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Kahlina, Katja. 2015. ‘Local Histories, European LGBT Designs: Sexual Citizenship, Nationalism, and “Europeanisation” in post-Yugoslav Croatia and Serbia,’ Women’s Studies International Forum 49, pp. 73–83. Kaplan, Ann E. 1997. Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze. London and New York: Routledge. Kulpa, Robert. 2014. ‘Western Leveraged Pedagogy of Central and Eastern Europe: Discourses of Homophobia, Tolerance and Nationhood,’ Gender Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 21(4), pp. 431–437. Laws, Zach. 2017. Ellen Page, Ian Daniel (‘Gaycation’): ‘Testament to those who risk lives to tell their stories’ (video), available online at: (accessed August 9, 2018). Lisle, Debbie. 2006. ‘Defending Voyeurism: Dark Tourism and the Problem of Global Security,’ in: Burns, Peter M., and Novelli, Marina (eds.). Tourism and Politics: Global Frameworks and Local Realities. Elsevier: Oxford, pp. 333–345. Lonelyplanet.com. Donbass Tour: War Experience 1 day, available online at (accessed May 1, 2019). Martsenyuk, Tamara. 2016. ‘Sexuality and Revolution in Post-Soviet Ukraine,’ Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 2(1), pp. 49–74. Mayerchyk, Mariya. 2014. ‘On Occasion of March 8th / Recasting of Meanings,’ Krytyka, March 8, 2014, available online at (accessed August 10, 2018). Murphy, Kevin P.; Serlin, David, and Ruiz, Jason. 2008. ‘Editor’s introduction,’ Radical History Review 100, pp.1–9. Paternotte, David, and Kuhar, Roman. 2018. ‘Disentangling and Locating the “Global Right”: Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe,’ Politics and Governance 6(3), pp. 6–19. Popova, Daria. 2018. ‘Women’s or Feminist Event: What Happened to the March on 8 March 2018,’ Feminist Critique, March 2018, available online at: (accessed August 9, 2018). Puar, Jasbir K. 2002. ‘Circuits of Queer Mobility: Tourism, Travel, and Globalization,’ GLQ – A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8(1–2), pp. 101–137. Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rault, Jasmine. 2017. ‘White Noise, White Affects: Filtering the Sameness of Queer Suffering,’ Feminist Media Studies 17(4), pp. 585–599. Wolff, Larry. 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

Part II

Local Queer Practices: Between Nationalistic and Global Discourses

Lesia Pagulich

5 New Lovers…? As Patriots and Citizens: Thinking beyond Homonationalism and Promises of Freedom (the Ukrainian case)

[F]or those of us […] on the margins, operating through multiple iden­ tities and thus not fully […] recognized through traditional singleidentity-based politics, theoretical conceptualizations of queerness hold great political promise. [T]he label ‘queer’ symbolizes an acknowledg­ ment that through our existence and everyday survival we embody sustained and multi-sited resistance to systems. (Cohen 2005: 24)

Introduction Every now and then, debates occur around LGBTIQ+ activism and nation­ alist-oriented politics in Ukraine (Маєрчик 2015; Пагуліч 2016; Погрібна 2015; Von Klein 2017). Such debates are important for the analysis of the effects of such politics on subjects who are excluded from nation-building, and furthermore, they question nationalism that positions non-normative subjects in a hierarchical relation to the national ideal (Korek 2007; Law & Zakharov 2018; Starr 2010; Zakharov, Law, & Lastouski 2017). In this chapter, I analyze the art exhibition ‘Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…’ (2015) to explore circuits and dynamics that attempt to normalize LGBTIQ+ subjects through discourses of the ‘patriot’ and the ‘good citizen.’ I ask what subjects are produced as legible within the art exhibition’s conceptual framework, visuals, and narratives. Respectively, I examine what subjects are racialized and left out of ‘the picture’ and remain homogenized in ways that allow for the emergence of individual liberal subjects.

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In 2015, the Pinchuk Art Center (Kyiv), a prestigious art gallery in Ukraine, hosted the art exhibition ‘Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…,’ which was produced by the 2014 Future Generation Art Prize winner Carlos Motta, a Colombian artist based in New York. The exhibition is composed of ten video-interviews with eleven Ukrainian LGBTIQ+ activists and journal­ ists ‘who discuss the critical and dire situation of lesbian, gay, trans and intersex lives in Ukraine in times of war’ (Pinchuk Art Center 2015). The project was developed and produced by Motta in collaboration with the Ukrainian journalist Maxim Ivanukha and with the support of the Future Generation Art Prize award. The interviews are shot vertically with yellow and blue backdrops, in front of which the interviewees stand in full size for the duration of the interview. As described by the art gallery, the exhibition presents interviews with Ukrainian LGBTIQ+ activists whose ‘relentless activism greatly contributes to the formation of a new and democratic postRevolution of Dignity Ukraine’ (ibid.). In Ukrainian mass media, the exhibi­ tion was framed as groundbreaking (Громадське Телебачення 2015). It was the first time that an exhibition related to LGBTIQ+ people was hosted by one of the most prestigious galleries in Ukraine. Besides being exhibited in the gallery, the videos were uploaded online for open access. The exhibition also made it on to Hyperallergic’s list ‘Best of 2015: Our Top 15 Exhibitions around the World’ (2015). The exhibition discusses LGBTIQ+ lives in Ukraine in times of war, which has significantly affected the sociopolitical landscape in the country. The militarization that emerged in the wake of the war with Russia in Eastern Ukraine, on the one hand, strengthens aspirations towards the EU as a way of Ukrainian ‘modernization’ against the ‘backwardness’ of its Soviet past (cf. Укрінформ 2018; Верховна Рада України 2014). The Soviet Union is often associated with Russian occupation; therefore, anti-Soviet senti­ ments seemingly automatically become anti-Russian ones. The discourse of the ‘European path’ situates Ukraine in a certain teleological temporal­ ity, which describes the current condition as a transition from the illiberal Soviet/socialist/communist past to a liberal Western/European future that is inevitably connected to a neoliberal market economy. Many scholars have noted that neoliberal transformations in postsocialist contexts produce mechanisms of erasure and exclusion of various marginalized and racialized groups (cf. Atanasoski 2013; Atanasoski & McElroy 2018; Gržinić & Tatlić

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2014; Hirt 2012; Stenning 2010; Verdery 1999). On the other hand, mili­ tarization intensifies nationalism as a struggle against Russian imperialism and the legacy of the Soviet Union. Although conservative nationalist forces oppose Western ideals, they perpetuate rigid ideas of ‘traditional Ukrainian values’ and national authenticity. Unsurprisingly, with militarization and the rise of nationalist and far-right groups, violence against LGBTIQ+ people, Roma communities, and feminist and LGBTIQ+ events has greatly increased (Gorbach 2018). My analysis of the exhibition ‘Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…’ is based on a critical stance towards Russian and Western imperialist interests and politics, and towards the presentation of nationalism or Western neoliberal models as the only alternatives (for similar a critique see Atanasoski & Vora 2018; Atanasoski & McElroy 2018; Gržinić & Tatlić 2014; Koobak & Marling 2014; Tlostanova 2010). I question the notion of incorporation into the nation by appealing to patriotism and being a ‘good citizen,’ as the exhibition title implies. For example, when analyzing the exhibition, Анна Погрібна/Anna Pohribna asserts that the name of the exhibition ‘Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…’ represents ‘three denominators that summarize all stories’ and ‘expresses cur­ rently common aspiration to incorporate into dominant discourse, when “during the war” national identity and civic stance become foregrounded’ (Погрібна 2015: paragraph 7). In the first and second sections of the chapter, I describe the theoretical framework, methods, and analytical tools that informed my perspectives on the exhibition ‘Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…’. In the third and fourth sections, I examine the exhibition and discourses surrounding LGBTIQ+ politics in Ukraine. In conclusion, I summarize the main results and discuss the pos­ sible social ramifications, addressing the potential of radical queer politics.

Theoretical Framework One of the core analytic concepts I engage with is ‘homonationalism,’ coined by Jasbir Puar (2006, 2007). Puar analyzes how ‘acceptable’ gay and lesbian subjects and ‘perverse pathologized Others’ are produced through

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racial and national differences. Puar developed the conceptual frame of homonationalism for analyzing the complexities of how ‘acceptance’ and ‘tolerance’ for gay and lesbian subjects have become an indicator through which the progressiveness of a nation-state is evaluated (Puar 2007). She examines how sexuality has become, both nationally and transnationally, a crucial formation in the articulation of ‘good’ citizens across gender, class, and race. Therefore, Puar explores how homonationalism is becoming a global phenomenon and fosters U.S. imperialism through the embrace of sexually progressive multiculturalism. I suggest that the concept of ‘homonationalism’ may provide a fruitful analytic framework with which to open up space for critical discussions of current power configurations between the state, neoliberalism, sexuality, and systems of racialization, and for rethinking queer politics in postsocial­ ist Eastern European regions. Many scholars engaging with the concept of ‘homonationalism’ in Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe explore the link between gay liberal rights discourses and the production of nar­ ratives of progress and modernity (e.g. Colpani & Habed 2014; El-Tayeb 2011; Kahlina 2015; Moss 2014; Rexhepi 2016). These scholars investigate the pitfalls of liberal human rights politics, providing a framework with which to understand the complexity of imperialist and nationalist forces and neoliberal interests. Following them, I engage with the analytic con­ cept of homonationalism in relation to the Ukrainian context in order to address different systems of power relations, racialization, and othering, in which U.S. imperialism is not the only major force to influence political and economic processes. I also aim to question nationalism as the alleg­ edly only form of anti-imperialist struggle. In Ukraine, racialization works in complex ways, especially with regards to militarization and the war. While non-normative and nonwhite bodies, such as Roma communities (European Roma Rights Centre 2014; Minority Rights Group International 2018), are not seen as worthy of protection, increased othering based on ideological or belief systems promises a potential avenue for patriotic LGBTIQ+ subjects to be included in the nation’s boundaries, thus positioned against the non-patriotic or not ‘truly Ukrainian’ subjects. Considering today’s dynamic situation and a wide range of LGBTIQ+ organizations in Ukraine, it would be a fal­ lacy to talk about a single strategy or to generalize the varying discourses.

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However, it is important to examine the nascent forms of homonational­ ism and related tendencies, which are becoming increasingly visible. Such tendencies may differ from one LGBTIQ+ event to another and change in relation to the dynamic political landscape in Ukraine. This landscape drastically varies, from physical attacks on LGBTIQ+ events by far-right groups to the introduction of sexual orientation and gender identity into the anti-discrimination legislative amendment in 2015. Furthermore, as I have mentioned, the war in Ukraine created a potential discursive avenue for LGBTIQ+ subjects to be legitimized. The dividing practices between patriotic national gays and ‘Others’ (Puar 2007) promise considering cer­ tain gay subjects as worthy of protection by the nation-state based on their contribution to nation-building. However, attempts to be incorporated into nationalist rhetoric and formations only lead to the advancement of privileged groups within marginalized communities and the solidification of the status quo. I pay critical attention to these different tensions and dynamics in order to reveal critiques and analytics that shift from the ideas of ‘incor­ poration’ to the politics of ‘transformation.’ Therefore, another concept that I draw on is radical transformative queer politics, which Cathy Cohen conceptualized as radical queer strategies that can transform systems of domination and destabilize homogeneous identities through critical inter­ rogations of privileges of elite groups within marginalized communities (Cohen 2005). Cohen’s radical queer approach provides tools to uncover homonationalist tendencies and imagine alternatives. She emphasizes that strategies, aiming at assimilation and incorporation, only expand the accessibility of the status quo for the more privileged individuals among marginalized groups, while for the most vulnerable within those com­ munities their experience of oppression and stigmatization continues (Cohen 2005: 27). Importantly, Cohen proposes focusing on left-oriented radical queer politics that emphasize economic exploitation and the systematic relationship among forms of domination as well as center struggles against the sexual nor­ malization of all marginalized communities. As she suggests, transformative queer politics have to pursue an intersectional analysis of power dynamics and oppressions instead of a single-issue perspective (ibid.: 45).

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Methods I focus on the exhibition in a complex way that includes visual and discourse analyses of the exhibition itself, the media articles surrounding it, as well as the exploration of the context of its emergence. In particular, I draw on the works of Michel Foucault, Norman Fairclough, and Vivian Sobchack. Foucault states that power exercises itself through discourse and, in particular, discourses of truth (2003: 24). For Foucault, discourse is the ‘ordering of objects’ or ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (1972: 49). Different discourses can exist and struggle to be accepted as meaningful and to define truth. In my analysis, I look at discourse in terms of what statements and practices are uttered and pre­ sent in the discourse, and what is left unspoken and absent. Also, I employ Foucault’s theory of power/knowledge: when power is decentralized and dispersed, it creates social worlds and ways in which the world can be talked about. Power is a productive as well as a constraining force. Power produces discourse, knowledge, and subjectivities (Foucault 1980: 119). I also draw upon the ideas of Fairclough (1992), who uses Foucault’s concept of dis­ course to emphasize how discourses are organized to support relations of domination and subordination. Fairclough states that discursive practices contribute to the creation and reproduction of the unequal distribution of power between social groups to maintain social order. Sobchack’s theorizing (2004) informs the visual analysis in this chapter. Sobchack argues that (photographic, cinematic, and electronic) technologies constitute figurations of bodily existence and offer lived bodies different ways of ‘being-in-the-world’ (2004: 136). In other words, Sobchack notes that technologies influence subjectivity and engage subjects in temporal, spatial, and bodily formulations. Specifically, Sobchack emphasizes that photography and video have two levels of influence over viewers: first, microperception ‘through the specific material conditions by which they latently engage and extend our senses at the transparent and lived bodily level’; second, macroperception ‘through their manifest representational function by which they engage our senses consciously and textually at the hermeneutic level’ (2004: 138). Therefore, I look at how the exhibition is technically organized, what technological and artistic tools are utilized, and how the exhibition transforms embodied subjects and produces certain subjectivities.

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The Art Exhibition ‘Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…’: Promises of Freedom To some extent, the exhibition ‘Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…’ is a product of transnational circuits about democratic freedoms that the artist situates within a Ukrainian nation-state project. Carlos Motta is a Colombian artist based in New York. In his various works, Motta has focused on questions of sexuality and LGBTIQ+ politics in different countries. For example, in 2012, Motta started the project ‘We Who Feel Differently,’ which explored the global development of sexual politics over the last forty years. The project features conversations with queer activists, academics, artists, researchers, doctors, lawyers, and others in Colombia, Norway, South Korea, and the United States about the histories and development of LGBTIQ+ politics in these countries. With this project, Motta (2017) claims to prioritize think­ ing about the role of difference within LGBTIQ+ movements. In a certain sense, the exhibition ‘Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…’ is a logical continuation of the artist’s previous transnational projects. On their personal website, the artist located both exhibitions, ‘Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…’ and the project ‘We Who Feel Differently,’ under a larger rubric titled ‘Democracy Cycle,’ where, as Motta explains, ‘questions of democratic representation, issues of immigration, sexuality, gender, genocide [intersect]’ (ibid.). Looking closer at the exhibition ‘Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…’ in the context of the artist’s previous work allows for a critical reflection of the dangers of ‘easy’ comparisons and analogies between different contexts as well as problematizing the mobility of certain ideas. Although the exhibition ‘Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…’ was an important event in the Ukrainian context in terms of providing a platform for publicly speaking about sexuality and gender, it implies that the U.S. or the West are the absolute leaders of democracy, without allowing for critical discussions of such an implication. Furthermore, it does not contest the colonial and imperial histories of the concepts of liberal democracy and freedom. While the artist problematizes equality and assimilation as the end goals of the mainstream LGBT movements and emphasizes difference as a source of systemic transformations in his other works, the exhibition ‘Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…’ conveys the unquestioned categories of citizens and

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patriots. As such, the exhibition shows no critical approach towards con­ cepts of nationalism or liberal equality. It works with the colors of the Ukrainian flag and appeals to liberal formations, which assign bodies to a subject that supports the reconstitution of the national order and social structures. Therefore, I argue that, by representing normative scripts of ‘proper’ citizens, though perhaps ‘different’ in regards to sexuality and gender identity, the exhibition produces the notions of equality and free­ dom that reinforce the nation’s boundaries. Considering the context of the exhibition’s production, I also explore how the content, that is, visual and textual narratives, are constructed, edited, and directed in relation to the liberal scheme.

Figure 5.1.  Photograph of the art exhibition, ‘Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…’ Photographs provided by the PinchukArtCentre © 2015. Photographed by Sergey Illin.

Figure 5.1 provides a general view of the exhibition. Ten video screens of approximately human-height size showing the interviews were placed on a small podium in the center of the rectangular room. The screens were set up in a checkerboard pattern, the videos were each nine to fifteen minutes long, in Ukrainian or Russian with English subtitles. In each video, an individual interviewee stands in front of and looks into the camera while telling their story, answering questions that the viewer does not hear. Interviewees are filmed in long shots and medium shots, which alternate.

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The installation in the pavilion and the height and size of the screens are meant to engage viewers in a ‘conversation’ with individual activists, cre­ ating the effect of embodied presence. At the exhibition, viewers can come up to any of the screens, take the headphones, and listen to an interview. Headphones make this conversation more intimate on a sensory level, cut out an extraneous sound, and create a trusting atmosphere for the viewer. The cord of the headphones could be a connection between the viewer and the activist, like a physical string meant to strengthen the effect of temporal connection in the gallery space. When the activists talk, they mostly look into the camera, so that viewers can feel as if they were in the place of the person asking the questions. This form of viewing renders the impression of an activist’s presence, creating a personalized effect and the sense of a tête-àtête conversation, intended to bring the ‘other’ closer to the ‘general public’ and the individual ‘interlocutor.’ In addition, the editing of medium shots and long shots mediates the balance between intimate and formal distance to the activists. Cuts to medium shots are used when the activists tell their personal stories or recount homophobic incidents; cuts to long shots are used when activists talk about ‘statistical data.’ This embodiment resonates with Roger Hallas’s statement that the creation of the effect of bearing witness relies ‘on techniques which enhance the impression of a witness’s presence before the viewer’ (2007: 38). The exhibition attempts to create both the effect of presence and the effect of witnessing and discovering the plight of the LGBTIQ+ community in Ukraine during the war and the rise of violence. Likewise, the sound in the videos does not create an effect of very close intimacy. A viewer can discern a slight echo, which establishes a distance between the viewer and the activist. In addition, the activists’ bodies are placed against an empty background, rendering the impression of a sterile room. These visual and auditory elements produce the effect of a so-called ‘bare truth,’ wherein the activists are filmed as the rational agents of this truth. Although the main footage was shot during the interviews as the activists responded to questions, the viewer does not hear the questions but only the narratives of the activists. Through editing, the artist assembled the videos in such a manner that one has the impression that the interviewee’s narra­ tives were not structured or directed by the questions or creators’ inquiries. The video background, which is made up of the colors of the national flag, together with the exhibition’s name, ‘Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…,’

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attributes national symbols and nationalist meanings to the LGBTIQ+ sub­ jects (see Figure 5.2). Possibly, the intended presence of LGBTIQ+ visibility in the coded national attributes is an attempt to disrupt the rigid bound­ ary of the nation as inherently heterosexual and gender-normative. Motta explains that the discourse of nationalism and patriotism excludes sexual and gender identities from the notion of the sovereign nation. Therefore, his idea was to make these sexual and gender identities visible and articulate the dire situation surrounding gender and sexuality in Ukraine. However, I would suggest that this visual framework and the narratives prioritize certain subjects as representable. It is important to note that one of the exhibition’s videos portrays a transgender woman with an obscured face that makes a part of her body unrecognizable, for the viewers in particular or for the nation in general. Her image can be read as demarcation of the limits of who can be successfully represented and fully visible as part of ‘democratic representation’ and inclusion into the nation. Overall, the exhibition por­ trays individuals who are presented and perceived as white, able-bodied, and within the gender binary. Moreover, the use of the national flag colors frames individuals as ‘normal’ and sovereign citizens and patriots who are only different because of their sexuality and gender identity.

Figure 5.2.  Photograph of the art exhibition, ‘Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…’ Photographs provided by the PinchukArtCentre © 2015. Photographed by Sergey Illin.

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I argue that the exhibition supports the idea of incorporation into the nation’s boundaries through concepts of ‘patriotism’ and ‘good citizens.’ The idea of incorporation into the national rhetoric is manifested in the exhibition’s title, which contains the denominators patriot and citizen, thus linking LGBTIQ+ stories to Ukrainian national identity and citizenship (see also Погрібна 2015). The exhibition strives to produce a potential discursive avenue for LGBTIQ+ subjects or ‘lovers’ to be recognized as ‘patriots’ and ‘good citizens’ of the nation-state and nationalist formations. For instance, in one interview, a gay activist asserts: Ukrainian nationalist far-right forces have taken up the messages delivered to Ukrainians through Russian propaganda. They say that LGBT people are a foreign element that has to be eliminated or otherwise our nation will perish. The most common accusation that far-right movements throw at the LGBT community is that we did not create our own LGBT battalion to fight in Eastern Ukraine. But gays and lesbians are everywhere. We also volunteer in the [Ukrainian] armed forces. (Kis & Levchuk 2015)

This response serves as a justification, based on the premise that the only way to be legitimized is through patriotism, thus proving a ‘proper’ civic stance. Importantly, this proper stance involves the production of the ‘common enemy’ that is ‘uncivilized’ and ‘non-democratic’ in opposition to a ‘progres­ sive’ and ‘democratic’ Ukraine that stands for European values of human rights. Hence, some of the interviewees talk about people with so-called ‘Soviet mentalities’ who prevent Ukraine from progressing. One of the interviewees expresses the following opinion: I think that the attitude of the younger generation towards these issues [tolerance towards gays and lesbians] is much lighter. […] They were raised in a free society with fairly free views and media. I’m confident that this background will help them make the world into what they want it to be. And of course, this would mean progress. (Zinchenkov 2015)

Similarly, another interviewee emphasizes a particular kind of thinking about Ukraine as steadily progressing from its Soviet past to a European future: [T]he war in Ukraine is not only military and economic, but also civilizational and cultural. Building a society that is dramatically different from Russia and from the post-Soviet values that we are still trying to get rid of would be a very important

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Lesia Pagulich victory in this war. A victory for everyone, not only for the minorities, but also for the whole country. This won’t be achieved by solving only military and economic problems. (Eristavi 2015)

In this sense, such statements emanate from the premise of a constructed divi­ sion between people who are allegedly stuck in the Soviet past or so-called ‘Soviet mentality’ (and therefore unfree) and those liberated from the Soviet constraints on the path towards democratic freedom. As Тамара Марценюк/ Tamara Martsenyuk (2015) notes, some strategies in the LGBT1 movement in Ukraine that resonate with homonationalism are rooted in contrasting ‘us,’ who stand for European integration (and are therefore progressive, democratic, modern), and ‘them,’ who are against such integration (and are hence uncivilized and non-democratic). Accordingly, the appeals to patriotism and ‘good citizens’ contribute to the creation of a ‘good’ LGBTIQ+ identity that may later be used to cast out non-normative queer subjects. Therefore, the accusations of some right-wing groups that Ukrainian gays should create a gay battalion to prove their patriotism was met with responses from certain LGBTIQ+ organizations and activists that there are already gays present in regular battalions. They thus deserve to be Ukrainians, and there is no need to segregate them (e.g. Gay Alliance Ukraine 2016a, 2016b). In this context, it is important to state that the premise of the right-wing accusations, that is, ‘prove that you are worthy’ (here, ‘worth’ is defined by belonging to the Ukrainian nation and being a ‘good citizen,’ productive for the nation and the state), remains unchallenged. The critical perspective on the exhibition is especially important in the context of the post-Cold War expansion of the U.S. as the main bearer and protector of freedom and democracy. As Neda Atanasoski (2013) states, the collapse of the Soviet Union facilitated the global spread of the principles of U.S. liberal democracy, universal human rights, humanitarian interven­ tions, multiculturalism, and free markets. While universal human rights and multiculturalism claim to provide space for individual voices and experi­ ences to be heard, accommodated, and accounted for, only ‘certain voices and experiences become favored as representative or authentic’ (Atanasoski 2013: 16), through the elimination of ‘illiberal ways of inhabiting ethnic, religious, and sexual difference’ (ibid.: 5). 1

Марценюк/Martsenyuk uses LGBT (without Q).

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Importantly, the so-called ‘victory of liberal capitalist democracy’ over ‘corrupted socialist projects’ not only affirmed the universality of the U.S. and Western Europe but also muted the historical origins of liberal projects (e.g. slavery, colonization, capitalist exploitation; ibid.: 8). Saidiya Hartman elucidates how histories such as the Transatlantic slave trade and colonialism informed the drastic fabrication of Western/European ideas about freedom, rights, and liberal subjects. Examining the formation of liberalism in the U.S., Hartman states that ‘a liberal scheme based upon certain notions of commensurability […] reinscribe[s] the power of the law and of the state to make right a certain situation, when, clearly, it cannot’ (Hartman cited in Hartman and Wilderson 2003: 198). In particular, Hartman (1997) explores the entanglement of slavery and freedom that foregrounds the construction of liberal subjectivity in the post-emancipation context of the U.S. She states that, by bestowing the emancipated status of rights bearer and free laborer, the discourse of emancipation presented slavery as an event in the past, something that happened before the emergence of the liberal civilized man. However, as Hartman points out, the emancipated remained in the relations of subjection, domination, and exploitation, emphasizing the constitution of liberty through bondage and proprietorial conceptions of the liberal subject. Drawing on Karl Marx, Hartman uses the term ‘the double bind of freedom’ (1997: 117), thus shedding light on the entanglement of freedom and slavery, abstract equality, and Black subjugation within the U.S. context. Following Hartman and Atanasoski allows for the articulation of a criti­ cal positionality in relation to the transnational circuits of the liberal scheme. I consider the theorizations of Hartman and Atanasoski to be fruitful for challenging the mobility of certain perceptions of democracy and freedom and their possible entanglement with the legacies of different imperial pro­ jects. In response to the critical perspectives of Hartman and Atanasoski, I suggest that the transnational circuits of U.S. ideas of liberal subjecthood contribute to the logics of the exclusion of non-white people and migrants from the Ukrainian nation. Therefore, I explore the exhibition ‘Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…’ in light of both local transformations in Ukraine and global movements of ideas and practices. I suggest that the exhibition repro­ duces and assigns bodies with certain understandings of freedom that rein­ force the nation’s boundaries and (re)produce the absence of some bodies. The absences and silenced histories behind the contemporary discussions of

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freedom, democracy, and equality on a global scale contribute to the margin­ alization of critical positionalities in relation to dominant notions of justice. Thus, the format of individual testimonies, in connection with the national attributes presented in the exhibition, constructs the individual sub­ jects of democracy and freedom, foregrounds the representability of certain subjects, prioritizing an integrationist approach in which nationalist rhetoric remains unquestioned. The inclusion of one group into the nation’s bounda­ ries, however, does not challenge social hegemonies but rather attempts to normalize the LGBTIQ+ subject in line with the hegemonic discourses of the nation. The idea of incorporation into nationalist rhetoric and forma­ tions leads to advancing only privileged subjects within marginalized com­ munities and solidifying the status quo. In the following section, I focus on the other aspect of the exhibition, which is related to issues of racialization.

Homonationalism, Whiteness, and Racialized Others In this section, I analyze the erasure of race and ethnicity in the exhibition. Whiteness or racial politics are not marked or articulated in the exhibition. Drawing on Cathy Cohen’s theorizing of transformative queer politics, my aim is to make visible how the appeals to universal humanity and equality in the exhibition contribute to the reassertion of whiteness as a norm and silence questions surrounding ethnicity, race, and citizenship. Although the exhibition focuses on oppression and inequality based on sexuality and gender identity, categories such as class, race, ethnicity, etc., which are deeply intertwined with sexuality and gender and inform the position of a subject in relation to power, are left unaddressed despite the rare appeals within the exhibition’s interviews to the intersections of different forms of discrimination. An example of gesturing towards racial and ethnic difference may be one interviewee’s call for love to all humans despite the differences: People, I want to say this to all of you: Don’t forget you are human. Don’t forget to remain human and to see human beings beside you. Don’t think about the color

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of their skin or their sexual orientation: See human beings who have a right to be who they are. (Yerema 2015)

Despite this rhetoric of inclusion, the exhibition’s interviews contribute to colorblindness and the claims to universality, while preserving notions of individuality, personal choice, and agency. In one of the exhibition’s inter­ views, when talking about civil rights of LGBTIQ+ people, the respondent asserts: ‘It [equality] is something given to all humans at birth. This is the idea with which absolutely all Ukrainians can agree on after the Maidan revolution’ (Eristavi 2015). The processes of erasing or subordinating myriads of other subjects along the lines of race, gender, and class are left unchallenged in such rep­ resentations. In the introductory quote to this chapter, Cathy Cohen criti­ cizes single-identity-based politics and views the potential of queer politics as one that speaks to people on the margins of marginalized communities. For example, Cohen states that positionalities of poor single Black mothers and queer people of color should be a part of queer politics. Single-identitybased politics do not address, how power is distributed outside and within LGBTIQ+ communities. Accordingly, they circumscribe queer politics’ potential for comprehension and transformation (Cohen 2005: 25). Cohen emphasizes that transformative queer politics should address relations of vari­ ous marginalized groups to power and arise from a nuanced understanding of power without collapsing it into a single continuum. Cohen proposes leftoriented radical queer politics that focus on economic exploitation and the systematic relationship among various forms of domination, as well as center struggles against sexual normalization of all marginalized communities. The appeals to universal humanity and equality in the exhibition’s interviews overlook how these notions are attached to concepts of European modernity and liberal humanism that produce the Human through a certain regime of eligibility and ineligibility, according to which only the white European subject represents Man/Human (for more on this see Bonnett 1998; El-Tayeb 2011; Imre 2005; Lentin 2008; Salem & Thompson 2016; Wekker 2016). Thus, Sylvia Wynter argues that the foundational invention of European modernity is the universal and ‘now globally hegemonic ethnoclass world of “Man”’ (2003: 262) with its ‘descriptive statement’ of rationality/ irrationality. Furthermore, Enlightenment humanism produced not only

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the universal idea of a certain ‘genre’ of Human (white/male/bourgeois/ rational) but also ‘the idea of the irrational/subrational Human Other’ (Wynter 2003: 266). Therefore, Wynter elucidates that the foundational basis of European modernity and liberal humanism is ‘the Rational Self of Man as political subject of state’ (2003: 277) in opposition to racial ‘Human Other’ when ‘other modes of being human have to be seen […] as the lack of the West’s ontologically absolute self-description’ (2003: 282). In this sense, race or ‘the Color (cum Colonial) Line’ is established to vitalize the logic of the imperial order as well as of the nation-state, which establishes the Western bourgeoisie as ‘the selected’ and ‘deserving’ subject, in opposition to its ‘dysselected’ and ‘undeserving’ Other (Wynter 2003: 322). In the case of the exhibition, liberal humanism also finds its way in the uncritical acceptance of the idea of the ‘return to Europeanness,’ which is invested in whiteness. For example, one of the exhibition’s interviewees emphasizes that Ukraine chose the civilized path of European modernity: ‘LGBT activism has become more crucial since EuroMaidan when Ukraine made its civilizational choice. We are moving in the direction of Europe. […] It means that all people can be equal and be themselves’ (Kis & Levchuk 2015). Furthermore, the exhibition’s manifestations of universalism (of humanity and equality), in addition to the backdrop of the Ukrainian flag colors, contribute to the reassertion of whiteness as a national attribute, which is supposed to be attained by a ‘normal’ citizen. Importantly, the emergence of the claims to Europeanness expressed in the exhibition’s interviews refers to the contradictory histories of the former state-socialist region. Within contemporary Europe, Ukraine, as a part of the East European post-Soviet bloc, is positioned as the ‘other’ in relation to Western Europe, the EU, and the global North in general. Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery describe the organization of the Three Worlds ideology and knowledge production as follows: ‘a “free” First World that is modern, scientific, rational; […] a “communist” Second World controlled by ideology and propaganda; […] and a Third World that is “traditional,” irrational, overpopulated, religious, and economically backward’ (2009: 18). Neda Atanasoski furthers this idea, pointing out that the racialization of the so-called Second and Third Worlds does not solely rely on bodily difference, but also on ideological, cultural, and religious markers, meaning that both ‘worlds’ have to overcome different obstacles to become ‘liberated’

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and ‘free’ (2013: 21). In this sense, the aspirations of Eastern Europe towards ‘Europeanness’ serve to overcome the ‘inferior position’ within the metageography of the world. Similarly, in regards to the European imperial pat­ tern, the Eastern European construction of whiteness may assert its legitimacy and power at the expense of and by projecting backwardness onto racial Others (Imre 2005). For example, Fatima El-Tayeb notes that Slavic Eastern and Southern European’s claims to whiteness are in line with the discourse of colorblindness and the construction of non-whiteness as non-Europe­ anness (2011: xxiv). The outcome of these racial politics is ‘amnesia’ and ‘philosophical unseeing’ of political and theoretical histories that manifest in ‘the invisible, unspeakable presence of race, the myriad ways in which it makes itself felt from day-to-day interactions to transcontinental political structures, while simultaneously being deemed nonexistent within European thought’ (El-Tayeb 2011: xviii–xix). In this sense, I ask who may identify with the exhibition’s narratives and for whom this way of legibility is precluded. The exhibition’s silence and absence around questions of ethnicity, race, and citizenship demarcates boundaries of non-normative sexuality attached to Europeanness/whiteness. David Eng, analyzing politics of liberal inclusion, rights, and recognitions for particular gay and lesbian U.S. citizen-subjects, introduces the term ‘queer liberalism’ to ‘rethink the significant cleavings and dissociations of sexuality from race, and race from sexuality, that organize contemporary structures of family and kinship as well as the privatized space of the intimate in our color­ blind age of global capitalism’ (2010: xi). In other words, Eng critically calls out the forgetting of race and the dissociation of queer politics from critical race politics. Eng articulates the urgency to analyze how queer liberalism secures its claims and constructs normative gay and lesbian citizen-subjects through the forgetting and disassociation from the race. Following this perspective, I suggest thinking about the exhibition ‘Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…’ in conjunction with the violence against Roma communities in order to explore the mechanisms of legibility. My aim is not a critique of activists/the exhibition’s interviewees but rather an analysis of the limits of liberal humanist reason that precludes other thinking, narra­ tives, and stories. The war in Ukraine put many LGBTIQ+ people in a dire situation as well as significantly deteriorated the situation of Roma, in particular, those

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displaced from Crimea and Eastern Ukraine (OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights 2014). Although there is a lack of official data on Roma people in Ukraine and only limited countrywide data on their situation, racism and discrimination against Roma are widespread and often lead to violent attacks against Roma and their property, perpetrated both by state and non-state actors. Roma people constantly encounter bar­ riers in accessing quality education, housing, civil registration documents, and employment. Forced evictions, criminalization, physical violence, and structural barriers are past and present experiences for Roma people in Central and Eastern Europe. For many, the constant process of settling and resettling as a result of violent displacement of Roma communities has become a mundane act (Law 2012). Often, the displacement is supported by the state apparatus, sanctioning the violent removal of Roma people by vigilantes or other ‘concerned citizens.’ Since 2016, there have been a number of attacks on Roma settlements across Ukraine (Coynash 2018; Lee 2016; Rorke 2018). In the prevailing discourse around the anti-Roma pogroms, Roma people are often discussed as a homogenized group and using terms such as ‘criminals,’ ‘thieves,’ or ‘drug dealers.’2 I focus on the violence against Roma communities in order to explore how the disregard of both anti-Roma violence and political organizing within Roma communities marks the limits of the liberal humanist framework and narrows down the potential of political movements. To this end, I return to Sylvia Wynter’s theorizations about European modernity, which invented Man/Human as the rational political subject and agent of the state, as one who demonstrates his reason by ‘primarily adhering to the laws of the state’ (2003: 277). Wynter states that, beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, liberal and economic-political humanist intellectuals re-described

2

For example, at the press-briefing related to the expulsion of Roma from the village Loshchynivka, the Governor of Ukraine’s Odessa Oblast commented: ‘There is a real drug dealing den; there is a mass drug dealing, in which these asocial elements [Roma] living there are involved. … It is necessary that these drug dealers, criminals, who created the violent environment wouldn’t feel themselves at ease.’ «Саакашвили прокомментировал события в Лощиновке», Корреспондент.net, August 29, 2016, available at: (accessed February 28, 2019).

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the Human/Man as a political subject also as ‘economic Man’ (2003: 314), as ‘jobholding Breadwinner,’ and ‘Investor, or capital accumulator’ (2003: 321). This new conceptualization of the human calls for its ‘archipelago of Human Otherness’ (2003: 321), which is populated by the unemployed, the Poor, the homeless, and the criminalized. One of the central mechanisms that functions in relation to the ‘archipelago of Human Otherness’ is the expansion of criminalization (Wynter 2003: 329). In turn, Cacho states that criminalization determines the racialized leg­ ibility to liberal personhood and regulates vulnerable racialized populations, ‘not only disciplining and dehumanizing those ineligible for personhood but also presenting them as ineligible for sympathy and compassion’ (2012: 37). Cacho uses the concept of ‘a de facto status crime’ that refers to the condition when a ‘person does not need to do anything to commit a status crime because the person’s status is the offense in and of itself ’ (2012: 43). A de facto status crime assumes ‘that a person of a certain status is certain to commit future crimes and may well have already committed crimes unwitnessed’ (2012: 43). Although Cacho writes about the U.S., her work is important for think­ ing about racialization and criminalization of non-whiteness outside of the U.S. It is crucial to explore how criminalizing and racializing mechanisms are entangled with the parameters of rights discourses through the universal­ ity, neglect, and normativity of certain concepts and ideas; in other words, how the exhibition’s framework and its appeals to universality, rights, and recognition for LGBTIQ+ people in Ukraine highlights or occludes other racialized groups’ ineligibility for those same rights. In the context of the exhibition, only certain bodies and behaviors become visible and legible, while other ways of representing sexuality or political activity outside of the framework of rational, modern, liberal subjects are excluded. The exhibi­ tion represents distinct individuals with their deliberate will and personal choice and attempts to legitimate them as national citizen-subjects. This representation may be unattainable for racialized populations, for example, queer Roma people or other marginalized populations whose access to the public domain may be connected with extreme risks or entirely impossible. One of the themes in the exhibition’s narratives is a call to LGBTIQ+ people to be visible, to come out. Coming out is narrated as an essential part of the fight for rights. In one of the exhibition’s interviews, an openly gay journalist states:

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Lesia Pagulich Our own community is also to blame. In a country of 45 million people, there are practically no LGBT people who are out. There are only a handful of them and they are mostly involved in the field of activism. Ordinary Ukrainian citizens don’t know what LGBT means and they don’t know any LGBT people. In a country that keeps its LGBT life in the closet, the community itself should be the first to address this issue. (Eristavi 2015)

This comment was followed by his own story of overcoming the fear of coming out, facing bullying in school, and coming out after having had a chance to travel: I went to places where I thought I would feel more comfortable but I realized that this fear stays inside you everywhere you go. It is impossible to escape until you turn back, stop, and start hitting back. Where you live is not so important, you first have to solve the problem of self-respect. (Eristavi 2015)

The liberal narrative of individual responsibility (that often requires privi­ leges) and personal will as the only resources one needs to overcome oppres­ sion by coming out narrows down the understanding of oppression to an individual issue. As Fatima El-Tayeb argues, the binary between out and closeted subjects fundamentally relies on ‘legitimate and illegitimate subjects, privileging an either-or binary that rejects the negotiating of in-between spaces’ (2011: 130–131) and constructs a certain model of queer identity. Ultimately, an algorithm of coming out becomes a model of development for LGBTIQ+ activism and way to measure progressiveness, modernity, and the success of the community. Therefore, representing distinct individuals with their personal choices and will, for whom coming out exists in the realm of possibility, the exhibi­ tion follows the logic of liberal subjecthood, access to which is unattainable for racialized populations marked as irrational and as ‘criminals’ (Cacho 2012; El-Tayeb 2011). The homogenization of Roma populations as criminal precludes their legibility to individual reason and rational (political) will. Thus, Roma populations remain ineligible to (national or European white) liberal subjecthood and ‘the rational self ’ (Wynter 2003). In this sense, the exhibition only makes certain subjects legible, while other ways of represent­ ing sexuality or political activity remain outside of the constructed model of identity.

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Conclusions In this chapter, I analyze the projections and forms of homonationalism in Ukraine and in particular, strategies and mechanisms through which gay and lesbian subjects are constructed as legible, while ‘Others’ are (re)pro­ duced via racial and national difference. Through its rhetoric of patriotism and citizenship, the exhibition ‘Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…’ demonstrates how sexuality becomes a crucial formation in the articulation of ‘good’ citi­ zens across gender, class, and race. The very title of the exhibition frames legitimization through patriotism, proving a ‘proper’ civic stance. In other words, the exhibition’s framework intends to produce new lovers, however, only within the framework of patriots and citizens. I suggest that the inclu­ sion of one group into the nation’s boundaries does not challenge social hegemonies but attempts to normalize non-normative subjects according to the hegemonic discourses of the nation. Furthermore, I explore the exhibition ‘Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…’ in terms of mapping the limits of liberal humanist reasoning that reinforces a single-identity-based politics that often relies on hetero-/homosexual, us/enemy binaries. The exhibition’s references to universal equality and human rights demonstrate the link between gay liberal rights discourses and the production of narratives of progress and modernity that leave out the myriad of other subjectivities and experiences. In this case, discourses of freedom and rights contribute to the advancing of only privileged groups within marginalized communities and solidifying the status quo. The desire to make LGBTIQ+ issues visible via the rhetoric of universal humanity, rights, and tolerance, together with certain national attributes, constructs the individual subjects of democracy and freedom, and foregrounds the representability of certain subjects, prioritizing an integrationist approach wherein nationalist rhetoric remains unquestioned. Thus, I argue that the exhibition situates the notions of equality and freedom within the nation’s boundaries, which have been intensely policed and conditioned by propagating normative scripts of ‘proper’ citizens, though ‘different’ in terms of sexuality and gender identity. Therefore, only certain voices, bodies, and experiences become viewed as representative. The use of

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the national flag colors frames LGBTIQ+ individuals as sovereign citizens and patriots. As I have demonstrated, the exhibition reproduces limits and assigns bodies with certain understandings of freedom that reconstitute the nation’s boundaries and reproduce mechanisms of stratification and the absence of some bodies. These limits may contribute to the marginalization of criti­ cal positionalities in relation to dominant notions of justice. In addition, the danger of a single story of social justice, visibility, and the possibility to ‘speak’ emerges, which does not challenge social hegemonies. Therefore, drawing on Cathy Cohen’s theorization, I emphasize that transformative queer politics and coalition-building have to address relations of various mar­ ginalized groups to power. Focusing on left-oriented radical queer politics, which center struggles against sexual normalization of all marginalized com­ munities and highlight economic exploitation together with the systematic relationship among forms of domination, Cohen underlines the necessity of a constant re-thinking, destabilization, and troubling of normative power, categories and identities, social hierarchies and hegemonies, and the impor­ tance of political struggles that do not collapse the understanding of power into a single continuum but arise from a nuanced understanding of the latter.

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Motta, Carlos. 2017. ‘The Problem of Democracy,’ The Vilcek Foundation, March 14, 2017, available online at (accessed February 28, 2019). OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. 2014. ‘Situation Assess­ ment Report on Roma in Ukraine and the Impact of the Current Crisis,’ August 2014, available online at (accessed February 28, 2019). Pinchuk Art Centre. 2015. ‘Pinchuk Art Centre presents Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…, a Solo Exhibition by the 2014 Future Generation Art Prize Winner Carlos Motta,’ October 29, 2015, available online at (accessed February 28, 2019). Puar, Jasbir. 2006. ‘Mapping US Homonormativities,’ Gender, Place and Culture 13(1), pp. 67–88. Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rexhepi, Piro. 2016. ‘From Orientalism to Homonationalism: Queer Politics, Islamo­ phobia, and Europeanisation in Kosovo,’ in: Bilić, B. (ed.). LGBT Activism and Europeanisation in the Post-Yugoslav Space: On the Rainbow Way to Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 179–203. Rorke, Bernard. 2018 ‘Anti-Roma pogroms in Ukraine: on C14 and tolerating terror,’ European Roma Rights Centre, June 12, 2018, available online at (accessed February 28, 2019). Salem, Sara, and Thompson, Vanessa. 2016. ‘Old Racisms, New Masks: On the Con­ tinuing Discontinuities of Racism and the Erasure of Race in European Contexts,’ Nineteen Sixty Nine: An Ethnic Studies Journal 3(1), pp. 1–23. Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Starr, Terrell Jermaine. 2010. ‘Blacks in the Ukraine,’ The Crisis 117(3), pp. 20–24. Stenning, Alison. 2010. Domesticating Neo-Liberalism: Spaces of Economic Practice and Social Reproduction in Post-Socialist Cities. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Tlostanova, Madina. 2010. Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian Borderlands. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Verdery, Katherine. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press. Wekker, Gloria. 2016. White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, its Overrepresentaion – an Argument,’ The New Centennial Review 3(3), pp. 257–337.

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Yerema, Anatoliy. 2015. Interview. PinchukArtCentre, available online at (accessed February 28, 2019). Zakharov, Nikolay, Law, Ian, and Lastouski, Aliaksei. 2017. ‘Racism in Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine,’ in: Zakharov, N., and Law, I. (eds.). Post-Soviet Racisms. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 53–90. Zinchenkov, Aleksandr. 2015. Interview. PinchukArtCentre, available online at (accessed February 28, 2019).

Vanya Mark Solovey

6 ‘Global Standards’ and ‘Internalized Coloniality’: How Feminists in Russia See the ‘West’

Introduction Is there a feminism in Russia?1 Most academic scholarship touching on the subject tends to claim that in Russia, feminism has failed or never ‘taken root’ (Yusupova 2014: 608; Turbine 2015: 327). Whereas there exists a consider­ able body of scholarship on the Russian2 women’s movement of the 1990s (see e.g. Posadskaya 1994; Racioppi & O’Sullivan See 1997; Sperling 1999; Zdravomyslova 2002), feminism’s current situation in Russia is, according to the broad academic consensus, one of decline and increasingly desperate struggles. A common academic narrative on feminists in Russia – be it on women’s rights NGOs or Pussy Riot – constructs them as a tiny handful 1

2

Some of the arguments in this paper were initially presented at two conferences: Queering Paradigms VIII – Fucking Solidarity: Queering Concepts on/from a Post-Soviet Perspective at the University of Vienna on September 21, 2017, and Queer and Feminist Studies in Eastern Europe at the University of Bucharest on November 19, 2017. I thank Xüsha Urmenic, Masha Neufeld, and Katharina Wiedlack who first introduced me to a critical perspective on ‘Western’ hegemony and whose generous support throughout the years has meant a lot to me. I also thank my supervisor, Prof. Beate Binder, the anonymous reviewers, and the editors of this volume for their insightful comments and suggestions which this paper has greatly benefited from. In English, I have no way to distinguish between Russian as relating to the state and to its dominant ethnicity (which I can do both in Russian with российские vs. русские and in German with russländisch vs. russisch). Following Redi Koobak’s strategy (regarding the term Estonian), which she shared during her lecture at the Linköping University in February 2017, I try to avoid using the ambiguous term Russian altogether and replace it with the phrase in Russia. When it is unavoidable, however, I only use it in the state and not the ethnic sense.

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of people who promote ‘Western’3 values in the face of an increasingly hos­ tile patriarchal state ( Johnson & Saarinen 2011; Johnson & Saarinen 2013; Turbine 2015). Exceptions to this trend are few (Sperling 2015), and they have to date mainly been published in other languages than English (Garstenauer 2010; Garstenauer 2018; Сенькова 2018), which limits their impact on the academic mainstream.4 Having spent my formative years as a feminist activist in Moscow, I see the situation differently. Since the mid-2000s, grassroots feminist move­ ments in Russia5 have been growing steadily and at an impressing pace. At the present moment, feminist collectives all over Russia are organizing consciousness-raising and support groups, holding protests, educational, and cultural events. Thousands of online projects across various platforms unite hundreds of thousands of subscribers in ever more vibrant and diverse femi­ nist communities. Feminist communication and expression take all possible forms, from theoretical debates to creating cartoons and poetry. Increasingly, feminist activists have succeeded at securing visibility in the media, which are gradually accepting and helping to promote the feminist agenda.6 3 4

5 6

I put the term ‘West’ in quotation marks in order, firstly, to highlight that this is an imaginary entity without clear boundaries and, secondly, to indicate a critical distance towards this concept and its trail of political connotations. Valerie Sperling dedicated a chapter in her book (Sperling 2015) to Pussy Riot and inter­ viewed other feminist activists on these most prominent Russian feminists. While Sperling’s account acknowledges multiple feminist voices within Russia, her general argument pre­ sents Pussy Riot, too, as failing at feminism. Therese Garstenauer who writes in German offers a thorough analysis of the power dynamics between Russian and ‘Western’ gender researchers. Located in the sociology of science, however, her research does not focus on grassroots movements but on academia. Olga Senkova’s newly published research is dis­ cussed in the ‘Method and Data’ section of this paper. Research has also been published on #ЯНеБоюсьСказать (#IAmNotScaredToSpeak), the 2016 Ukrainian and Russian online flashmob against sexual violence (Стеблина 2018, Aripova & Johnson 2018, Sedysheva 2018). However, these articles present the flashmob as a standalone event without exploring its connection to the broader and pre-dating feminist movements in Russia or Ukraine. To demarcate my research object, I rely upon a broad definition of feminism; self-identi­ fication as feminist is central to it. See more about this in the ‘Method and Data’ section. I refer here to liberal, predominantly online media outlets such as Meduza (even though the recent harassment scandal uncovered the limits of its feminist awareness), The Village, Bumaga, Afisha, Takie Dela, etc., and some of the more traditional media like Ekho Moskvy. A crucial development has also certainly been the emergence of a specifically (pop) feminist online magazine: Wonderzine.

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I argue that one of the major reasons why feminist movements in Russia have until now remained unacknowledged by academia, despite their growth and increasing successes, are ‘West’-centering assumptions that underlie the mainstream academic approach to feminism and gender in Russia. Specifically, it is the construction of feminism as an element of ‘Western’ modernity and of Russia as ‘lagging behind’ (Wiedlack & Neufeld 2014: 147; Tlostanova, Thapar-Björkert, & Koobak 2016: 213–214) that prevents ‘West’-dominated academia from imagining the possibility of successful mass feminist movements in Russia. Therefore, to make contemporary feminist movements in Russia visible to academia, it is not enough to simply intro­ duce them as a research object. Rather, it is necessary to explicitly address ‘Western’ hegemony. In the following, I will attempt to do this by ‘turning the tables’ and looking at the relationship between ‘Western’ and Russian feminisms from a Russian feminist’s point of view.

Method and Data This paper is part of my research on contemporary feminist movements in Russia. I define feminist movements and movement communities as grassroots, non-professionalized communities that identify as feminist, engage in a wide range of political, ideological, and cultural activities both offline and online, and maintain constant contact with each other. Explicit feminist identifica­ tion is central to this definition, but what it specifically entails (i.e. defini­ tions of woman, gender, patriarchy, formulations and negotiations of political agendas) is, by contrast, one of the focuses of my empirical work rather than a predefined parameter. Including the term grassroots in my definition of femi­ nist movements means that I do not focus on women’s rights NGOs, gender studies institutions, or contemporary art scenes. The goal of this research is to provide a general analytical perspective on feminist movements in Russia that is, on the one hand, useful for those within them and, on the other, helpful for understanding them from the outside. More specifically, I seek to identify at least some of the fundamental processes currently characteristic to these move­ ments. This has not been done before; to my knowledge, the only completed

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study of contemporary feminist movements in Russia is Ольга Сенькова/Olga Senkova’s recent research on the Saint Petersburg feminist scene (Сенькова 2018). While it introduces grassroots feminist movements as a research object and opens up an interesting discussion of current ideological divides within the feminist scene, this study’s local focus is, I believe, a substantial limitation, and the fact that its chosen locality is one of Russia’s two metropolitan centers makes it even harder to draw any generalized conclusions. As long as contemporary feminist movements in Russia remain unseen by academia, there also remains a need for a broader picture, which is what I hope to provide with my research. In order for this picture to adequately represent the movements’ com­ plexities, internal differences, and conflicts, I believe it is crucial to center those voices within feminist scenes that remain systematically pushed to the margins and unheard within as well as beyond feminist communities. Consistent with feminist standpoint theory, I also believe marginalization provides subjects with opportunities to see social reality more clearly and fully than privileged subjects do (Harding 1991: 121; Hill Collins 1990: 11–13). That is to say, marginalized subjects potentially have an epistemic advantage (Rolin 2009: 218), which is why it makes both political and epistemological sense to place their perspectives at the center of one’s research. One way I have tried to do this in my project was to prioritize marginalized perspectives when inviting people to participate in interviews. I have considered class/educational status, race/ethnicity, gender and sexual identities, age, and other axes of domination and oppression as well as people’s positions within feminist communities, in other words, their status in internal hierarchies, deliberately approaching primarily ‘regular’ feminists rather than prominent ‘leaders.’ By leaders, I mean those few feminists who have considerable symbolic capital and enjoy both wide recognition across feminist scenes and public visibility in the media, which also means that their opinions are already available in published sources. By ‘regular’ feminists, on the other hand, I mean those who participate in feminist scenes without achieving wide prominence or recognition. Whereas I am still considering talking to some of the feminist celebrities later in the research process in order to complete the picture, it is the strategy of starting out from marginalized perspectives that has enabled me to gather non-trivial and multifaceted data. My core data are currently fourteen qualitative, semi-structured individual and group interviews with a total of eighteen feminists from four Russian cities: Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Tomsk, and Voronezh. My choice of cities

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was motivated by the presence of an active local feminist scene as well as the need to ensure diversity in terms of the cities’ location and population size. To include various marginalized perspectives, I relied partly on personal con­ nections; thus, some participants were my personal acquaintances (however, I deliberately ruled out interviewing those I had worked or been close friends with). The interviews took place in 2015 and 2016, the settings were mostly cafés or participants’ homes. Our conversations revolved around participants’ experiences with feminist projects, events, and collectives; they also included questions that invited reflection on a variety of movement- and scene-related issues. I sought to avoid obscuring participants’ agenda and priorities with my own and limited my control over the conversation, letting participants talk freely on the topics of most interest to them. I subsequently analyzed the data relying on constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz 2014), an approach that allows for relative independence from preexisting theories while also taking into account how the researcher and researched co-construct the data through their interaction. In order to reduce the inequality inherent in academic empirical research (Edwards & Ribbens 1997: 3–4; DeVault 1999: 187–188) and grant participants more power over their stories and ideas, I included a question on quote authorization in the informed consent form I handed out before the interviews, along with the usual issues of general research aims, data confiden­ tiality, and access. As all participants stated they wanted to be contacted for this, I get in touch with each of them every time I want to use a quote from their respective interview in a new publication and check whether I may cite these particular words in this particular context. Although this procedure does not cure all power imbalance, it is efficient enough in preventing much of the well-intentioned distortions of participants’ stories common to academic research (DeVault 1999: 188). Besides the interviews, my understanding of feminist scenes in Russia draws on my personal experience as an activist. This being said, I do not con­ sider myself a full insider in the sense of the ‘insider/outsider debate’ in social research, but rather think of my perspective as partial and of my insider/ outsider status as situational and shifting (Naples 2003: 49). My experience and the contacts I maintain to feminists in Russia provide me with exten­ sive knowledge of various feminist scenes, events, and debates, and help me see beyond many preconceptions that haunt outside observers. However, both my knowledge and my status within feminist scenes are shaped by my

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(changing) social positioning. For instance, my Moscow origin means that my activist experience has limited relevance in the so-called ‘regions,’ and coming out as trans in the course of my research project has reduced my opportunities to access certain feminist scenes while also making me more acutely aware of the issue of cissexism in feminist politics. More importantly for this paper, the fact that I currently belong to ‘Western’ academia makes me more of an outsider with regard to feminist activist scenes in Russia. Namely, it causes, among other things, a difference in priorities. For most of my research participants, as I will discuss in more detail below, the ‘West’ has proven to be a topic of secondary importance, which was, of course, to be expected due to my chosen interview type and sampling strategy. For me, on the other hand, it is a crucial issue both personally and with regard to my research. The question of how to think about the rela­ tionship between Russian and ‘Western’ feminisms is inseparable from the question of how to present my research to ‘Western’ audiences. Hence, while negotiating relationships with the ‘West’ certainly does not belong to the fundamental trends in the feminist movements I seek to analyze, this issue has to be the starting point if I am to produce an account of these move­ ments that is not stereotypical and depoliticized. In the following, I will juxtapose fragments from interviews with two feminists, Katerina Maas and Tatyana Bolotina.7 The reason I focus on them is simple: they were the ones who spoke about the ‘West’ at length rather than just mentioning it briefly, like many other participants did. I will discuss the ways of thinking about the ‘West’ and dealing with ‘Western’ hegemony as they are made apparent in this data and then address the more specific issue of knowledge transfer between ‘Western’ and Russian feminisms in the same interviews. I will conclude with discussing the significance of these two perspectives with regard to my other data as well as the broader context, as defined by hegemonic discourses on feminism in Russia. 7

Although I initially planned to use pseudonyms to protect participants’ identities, both feminists I cite below preferred being featured under their actual full names. Whereas I am still working on a general strategy to resolve the tension between per­ sonal data protection and giving due credit to activists’ authorship, in this case, the second motivation prevailed, as the quotes I use here lay down participants’ analysis rather than personal stories.

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‘Global Standards’: Complicating the ‘Lag’ Discourse I will begin with a quote from an interview with Katerina Maas, a journal­ ist and blogger from Tomsk. Katerina founded a feminist group in Tomsk that started out online and then expanded into the offline, holding meetings and organizing public talks on feminist topics with invited speakers. When explaining why she does not define these activities as political, Katerina says: We’re not a political group, we’re simply… Simply learning how to live by global stand­ ards, so to say [laughs]. Although in Tomsk, nobody really needs that.8

Even if one leaves out the whole topic of definitions of the political, which is, I believe, significant enough to deserve a separate paper, this short statement says a lot. One way of interpreting it is to focus on the association Katerina makes between her group and a certain ‘global’ community, while setting herself and her group against their local community in Tomsk. She also places the two communities in a hierarchical relationship and points out her own position within this hierarchy: a ‘learner’s’ one. On the other hand, there is a certain bitterness in Katerina’s words about her city, an environment that does not understand her. If we take this sentiment as a starting point, the ‘global’ community that sets the ‘standards’ appears as a collective ally that helps Katerina (albeit symbolically) to not feel alone. Both aspects are easier to discern in the following excerpt: vanya: In your opinion… in what direction should feminism develop? katerina: Oh, dear me, in Russia we’ve got a long way to go, I mean really! I can’t even think about Russia, to be honest. I get so depressed right away! I just… with all those laws, with all those [fanatics] who propagate that you have, like, some energy 8

The interviews were conducted in Russian; all quotes here are given in my translation. I have edited the quotes slightly to bring them closer to written style but have mostly preserved hesitation pauses to reflect thinking processes as they manifest themselves in speech. In interview quotes, round brackets indicate fragments where the transcrip­ tion might be inaccurate due to recording deficits, and square brackets are used both for non-verbal sounds and for minor rewordings resulting from editing and translat­ ing. In very rare instances, I have edited out language that reproduces oppression and replaced it with terms I deem more appropriate (also enclosed in square brackets).

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Vanya Mark Solovey flowing into your uterus through your skirt9 – I don’t know… I think, in Russia we haven’t even reached the second wave of feminism yet, that’s… my personal senti­ ment. We’ve got – [to be] like the USA, we’ve got a very long (way) to go, [to be like] Europe – I’m not even talking about [countries like] Norway or Sweden, that’s out of the question, goodness me!

When asked about future directions for feminism, Katerina starts with speaking of feeling hopeless and cornered. She refers to far-right ideologies that naturalize patriarchy and to restrictive laws recently introduced by the state (at the time of the interview in 2016, the new laws dealing with gender and sexuality included, most notably, the 2013 federal ban on ‘homosexual propaganda’ and the increasingly restrictive and stigmatizing abortion legisla­ tion adopted between 2011 and 2014). By making these references, Katerina outlines a hostile political and cultural environment in which the state joins forces with extreme conservatives advocating for abolishing all emancipa­ tion. The implication is that in a hostile environment like this, it is hard to make any grand plans for a movement or to imagine any daring agenda. Katerina also recurs, as she does in the former quote on ‘global standards,’ to what has been called the ‘lag’ discourse (Koobak & Marling 2014: 332). This discourse constructs Central and Eastern Europe as ‘backward’ and ‘repressive’ and opposes it to a ‘free’ and ‘progressive’ ‘West’ (Mizielińska & Kulpa 2011: 17–18; Wiedlack & Neufeld 2014: 147). In this discourse, it is the ‘East’ that has radical conservatives with outrageous and ridicu­ lous ideas, partly supported by the state, whereas similar processes in the ‘West’ are blurred out. When the ‘lag discourse’ is applied to feminisms, the ‘West’ appears as a yardstick not only of progress, but of feminist success; in Russian feminist scenes, it is common to combine the ‘lag discourse’ with the ‘three waves of feminism’ narrative, which sparks debates on whether ‘it’s time’ for Russia to go over to the ‘third wave’ or if it has to ‘catch up’ more thoroughly with ‘the second.’ Such debates are, incidentally, similar to what Polish queer researchers have theorized with regard to LGBT and 9

The idea that women must only ever wear skirts or dresses so as not to obstruct the ‘natural’ flow of the ‘female energy’ supposedly emanating from the earth has indeed been popular for some time in the extreme neoconservative circles in Russia. In femi­ nist scenes, on the other hand, it has been much derided and turned into a meme that mocks radical gender essentialism.

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queer activism as Eastern European ‘knotted time’ or ‘time of coincidence’ as opposed to ‘Western’ ‘linear time’ or ‘time of sequence’ (Mizielińska & Kulpa 2011: 15–16). In considerations of feminism as well as of queer activ­ ism, time functions as a tool of ‘Western’ hegemony (Kulpa et al. 2012: 117). The ‘lag discourse’ is activated by Katerina in the statement above. In fact, her first answer concerning future directions for feminist movements in Russia seems to be that they should follow the ‘Western’ model. When I first heard Katerina speak of Russia and the ‘West’ in this way, I thought that she subscribed to the ‘lag discourse’ in its totality and was completely ‘West’-oriented in her views. But a close reading of her statements mentioning ‘Western’ actors, movements, and theories proves her position to be much more nuanced. This becomes clearer as she continues: I don’t know what I’d wish for. I’d like [to have] more popularization. Let it be pop feminism, like Taylor Swift or Beyoncé, but let it be there, let it be some… um… parallel way… where, I mean, that you can jump over on… and follow it… like… so it all moves forward somehow. I don’t know, I mean, maybe more… spreading of the network itself, I guess, of feminist associations of all sorts and… women’s associations.

Katerina speaks here of a visible alternative, something to counter the con­ servative hopelessness and stagnation she has described above. She uses ‘Western’ examples (Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, in this case) as ready-made illustrations that represent an acceptable rather than ideal version of femi­ nism. In Katerina’s deliberations, the ‘West’ is not so much a model to follow blindly but rather an inspiration – this is, I argue, if not a challenge to, then certainly a complication of the ‘lag discourse.’ In fact, in this fragment, she names ‘Western’-type pop feminism alongside expanding the network of feminist and women’s rights organizations within Russia as two parallel, mutually complementing ways to ensure a wider circulation of feminist ideas. After suggesting that feminist movements in Russia need to follow the way paved by the ‘West,’ Katerina presents her actual idea of popularization as a central goal for feminist movements in Russia. Drawing on ‘Western’ models becomes, in the end, a tool that is subordinate to reaching this goal. While Katerina looks for visible ‘parallel ways’ to counter patriarchal ideologies and practices, she does not stop at using ready-made ‘Western’ inspirations. As a feminist blogger, journalist, and, moreover, founder of a

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feminist group, she actively produces these alternatives herself. Indeed, she emphasizes this idea when reflecting on her group’s significance and impact: We simply show that it’s actually possible, this… um, women’s community [laughs] without… mutual insults, threats or anything… I mean, not what we’ve been… shown for a long time as the norm, but something more modern and something that doesn’t revolve around… I don’t know, chasing for a husband or some similar nonsense.

What the group does, according to Katerina, goes beyond providing a safer space for its members, a space-based on mutual respect, free of the misogyny and androcentrism that are normalized in the larger society. By its mere exist­ ence, the group also fulfills a symbolic role: it demonstrates the possibility of respectful and valuing communication between women, something that deserves being called a community, although Katerina’s laughter suggests she is still somewhat embarrassed to use the word. Besides being a haven for its participants, the group also sends a message to society at large, and this mes­ sage contests the normalization of patriarchy – as do, according to Katerina, ‘Western’ pop feminist icons. Ultimately, what Katerina is interested in is fighting sexism and patriarchy in the symbolic field, and ‘Western’ models are one of the many tools she uses in this fight.

‘Internalized Coloniality’: Criticizing ‘Western’ Hegemony Tatyana Bolotina who lives in Moscow and defines herself as a full-time feminist activist10 provides a different example of explicitly taking a complex stance towards the ‘West’:

10

Of all my participants to date, Tatyana Bolotina is probably the best-known in (pri­ marily metropolitan) feminist scenes. A radical lesbian, vegan, anarcha-feminist, and anti-classist, she is a controversial figure and certainly has little symbolic capital, which is why I decided approaching her to be part of my primary sample would still be in line with my strategy of starting out from marginalized perspectives.

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Actually, I would like to add something on, so to say, [laughs] internalized coloniality, as I call it. I mean, most Russian women have this feeling of inferiority compared to first-world countries, especially the USA, and it shows in different ways, like, many get into hardcore nationalism, right? But among feminists, it’s mostly not the case, I mean, mostly the feeling is that, you know, everything sucks here, that we’ve got a bad mentality, that nothing is ever going to be better… That out there somewhere, far, far away, that’s where everything’s cool, and here everything’s bad because we’re so bad… And in my opinion, it’s very similar to how women in general feel about men: that, like, men are so great, like they’ve invented everything, written everything, and so on, and we are only good enough to make babies and… be sexual objects. And actually, this internalized coloniality, it gets in the way a lot… for the feminist movement, it prevents [us] from… treating… perceiving one another as important people, so to say… to care about each other, to take interest… in each other. […] This is a systemic issue. This… feeling of our own, like, worthlessness. [I]’d like to work with it somehow, um, by popularizing what goes on here, I’ve already talked about demonstrations, and texts written here, written by non-prominent feminists. This is partly why I like reading personal stories and comments, not the manual.

Tatyana criticizes sharply the ‘lag discourse,’ the tendency to compare one­ self to ‘first-world countries,’ and associates it with feelings of inferiority and worthlessness. She lays down her analysis, distinguishing between two ways to respond to ‘Western’ cultural hegemony: ‘hardcore nationalism’ and internalizing our own inferiority, which is, according to her, more common among feminists. She goes on to describe how women in Russia internal­ ize their subordinate position and compares it to internalizing sexism and misogyny. She then explains the negative impact this internalizing has on feminist movements and outlines ways of resistance. While I find Tatyana’s analysis extremely compelling, I would like first to address the one point I personally disagree with, namely her use of the term coloniality. Colonial terms tend to come to mind easily when one reflects on Russia’s subordinate status with regard to the ‘West,’ and sev­ eral theorists would side with Tatyana in this regard: Decolonial scholar Madina Tlostanova, for instance, describes Russia as having been ‘intel­ lectually, epistemologically and culturally colonized’ by ‘Western’ empires (Tlostanova 2015: 46). However, such metaphoric uses, even with caveats like those Tlostanova makes, entail the risk of obscuring the nature of the relationship between Russia and the ‘West,’ which is not a colonial one, and erasing actual colonial power hierarchies (Suchland 2011: 854–855).

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Indeed, it is also Tlostanova, together with and followed by other authors (cf. Tlostanova & Mignolo 2009: 136; Tlostanova 2010: 64; Morozov 2015: 13), who has conceived of Russia as a subaltern empire, that is, one that is simultaneously object of ‘Western’ domination and subject of imperial and colonial oppression. I hand it to Tatyana that for the purposes of her argu­ ment, the term coloniality certainly has both rhetoric and analytical power. Whereas I went so far as to quote it in this paper’s title so as not to misrep­ resent Tatyana’s argument, I also believe that as people born and raised in Moscow, the metropolitan center of a colonial Empire (a position she and I share), we should be mindful of Russia’s direct, rather than metaphoric, colonial power and take care not to relativize it. I would like further to address how Tatyana differentiates between the two responses to experiencing ‘Western’ hegemony: nationalism and internalization. By naming both responses and taking a critical distance from both, Tatyana demonstrates that the choice is not limited to those two options. She thus resists the easy ‘Cold War-style’ dichotomies that would conflate a position of critique towards the ‘West’ with nationalism and, respectively, opposition to Russian state policies and ideologies with an uncritical acceptance of a ‘Western’ perspective. But the most crucial point is, in my opinion, Tatyana’s analysis of how women in Russia internalize their subordinate position and the parallel she draws to internalizing sexism or misogyny. Drawing on well-theorized modes of discrimination or oppression to gain insight into less theorized ones is a widely used analytical tool in feminist scenes. Tatyana resorts to it in this statement to expose the similarities in the processes of internalization: as her statement suggests, in both cases, those in power are constructed as deserv­ ing their status, whereas the disadvantaged and oppressed are constructed as undeserving, and their subordination is associated with their supposed inherent deficiencies. According to this model, self-devaluation is crucial to internalizing and, ultimately, accepting oppression. And it is this self-deval­ uation, Tatyana argues, that hurts feminist movements. Hence the solution she suggests: re-valuing marginalized – local, Russian, and unrenowned – feminists by consciously centering them, promoting and popularizing their work, whatever form it takes. Tatyana first mentions demonstrations, refer­ ring to a different point in the interview where she stressed the importance of disseminating and preserving knowledge on demonstrations and other

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feminist action in Russia to ensure the movements’ continuity. She also sug­ gests focusing on non-prominent feminists’ stories and ideas rather than on texts written by renowned feminists (she refers to the latter as ‘the manual,’ a concept I will address below). Tatyana provides an example of a clear, outspoken, and thought-out feminist critique of ‘Western’ hegemony. Whereas Katerina uses the ‘West’centering ‘lag discourse’ strategically, Tatyana rejects it altogether, emphasiz­ ing its harmful aspects. What both feminists’ positions have in common, however, is the focus on their own communities. Katerina speaks of her own city, Tomsk, and local women as her main audience, and Tatyana emphasizes the importance of ‘perceiving one another as important people.’ In the follow­ ing, I will juxtapose two more quotes from their respective interviews that, on the one hand, make both their positions and the intersections between them clearer, and on the other, bring to light another significant aspect of the relationship between Russian and ‘Western’ feminisms.

Learning from the ‘Western’ Manual? Learning is a concept that already came up in Katerina’s first quote, in which she spoke of ‘learning how to live by global standards,’ and it is the issue of learning – in other words, of knowledge transfer and circulation – that I will focus on in this section. Indeed, communication between ‘Western’ and Russian feminisms has often taken the form of teaching and learning. Although theoretically, the process of knowledge transfer can be mutual and equal, in fact, it has mostly been a one-way, top-down relationship deter­ mined by ‘Western’ cultural hegemony. For the grassroots feminist move­ ments I study, the search for intellectual and ideological foundations – who to learn from – seems to be a major concern, which probably has to do with their need for legitimization in a context in which they are being constantly denied legitimacy by all powerful institutions, from state authorities to the media and academia. A special term has even established itself, designat­ ing this core of essential feminist ideas: матчасть/matchast’, which I have translated above as the manual (the English and Russian slang words are

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widely considered to be functional equivalents). Initially internet slang for a complex of generally accepted, fundamental knowledge on a given topic, this term has acquired a more specific meaning in Russian-speaking online feminist scenes. In light of the many ideological conflicts and divides that happen in feminist communities, ‘the manual’ is something every feminist in Russia is supposed to be aware of and agree with – in other words, mainstream feminist knowledge. It is probably unsurprising, then, that much of ‘the manual’ consists of ‘Western’ ‘second-wave’ texts.11 These texts are translated and circulated time and time again on Russian feminist online platforms. And it is this practice that Tatyana Bolotina takes on in the fol­ lowing interview fragment. Those public pages [that publish] all that manual [stuff ], I’m not interested in that. […] I’m interested in the problems people face here and now. That is, not in some­ thing that has once been described in America or somewhere else, see? And… I believe what’s happening in Russia today is actually a little different from… another country and another time.

The public pages (паблики/pabliki) Tatyana mentions are collective online spaces on Vkontakte, a Russian counterpart of Facebook, which is currently the most popular online platform for feminists in Russia. Criticizing feminist public pages for publishing ‘the manual,’ Tatyana makes a direct association between ‘the manual’ and outdated American texts, which she discards as irrelevant. When I ask her for examples, Tatyana says: Well, the most elementary example, for instance… of the American manual that doesn’t suit us is the middle-class housewife, I mean there is a lot on that topic. Here, we have, firstly, few housewives and… as to the middle class… I don’t know [laughs], basically, there’s a lot less of middle class as well. Yes, and… Our history is different, I mean, at the time where in America, middle-class women mostly stayed at home and did housework, women here mostly worked, they had, like, two or three shifts.

Tatyana emphasizes the differences between the realities of present-day Russia and the mid-twentieth-century U.S.A. and draws upon these differences to explain her critique of Russian feminist platforms that publish ‘the manual.’ 11

Some of the prominently featured authors are Andrea Dworkin, Kate Millett, Catherine McKinnon, and Shulamith Firestone.

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The example she provides has long been discussed by post-socialist feminists (e.g. Slavova 2006: 248–249) – which goes, in my opinion, to prove its central­ ity. Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique with her feminist argument building on a white middle-class housewife’s life is indeed constructed in histories of feminism as a (if not the) cornerstone and thus placed at the very heart of ‘the manual.’ Meanwhile, that middle-class housewife’s experience is unrelatable for a wide majority in post-socialist countries. Tatyana is hesitant about the term middle class as applied to Russia – with good cause, as the term is highly unclear and ambiguous in a post-socialist context (Remington 2011: 100, 115; Gontmakher & Ross 2015: 269–270). What is certain, however, is that both in socialist and postsocialist contexts, most women have had to combine day jobs with housework and child/care work (this system is commonly concep­ tualized by feminists in Russia as two or three shifts).12 Pointing out instances in which the ‘Western’ ‘manual’ is inapplicable to the present-day Russian context, Tatyana rejects the ‘learner’s’ position towards ‘Western’ feminist knowledge as well as the idea of universal ‘standards’ of feminism. As her previous quotes indicate, she prefers other sources of knowledge: personal stories told by ‘regular’ Russian-speaking women. This is how she uses them: tatyana: [S]o it’s very interesting, actually, what’s going on now and… based on that, I build my own, well, theory, so to say… vanya: Theory – how do you mean that? tatyana: Um, well… a notion of what [issues are] top of the agenda at the moment and how [they] should be solved.

During the interview, I reacted to the word theory straight away. Frankly, I am still impressed by Tatyana’s boldness in reclaiming this word from the dominant ‘Western’ and academic discourses. She does this, on the one hand, by using it (almost) unapologetically to designate her own analysis

12

As one of the reviewers pointed out, the concept of two to three shifts bears a resem­ blance to that of the ‘working mother contract’ introduced by gender researchers Anna Temkina and Anna Rotkirch (Temkina and Rotkirch 1997). It may be that this academic theory was adopted by members of grassroots feminist communities, although I have no evidence of this. It seems at least as probable to me that the two conceptualizations were developed independently to make sense of the same familiar (post-)socialist reality.

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and, on the other, by defining theory as a foundation for political action, as a tool for activism rather than something superior to it. Ultimately, Tatyana exemplifies a grassroots Russian feminist who consistently opposes both academic and ‘Western’ hegemony. Katerina, for her part, also touches upon the topics of learning and reproducing ‘the manual’: I mean, I believe we should simply promote [feminism], write in an understandable language. By the way, one reason why I don’t like all those [online] groups and public pages that much [is that] they’ll take some bloody text from the ’70s that uses language even I don’t always understand […] I mean… why? Who are you writing it for? Write about yourself, about your experience […] Popularization is explaining all these things in a simple language, I mean… Like actually, I think, Betty Friedan’s done a cool thing. I mean you… don’t even have to bloody do anything, just do the same in Russian! I mean, she just took women’s experience and showed with their example how… detrimental that whole period was and how much freer women felt when they managed to escape from it. So do the same in Russian, who’s stopping you? Svetlana Alexievich, by the way, has done a very cool thing in this respect. She popularizes this anti-war rhetoric, right? She gathers all those interviews, and it’s huge work, it’s actually… Lyudmila Petranovskaya popularizes psychology, she explains it all in a very competent way. I like that. […] I mean, this is how [we] should just go and popularize [it too].

Like Tatyana, Katerina begins with criticizing feminist online platforms for re-posting ‘texts from the 1970s,’ that is, texts by ‘Western’ ‘second-wave’ authors. However, she provides a somewhat different explanation for her criticisms: She argues that the inaccessible language these texts use makes them hard to understand, which obstructs popularization instead of helping it. Katerina’s call for writing from one’s own experience suggests that she, too, perceives a difference in social realities between the ‘Western’ 1970s and today’s Russia. It may seem confusing in this context that she goes on to bring up a ‘Western’ ‘second-wave’ author, Betty Friedan (who seems indeed to be an inescapable reference point) as a model of smart populariza­ tion. I believe, however, that there is no contradiction here. What Katerina primarily values about Friedan is her method – namely, ‘explaining all these things in a simple language’ – rather than her analysis of ‘these things,’ that is, women’s position in the post-war U.S. Further support for interpreting Katerina’s statement in this way is pro­ vided in the next segment where she continues her series of popularizers to

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look up to with two Russian-speaking authors: Belarusian Nobel-winning non-fiction writer Svetlana Alexievich and Russian psychologist Lyudmila Petranovskaya. Svetlana Alexievich became famous – and particularly appreciated by Russian-speaking feminists – for her book War’s Unwomanly Face («У войны не женское лицо»), a one-of-a-kind collection of wom­ en’s interviews on World War II. Lyudmila Petranovskaya is an author and educator who specializes in children’s and family psychology. Both are respected public intellectuals; neither, to my knowledge, has publicly defined herself as a feminist. Putting Alexievich and Petranovskaya on par with Friedan demonstrates that Katerina is by no means invested in universalizing ‘Western’ theories. Believing as she does in promoting feminist ideas, what she cares about is successful methods for achieving this. She also obviously believes in fighting androcentrism by focusing on women, women’s voices, and achievements (an approach known in Russian feminist scenes as the ‘choose the woman’ approach – «выбери женщину»/‘vyberi ženŝinu’).13 By constructing the Friedan–Alexievich– Petranovskaya triad, Katerina demonstrates that she seeks to learn from different people, whatever their country, language, or area of interest. While opposing a simplistic reproduction of ‘Western’ theories and its uncritical and dogmatic application to the contemporary Russian context, Katerina calls for selective and active learning, for acknowledging diverse sources and taking from each what you need and can. Both Tatyana and Katerina are against borrowing from ‘Western’ knowl­ edge indiscriminately. Both oppose universalizing ‘Western’ theory and by doing so, effectively resist ‘Western’ cultural hegemony. What they differ in are their suggested alternatives to the uncritical reproduction of ‘Western’ knowledge. Katerina does not discard ‘Western’ sources of knowledge, but complements them with Russian-language, post-Soviet ones. Throughout her interview, she presents a whole gallery of famous women who inspire 13

The slogan «выбери женщину»/‘vyberi ženŝinu’ [Choose the Woman] was coined by a radical feminist known on Livejournal under the username ‘rony_rnd’. In 2012, she published an eponymous manifesto on her personal blog where she called upon women to learn and practice solidarity in everyday life by choosing women over men, e. g. as ser­ vice providers, teachers, and business partners (Rony_rnd 2012). The manifesto became hugely popular and was widely shared and discussed across feminist online media.

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her, and they are both ‘Western’ and non-‘Western.’ Tatyana, true to her critique of ‘Western’ hegemony, rejects looking up to ‘Western’ models altogether – in fact, she opposes the whole concept of looking up to anyone, which is an extraordinarily consistent anti-hierarchical approach. Instead, she emphasizes valuing and uplifting local knowledge produced by nonprominent, regular women. In this instance, again, both feminists exhibit a focus on their local contexts and an active, critical attitude towards dominant structures and discourses.

Concluding Remarks: Local Focus and Russian Feminist Agency Tatyana and Katerina provide, as I mentioned in the beginning, rare instances of detailed pronouncements on the ‘West’ in my data. In fact, even the term ‘West’ appears very little in my interviews, and when it does, the context is sometimes quite different from the one under consideration here – for example, some of my Siberian participants used the word ‘West’ to refer to European Russia. On the other hand, other expressions are sometimes used to describe that imaginary geographic entity which accumulates wealth and power: ‘first-world countries’ or ‘rich countries,’ for instance. The lack of a common term seems to be another sign that for most of my research par­ ticipants, the ‘West’ is not a salient concept. As mentioned above, this has obviously to do with my sampling strat­ egy: most of the people I approached for interviews were multiply margin­ alized, non-prominent feminists. While my main idea behind this was to give space to those people whose voices and experiences generally remain unacknowledged, these people also happen to focus, for the most part, on smaller-scale and/or local projects or practices that primarily address their own communities. Their work is non-professionalized and, consequently, unpaid. As a result, ‘Western’ publics and organizations are not relevant for them as potential audiences, reference groups, or donors. This distinguishes my research participants from those feminists in/from Russia who have or seek contact to the ‘West,’ as researchers, journalists, artists, or NGO employees. Those who interact with ‘Western’ audiences – and I myself

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belong to this category – have to either comply with ‘Western’ hegemony or to reflect on and resist it, which still implies keeping one’s focus on the ‘West.’ For grassroots activists in Russia like my research participants, on the other hand, the ‘West’ and relationships to it remain beyond the scope of their immediate and continual concern. This is not to say that they take no interest in feminist movements in other countries – in fact, many asked me about feminism in Germany at the end of the interviews. Still, on the whole, this topic is secondary for them – as opposed, for instance, to issues of communication and conflicts within feminist collectives, debates on ide­ ology and strategies for feminist movements, or on ways to resist patriarchal pressure in everyday life. Against this backdrop of general disinterest in the ‘West,’ I have pre­ sented two examples of stances towards the ‘West’ or ‘Western’ feminism: one that acknowledges it as a source of knowledge and inspiration while retaining a critical perspective, and one that is unequivocally critical of the ‘West’s’ hegemonic position. These two distinct, though partly intersect­ ing, perspectives provide two differing but equally enlightening examples of agency, which is in stark contrast with the image of Russian women or even Russian feminists in dominant ‘West’-centric discourses. While those discourses construct feminism as inherently and monopolistically ‘Western,’ these feminists, on the other hand, draw upon regional, national, and local inspirations for and sources of feminist knowledge and methods. And they use them to produce their own feminism – by writing texts, organizing collectives, events, and projects – a feminism that acknowledges global developments but is rooted in the local.

Bibliography Сенькова, Ольга. 2018. ‘«Я c этими людьми в один автозак не сяду»: солидарности и конфликты в феминистских инициативах Петербурга,’ Журнал исследований социальной политики 16 (3), сс. 457–72. Стеблина, Наталия. 2018. ‘#Янебоюсьсказати в повестке украинских и российских СМИ: специфика восприятия инициативы граждан в конфликтной среде масс-медиа,’ Журнал исследований социальной политики 16 (3), сс. 425–40.

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Aripova, Feruza, and Janet Elise. 2018. ‘The Ukrainian-Russian Virtual Flashmob against Sexual Assault,’ The Journal of Social Policy Studies 16 (3), pp. 487–500. Charmaz, Kathy. 2014. Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide Through Qualitative Analysis. 2nd Edition. LA; London: Sage. DeVault, Marjorie L. 1999. ‘Speaking Up, Carefully: Authorship and Authority in Femi­ nist Writing,’ in: Liberating Method: Feminism and Social Research. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, pp. 187–92. Edwards, Rosalind, and Ribbens, Jane. 1997. ‘Living on the Edges: Public Knowledge, Private Lives, Personal Experience,’ in: Ribbens, Jane, and Edwards, Rosalind (eds.). Feminist Dilemmas in Qualitative Research: Public Knowledge and Private Lives. London: Sage, pp. 1–23. Garstenauer, Therese. 2010. Geschlechterforschung in Moskau: Expertise, Aktivismus und Akademie. Münster: LIT Verlag. Garstenauer, Therese. 2018. Russlandbezogene Gender Studies: Lokale, globale und transnationale Praxis. L’Homme Schriften/Reihe zur feministischen Geschichtswis­ senschaft 25. Göttingen: V&R unipress. Gontmakher, Evgeny, and Ross, Cameron. 2015. ‘The Middle Class and Democratisa­ tion in Russia,’ Europe – Asia Studies 67 (2), pp. 269–284. Harding, Sandra. 1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hill Collins, Patricia. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. London: Routledge. Johnson, Janet E., and Saarinen, Aino. 2011. ‘Assessing Civil Society in Putin’s Russia: The Plight of Women’s Crisis Centers,’ Communist and Post-Communist Studies 44 (1), pp. 41–52. Johnson, Janet E., and Saarinen, Aino. 2013. ‘Twenty-First-Century Feminisms under Repression: Gender Regime Change and the Women’s Crisis Center Movement in Russia,’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38 (3), pp. 543–567. Koobak, Redi, and Marling, Raili. 2014. ‘The Decolonial Challenge: Framing PostSocialist Central and Eastern Europe within Transnational Feminist Studies,’ European Journal of Women’s Studies 21 (4), pp. 330–343. Kulpa, Robert; Mizielińska, Joanna, and Stasińska, Agata. 2012. ‘(Un)Translatable Queer?, Or What Is Lost and Can Be Found in Translation…,’ in Mesquita, Sushila; Wiedlack, Maria Katharina, and Lasthofer, Katrin (eds.). Import – Export – Transport. Queer Theory, Queer Critique and Activism in Motion. Vienna: Zaglossus, pp. 115–145. Mizielińska, Joanna, and Kulpa, Robert. 2011. ‘Contemporary Peripheries: Queer Studies, Circulation of Knowledge and East/West Divide,’ in Kulpa, Robert, and Mizielińska, Joanna (eds.). De-Centring Western Sexualities: Central and Eastern European Perspectives. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 11–26.

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Morozov, Viatcheslav. 2015. Russia’s Postcolonial Identity: A Subaltern Empire in a Eurocentric World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Naples, Nancy. 2003. Feminism and Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis, and Activist Research. New York: Routledge. Posadskaya, Anastasia (ed.). 1994. Women in Russia: A New Era in Russian Feminism. London: Verso. Racioppi, Linda, and O’Sullivan See, Katherine. 1997. Women’s Activism in Contemporary Russia. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Remington, Thomas F. 2011. ‘The Russian Middle Class as Policy Objective,’ Post-Soviet Affairs 27 (2), pp. 97–120. Rolin, Kristina. 2009. ‘Standpoint Theory as a Methodology for the Study of Power Relations,’ Hypatia 24 (4), pp. 218–226. Rony_rnd. 2012. ‘Выбери женщину,’ Рони – дочь разбойника. Livejournal. December 18, 2012, available online at (accessed August 25, 2019). Sedysheva, Anna. 2018. ‘The #яНеБоюсьСказать (#IamNotScaredToSpeak) Campaign of July 2016 in Facebook’s Russian Speaking Community: A Discourse Analysis,’ Praktyka Teoretyczna 30 (4), pp. 180–203. Slavova, Kornelia. 2006. ‘Looking at Western Feminisms Through the Double Lens of Eastern Europe and the Third World,’ in Lukić, Jasmina; Regulska, Joanna, and Zaviršek, Darja (eds.). Women and Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 245–265. Sperling, Valerie. 1999. Organizing Women in Contemporary Russia: Engendering Transition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sperling, Valerie. 2015. Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Suchland, Jennifer. 2011. ‘Is Postsocialism Transnational?’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36 (4), pp. 837–862. Temkina, Anna, and Rotkirch, Anna. 1997. ‘Soviet Gender Contracts and Their Shifts in Contemporary Russia,’ Idäntutkimus: Finnish Journal of Russian and Eastern European Studies 2, pp. 6–24. Tlostanova, Madina. 2010. Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian Borderlands. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tlostanova, Madina. 2015. ‘Can the Post-Soviet Think? On Coloniality of Knowledge, External Imperial and Double Colonial Difference,’ Intersections 1(2), pp. 38–58. Tlostanova, Madina, and Mignolo, Walter. 2009. ‘Global Coloniality and the Deco­ lonial Option,’ Kult 6, pp. 130–147. Tlostanova, Madina; Thapar-Björkert, Suruchi, and Koobak, Redi. 2016. ‘Border Think­ ing and Disidentification: Postcolonial and Postsocialist Feminist Dialogues,’ Feminist Theory 17(2), pp. 211–228.

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Turbine, Vikki. 2015. ‘Women’s Human Rights in Russia: Outmoded Battlegrounds, or New Sites of Contentious Politics?’ East European Politics 31(3), pp. 326–341. Wiedlack, Katharina, and Neufeld, Masha. 2014. ‘Lost in Translation: Pussy Riot Soli­ darity Activism and the Danger of Perpetuating North/Western Hegemonies,’ Religion and Gender 4(2), pp. 145–165. Yusupova, Marina. 2014. ‘Pussy Riot: A Feminist Band Lost in History and Transla­ tion,’ Nationalities Papers 42(4), pp. 604–10. Zdravomyslova, Elena. 2002. ‘Overview of the Feminist Movement in Contemporary Russia,’ Diogenes 49(194), pp. 35–39.

Raili Uibo

7 Prides in Estonia: Struggling in the Centrifugal Pulls of Nationalism and Transnational Leveraged Pedagogy

Introduction This chapter1 explores how the two simultaneous Prides that emerged in Estonia in 2017 – Baltic Pride and Tallinn Pride – negotiated the sometimes oppositional but sometimes overlapping pulls of transnational and nationalistic forces. I will do this by examining the following sequence of questions that constitute the structure of this chapter: Which different cultural and political meanings does Pride evoke among the different actors, considering that it has been perceived as an ‘import’ from both the East and the West, depending on the respective political agenda of the actors? How do the Estonian LGBTIQ+ movements consolidate themselves despite their different understandings of Pride? How do the organizers of different Prides negotiate the solidarity and leveraged pedagogy that occurs through the engagement of transnational actors, especially in the highly nationalist context of Estonia? In the final sec­ tion of the chapter, I will analyze some examples of how LGBTIQ+ activists in Estonia straddle the line between appropriating and re-signifying nationalist culture in the context of Tallinn Pride 2017. Using Pride as a prime example of political mobilization is certainly problematic due to several reasons. It is often seen as a marker of demo­ cratic achievement and European integration, as pointed out by the social 1

Acknowledgments: This chapter was written in the framework of my Ph.D. studies and funded by the Baltic Sea Foundation Project ‘Queer(y)ing kinship in the Baltic region,’ run by Professor Ulrika Dahl. I am very grateful for the helpful comments from the anonymous reviewer and the editors.

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scientist Bojan Bilić (2016) and others. Hegemonic geotemporal imaginar­ ies about the difference between the East and the West delegate the entire Central Eastern European region to a constant state of ‘transition’ towards Western standards of development (Blagojević 2009; Koobak 2013; Kulpa & Mizielińska 2011). LGBTIQ+ solidarity practices are expected to follow a particular sequence, that is, the existence of a public, identity-based LGBTIQ+ community and its celebratory manifestation. Organizing a Pride parade has begun to function as a litmus test of progress that helps to locate a country’s place in the geotemporal hierarchies (cf. Mizielińska & Kulpa 2011; Navickaité 2014; Bilić 2016). Failure to conform to this practice is followed by pedagogical disciplinary measures through certain influential transnational forces. Moreover, these expectations are often internalized by local activists and scholars, who participate in victimizing their local contexts by portraying the setting as a lacking agency against a totalized Western gaze (Navickaité 2014). At the same time, I agree with Bilić (2016) in that Pride is interesting for analysis, as it is located at the crossing point for various social practices and discourses around sexuality, both in public and private, as well as debates about Europeanization and national belonging (Bilić 2016: 118). In the case of Estonia, the two parallel Prides in 2017 turned out to be an important arena where different political strategies and imaginaries clashed and con­ solidated. I, therefore, argue that looking into the history of Pride in Estonia, mapping the different actors and their often-discrepant goals, tactics, their careful negotiations of relations within the community and the public as well as with the wider transnational queer community provides a valuable incision into the contemporary LGBTIQ+ movement in Estonia.

Methodological Notes The following case analysis is based on material that was collected in conjunc­ tion with my Ph.D. thesis fieldwork from November 2016 to February 2017 and during July 2017. My Ph.D. project explores how LGBTIQ+ people understand and practice close relationships in contemporary Estonia and does

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not involve political mobilization in its focus. However, during my fieldwork I encountered a loose group of activists who started gathering around the idea of organizing a Pride parade in the summer of 2017 after ten years of there being no Pride parade in Estonia. So even though activism and Prides were not the initial focus of my fieldwork, I found the unfolding events very impor­ tant and necessary to follow, document, and analyze. This chapter is based on participant observation during the Tallinn Pride organizing and preparation meetings, at various social events and the Pride week events, during which I had several informal conversations, as well as on two interviews with activists. The Estonian LGBTIQ+ community and especially the aforemen­ tioned activist circle are so small that it is impossible to further describe the people who I engaged with, as it would compromise their anonymity. But it can be said that I was engaging with people who were active in organizing both Tallinn Pride and Baltic Pride as well as activists who were not directly involved in those events. Media coverage of the Prides served as a source of background information but is not directly analyzed here.

Tracing the History of LGBTIQ+ Activism in Estonia In order to understand contemporary LGBTIQ+ politics and the recent organizing around Prides in Estonia, I will first provide a brief historical overview of the legal context and political mobilization. I will also discuss how the developments fit into the general postsocialist dilemma between European integration and national sovereignty. While these are certainly not the only thinkable political solutions, the current political forces pre­ sent EU integration or closed nationalism as the only discursive possibilities that could be chosen. Complicating the Legal Progress Story During the first period of Estonian national independence (1918–1941), there was no law against homosexuality, while male same-sex acts had been

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criminalized under the prior czarist Russian rule (Talalaev 2010: 112). When the Soviets occupied Estonia in 1944, they implemented Soviet legislation with minor adaptions, including article §118 that penalized anal intercourse between men with two-year imprisonment. Women’s sexuality was not criminalized, as female sexuality was not considered important enough in the patriarchal context (ibid.). Once Estonia regained independence in 1991, this paragraph was discarded before the new constitution was implemented in 1992 (Kotter 2006: 298). At the current moment there are several legal regulations in place, some of them are derived from the European Union legislation and some are local – the European Convention on Human Rights, the Private International Law Act, the Equal Treatment Act, and the EU Citizens Act (Mets 2010: 83). So, in terms of legal development towards the protection of LGBTIQ+ people, Estonia aims to be the poster child of post-Soviet spaces. On October 8, 2014, Estonia became the first ex-Soviet republic to recognize civil unions of all couples, regardless of gender. The Registered Partnership Act (RPA) was to be enforced on January 1, 2016, after around eighty amendments were supposed to be made to various related laws, thus bringing them into accordance with the RPA. A superficial glance at the legal developments could bring one to the questionable conclusion that Estonia is on a straight path towards (the fantasy of ) liberation and progress, away from the (imagined) backwardness of the Soviet times. However, up until now (the beginning of 2019), the Parliament has refused to adopt the relevant legal changes and the RPA was eventually passed without the implementing acts. Estonia is thus in legal limbo – the partnership law has been adopted but without having adopted the additional implementation acts, the implementation of the law is only partial. There have been also various attempts to withdraw the law and in 2018 even a (failed) attempt to introduce a law defining marriage as a union between a woman and a man. Moreover, the situation of LGBTIQ+ people in Estonia has been evaluated to be the third-worst among OECD (Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development) countries (Valfort 2017), and various internal policy reports and surveys equally attest to the relatively dire situation (ERR 2016; Tiidenberg 2013). Additionally, critical voices point out that the Equal Treatment Act prohibiting the discrimination of LGBTIQ+ persons in employment was passed under a certain amount of

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pressure from the European Union (LaSala & Revere 2011: 431). The reality behind the smooth appearance of legal progress towards liberation is in fact rather messy and contradictory. Moreover, even the currently problematic legal status of the Partnership Act is not certain, as right-wing conservative forces have threatened to withdraw it after their success in the elections of March 2019. LGBTIQ+ Activism in Estonia Crossing Different Paths According to the scarce scholarly work on LGBTIQ+ lives in Estonia, the birth of LGBTIQ+ activism in Estonia dates back to the end of the Soviet era (Kotter 2006; Talalaev 2010; Allaste 2014). According to Allaste (2014), however, no documented information remains from most of the Soviet period, as queer networks were underground due to criminalization.2 Open political mobilization was not possible until the late 1980s, when censor­ ship was loosened. Like in several other post-Soviet countries, publishing private advertisements in newspapers was the first way of establishing public contact for LGBTIQ+ people in Estonia (Talalaev 2010: 112). First steps towards creating institutionalized organizations were taken in 1990, when the Estonian Lesbian Union (Eesti Lesbiliit) was established – becoming the first queer organization in Estonia and the rest of the Baltic States. Gay men formed their own organization, the Estonian Gay Union (Eesti Gayliit), in 1992 (Kotter 2006: 299). Since then, different organizations have been around for various periods of time. One important actor in the years 2004–2009 was the Gay and Lesbian Information Centre, which was closed due to a lack of resources and motivation (Talalaev 2010: 112–113).

2

No published sources are available at the time of writing this chapter in the end of 2018. However, Soviet queer life has in fact been depicted by the queer artist Jaanus Samma, who has been collecting information from criminal archives for his Ph.D. project. While Samma’s project is artistic and does not provide much material for Social Studies scholars, the newly admitted Ph.D. student Rebeka Põldsam will be collecting stories about lesbian lives in Soviet Estonia. Thus, very slowly, the artificial boundary between the straight Soviet era and the more permissible Estonian era will be blurred, also in scientific discourse.

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Some smaller organizations, such as Gendy (gathering transgender people) or Sekü (working for the legal protection of sexual minorities), stopped existing. Currently, the most widely recognized organization is the Estonian LGBT Association, which celebrated its ten-year anniversary in 2018 (LGBT Association Homepage 2018). But those steps towards political mobilization are often dismissed as being very rudimentary; it is a frequent topic of discussion among the activ­ ists I met during my fieldwork. Also previous research seems to take the lack of a queer political movement as a fact that needs to be explained with the help of cultural and historical facts rather than questioned. For example, two American psychologists LaSala and Revere (2011) concluded after their short stay in Estonia that Estonian culture is an impediment to political mobilization, as Estonians are supposedly culturally prone to individual­ ism. They understand individualist tendencies as a rejection of the forced collectivism that was characteristic of Soviet times (LaSala & Revere 2011: 433–434). Thus, collective action (whether openly political or not) is met with skepticism because it evokes cultural memories about the hypocrisy of forced mobilization around a purportedly shared socialist identity (Waitt 2005: 174–175). Estonian sociologists Katrin Tiidenberg and Airi-Alina Allaste (2018) equally argue that political engagement and activism have often a negative connotation in Estonia because of the Soviet legacy: ‘In Soviet Estonia “activism” meant state-mandated communist practices that most Estonians interpreted as “selling out” or cynical careerism’ (Tiidenberg & Allaste 2018: 2). Therefore, the notion of ‘activism’ has been damaged to such a degree that people might not only be reluctant to advocate for a cause but even those who do might shy away from describing their activities in those terms (Allaste 2014). However, the problem with these explanations is that the scholars seem to have a very particular model in mind according to which the presence of LGBTIQ+ community and activism can be measured. Allaste (2014), for example, uses American LGBTIQ+ history in order to explain the apparent ‘lack’ of LGBTIQ+ activism in Estonia. She notes that in the U.S., the com­ munity that gathered around a collective identity was a source of LGBTIQ+ activism. She evaluates the different historical and cultural circumstances of Estonia as a ‘problem,’ something that needs to be explained and justi­ fied. ‘Since in the Estonian case it is hard to speak about a community with

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a collective identity,’ she states, for example, ‘it also explains partly rela­ tively weak and unstable activism’ (Allaste 2014: 11–12). LaSala and Revere (2011) equally maintain that the lack of strong collective identity among the LGBTIQ+ population in Estonia is to be blamed for a low level of politi­ cal organizing. There is an implicit expectation about a particular sequence of queer engagements present in such accounts, inspired by the American context of gay liberation, where mobilizing around a new public gay identity provided a sense of both individual and collective identity ( Jagose 1996; Sullivan 2003). However, as Joanna Mizielińska and Robert Kulpa (2011) have argued, using this sequence as a desirable model to be followed and measured up against institutes a constant sense of lack and lag in the Central Eastern European settings (Mizielińska & Kulpa 2011: 17). It is thus crucial to move beyond expecting a certain pathway for LGBTIQ+ activism and community-building and instead account for the local specificities in the context of transnational flows. Already in 2006, Lilian Kotter identified some particularities of Estonian queer organizing, namely that there is a vibrant lesbian movement and that a high level of frag­ mentation has impeded establishing an umbrella organization. This holds true to some extent even more than a decade later. LGBTIQ+ activism (as well as any other grassroots organizing) in Estonia is largely dominated by women, according to Allaste (2014: 20). And even though the biggest queer organization is in fact an umbrella organization called the Estonian LGBT Association (Eesti LGBT Ühing), the various fragmentations have not been bridged, as will become evident in the analysis of the two somewhat conflicting Prides in 2017. Nevertheless, my aim is not to explore or argue for some absolute dif­ ference between the Estonian and the Anglo-American context, or for the supposedly special and authentic character of Estonian culture. Quite the opposite, I subscribe to the transculturation model according to which ideas are not only in circulation but always transformed and reshaped in different cultural contexts (Cerwonka 2008). The complication lies in avoiding the double trap of either participating in the hegemonic gesture of thoughtlessly transposing the Anglo-American context or in the equally problematic ori­ entalizing gesture of imagining non-Western countries as queer utopias (Baer 2011: 185). I also take Lithuanian Gender Studies scholar Rasa Navickaité’s warning about the tendency to invert the hierarchies between the imagined

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blocks of East and West and privileging the East as an inherently more queer location seriously (Navickaité 2014: 176). So, while closely examining the 2017 Prides in Estonia, I pay attention to transnational influences as well as to local problems and issues that emerge from historical and cultural specificities.

Unpacking the Prides of 2017 Whereas previous research has argued that Estonian queer movement is weak and lacking collective identity, I would argue that not only was there a significant mobilization around the partnership law in the mid-2010s but that there were also some very relevant attempts towards re-invigorating political mobilization of queer movement in Estonia in relation to the matter of Prides in 2017. We need to separate the history of Pride in Estonia from that of its Western neighbors. Short History of Prides in Estonia The first Pride parade in Estonia was held in 2004 in Tallinn, and the yearly event continued until 2007. While it seems that Pride parades have become cultural institutions in some parts of Western Europe, they certainly do not enjoy such a self-evident and celebratory status in Estonia. The general environ­ ment was hostile towards the practice during the mid-2000s. The municipal government and police used their bureaucratic powers to hinder the parade, and organizers faced death threats. The media reports were sensational, either ridiculing or simply disapproving. Also, the local reception was violent – the participants were met with a rain of eggs, tomatoes but also stones and faeces. Reports of bureaucratic and physical violence occurred frequently in accounts from activists that I encountered during my fieldwork as well as in articles that cover the history of LGBTIQ+ life in Estonia (cf. Sander & Samma 2001). According to one of the organizers of the early parades that I interviewed, the parades were discontinued due to a mix of fear and activists’ burn-outs but also due to a change in political strategies. This activist recalled that political

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parties had sent a clear message to the parade organizers in the mid-2000s that political goodwill for securing any LGBTIQ+ rights would only be pos­ sible if the community becomes less visible, that is, if there is no Pride parade. Pride re-emerged in Estonia in 2011 after several years of hibernation with a new concept and new people, now organized by the official LGBT Association. As an LGBT Association representative recounted to me, education and cul­ ture were deemed to be safe topics from which to start a dialogue with the rest of the society and the parade was therefore replaced with a cultural festival that takes place during the tri-annually rotating Baltic Pride. Baltic Pride is a Pride event that the three Baltic countries Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania take turns hosting in their capitals. In 2011 and 2014, it was Tallinn’s turn to host Baltic Pride but no parade was on the agenda, as Pride was clearly branded as a strictly cultural festival. The Baltic Pride 2017 was supposed to follow the same pattern, as Baltic Pride was introduced as an ‘LGBT+ cultural festival’ in the official press release on LGBT Association’s homepage (2017). The theme for the 2017 Baltic Pride was ‘Koos’ (literally translated into English as ‘United’). In the words of the organizers, the Estonian term ‘Koos’ has a double function. It refers simultaneously to the Registered Partnership Act (RPA), which is still not properly implemented, while also signifying ‘living together and acting together, but also growing together and growing older together’ (Davidjants 2017). So, according to the Baltic Pride organizers, Pride was supposed to celebrate togetherness in the form of a cultural festival, and a parade was not deemed a suitable part of such a celebration. Some activists who are not part of the Association shared the opinion of the LGBT Union that a Pride parade was too political to enjoy the sup­ port of high-end politicians. So, taking the matter in their own hands, a group of loosely affiliated queer community members gathered at the end of 2016 and started mobilizing towards re-organizing a street parade after a ten-year break, wishing to claim access to public space and visibility on their own terms. Baltic Pride vs. Tallinn Pride The LGBT Association is known for having put emphasis on building a strong relationship with state actors, achieving rights for individuals and

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families while carefully maintaining a respectable position in society. The Baltic Pride, organized by the Estonian LGBT Association, was supposed to consist of a reception-type event with invitations for sponsors, partners, and politicians, an open conference with panel discussions with activists and politicians, an open-air festival, and a concert, along with smaller events, such as family picnics or LGBTIQ+ history tours (Davidjants 2017). A group of people was dissatisfied with what they called the ‘apoliti­ cal’ outline of the upcoming Pride, which they saw as symptomatic for the LGBT Association’s general political strategies. With regards to the LGBT Association’s strategy, one participant in one of the brainstorming meet­ ings where people met to discuss organizing a Pride parade argued that ‘combining non-confrontational silence with political work hasn’t worked.’ If Baltic Pride is a cultural festival, then the consensus at the Tallinn Pride organizing meetings was to have ‘a political event that would be relevant in time and place,’ as one of the activists stated. Since the most pressing issues that were identified at those meetings were the lack of visibility (external) and a lacking sense of community (internal), the aims were to bring people together in support of each other and build a sense of community. A Pride parade, along with various street actions of art and politics (public readings, graffiti, performances), was supposed to be part of re-claiming public space, something that is not self-evident in the Baltic States (cf. Mazylis et al. 2014; Aavik et al. 2016). Moreover, one of the arguments that the participants of the planning meetings came up with was that a parade provides a greater sense of togetherness than attending a concert or a picnic, as it involves active participation as opposed to passive reception. The initial plan of organizing the Tallinn Pride march simultaneously with Baltic Pride was met with dismissal from the LGBT Association. Their response was that they would personally like to see a parade take place but not at the same time as Baltic Pride, as they were worried about sending mixed messages to their sponsors and partners. According to the representatives of the association, their lobbying efforts were focusing on different legal issues such as the partnership law. Lobbying with the goal of turning the parade into a big-scale event and involving the state remained outside of their capacities and priorities. However, the dissatisfied critical voices of the people from inside the community that I was also in contact with during my fieldwork

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bitterly complained that the LGBT Association was simply worried about losing their reputation as ‘respectable’ partners. The official LGBT Association and the group of non-affiliated activ­ ists had very different understandings of politics and with whom and how one should be in solidarity. They had very different visions of what Pride means: grassroots organizing of a highly political event, or a combination of non-political events for the community and high-level events oriented towards politicians and policymakers. Moreover, the tensions were partly about strategic differences but were also rooted in personal ties and histo­ ries. However, both groups were keen on not fracturing the fragmented community even further and agreed that it should be possible and relevant to self-organize with different aims. There were supposed to be two Prides in Estonia in the summer of 2017 – the Baltic Pride culture festival in July and the Tallinn Pride parade in August.

Transnational Solidarity vs. Leveraged Pedagogy through Pride Pride parades in Estonia offer an example of how the local and foreign swirl into an inseparable mixture of its own flavor also in its very execution. In fact, Pride parades had been so erased from the Estonian queer memory that it even caused considerable confusion and miscommunication between foreigners and locals in Estonia. For people in Estonia, LGBTIQ+ Pride meant the cultural festival with concerts and conferences, while foreigners considered Pride and parade to be synonymous. Therefore, when several foreign activists who had moved to Estonia found out that Pride in Estonia was going to take place without a parade, they also became very active in making a parade happen in Estonia. Transnational support played a significant role in both Baltic Pride as well as Tallinn Pride organization, as both events received financial support from international organizations, foreign guests came to attend the events, and experience from Prides in other settings was also used during the plan­ ning stages. But the flip side of transnational solidarity and support is lever­ aged pedagogy, a concept introduced by Robert Kulpa (2014). Leveraged

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pedagogy is the hierarchical relation between some European forces acting as the source of universal knowledge and the post-Soviet spaces as constant objects of European pedagogy. Below, I will discuss the practice of leveraged pedagogy in relation to Prides in Estonia For example, the LGBT Association’s refusal to organize a parade had caused a considerable amount of outrage in the neighboring countries and in various European lobby organizations. An activist who had been involved in the work of the LGBT Association for a long period of time pointed out that the Estonian LGBT Association needed to justify their decision to hold a cultural festival instead of a parade in several international forums and even experienced a form of ostracizing because of their deviation. The activist said ‘it was an unofficial boycott,’ meaning that no concrete sanctions were put in place but the disapproval was delivered through soft means of power. One example of the unofficial boycott was an international organization refusing to fund the cultural festival because it would only fund political events.3 Another example of an unofficial disciplining measure was put in place by an LGBTIQ+ organi­ zation from another country. Contrary to the common practice of the official board members participating in other countries’ Pride events, this organization had only sent a delegation of volunteers, while the board members refused to attend. All in all, the Estonian activists experienced a rather intense pressure to perform this very obligatory element of Western activism – a Pride parade. Another reminder of geopolitical pressure was foreign embassies becom­ ing involved in ‘showing a good example’ of how progressive countries are supposed to behave in the case of a Tallinn Pride parade. Examples of simi­ lar pedagogical measures can also be found in other contexts. For example, in the more hostile environment of Lithuania, the embassies and interna­ tional organizations exercised direct political pressure and participated in permitting and protecting the Baltic Pride parade in 2010 (Davydova 2010: 43). In the case of Tallinn Pride in 2017, more soft power was at play. Several Nordic embassies raised rainbow flags in support of Pride and a large group of Diplomats for Equality marched at the very front of the parade, taking space and visibility from the local queers. Such actions once more

3

I will not reveal the name of the organization, as I want to be mindful of not harming the LGBT Association’s cooperation with them.

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reinforce the understanding that LGBTIQ+ rights are a top-down import from (Western) Europe, delivered in the form of leveraged pedagogy (Kulpa 2014). Similarly to the Serbian (Bilić 2016) or the Russian context (Stella 2013), the large-scale presence of transnational forces in local LGBTIQ+ struggles has privileged foreign voices over local ones. Relying on transna­ tional support for ensuring support can relegate local activists to the role of mediators while further alienating the cause in the domestic political field. However, solidarity does not necessarily need to function as a form of disciplining and leveraged pedagogy. Both Baltic Pride and Tallinn Pride aimed at being transnational solidarity events. Baltic Pride is nominally a collaborative event between the three Baltic states and the Tallinn Pride organizing team consisted of both Estonians as well as several foreigners living in Estonia, who brought their experience and ideas into the organizing. However, the actual collaboration between the Baltic Pride countries is minimal. Each country is responsible for their own events but there are delegations from each country that visit the respective Prides each year. Moreover, when Tallinn Pride started organizing the parade, transnational solidarity was not only considered to be the question of connecting to a global cultural legacy but also a rather pragmatic matter. During the Tallinn Pride planning meetings that I attended, the participants expressed con­ cerns that it would not be feasible to have a parade with only the Estonian LGBTIQ+ community involved. The sheer numbers were perceived to be too small, and many of the people were judged to be too afraid of publicity to attend. All in all, it seems that turning to transnational partners in the case of both Pride events was considered more as a necessity rather than a purely empowering coalition-building activity.

Merged Pride(s), Dissolving Queer Initiatives In the end, transnational pressure played a key role in the merging of the two Prides in the summer of 2017. The Latvian representatives argued against having two Prides instead of one and after a common meeting, a coopera­ tive union between Tallinn Pride and Baltic Pride was established. It was

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not a direct merger, but the Tallinn Pride parade was supposed to take part within the framework of Baltic Pride. Even though Tallinn Pride and Baltic Pride were nominally supposed to remain different entities and the organizational work was carried out separately, the LGBT Association took over the entire communication about the parade. The parade became managed as a communication project, every aspect of its public image being carefully weighed. Notably, the same representatives from the LGBT Association who had been fighting against holding a Pride parade were suddenly giving interviews endorsing the Pride to the national media (cf. Virro 2017; Leivak 2017). Moreover, from conversations with queer activists in Tallinn, I found out that the Baltic Pride’s communication team went to great lengths to rebrand the Pride parade, which is often disparagingly called Gay Parade or Homo Parade, into the less harmful ‘Pride procession.’ I argue that the rebranding of the ‘Parade’ into ‘Procession’ was a conscious attempt to appeal to the popularity of the Song festival procession, which had received much positive media coverage just shortly before the Pride events. In order to understand the discursive link that was created between the Pride procession and the Song festival procession, it is crucial to note that Song festivals have a highly significant place in Estonian national identity construction and cultural memory. Song festivals (and the procession of participants) are a tradition that dates back to the national awakening at the end of nineteenth century (cf. Pawłusz 2016). The tradition gained much importance during the Soviet period, as singing a few national songs at the end of the compulsory program of Soviet songs was one of the few avail­ able forms of resistance during the occupation period. The tradition culmi­ nated at the end of the 1980s when up to 100,000 people gathered on the Song Festival grounds to spontaneously sing nationalistic songs (Lauristin & Vihalemm 1997). Song festivals have continued to be popular since the regaining of independence in 1991, and they attract hundreds of thousands of people when they take place every four years. The Baltic Pride team never publicly announced the rebranding from parade to procession. However, according to the participants that I spoke to, journalists were advised not to use the term ‘parade,’ and in media out­ lets that Baltic Pride produced (such as blogs and newsletters), the term was meticulously avoided. The replacement term ‘procession’ carried its

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own connotations that were judged to be more positive for audiences both outside and insider’s the queer community, reported another insider voice. Therefore, taking the cultural knowledge and conversations with activ­ ists into account, it is easy to see the temptation of associating Pride with the most popular public procession in Estonia – the Song festival procession. Just a few weeks before the Pride march, 40,000 people had marched to the Song festival grounds in order to participate in a seven hour-long concert of choral songs with nationalistic flair. Using the term ‘procession’ was thus meant to make the Pride parade more palatable for a mainstream audience by adding different connotations while removing the necessarily queer ones.

Within and Without Nationalism Flirting with nationalist connotations when re-branding the Pride parade was hardly a coincidence. I would argue that nationalist discourse frames any actions of LGBTIQ+ people in Estonia one way or another, whether in the context of activism or in everyday life. As argued by Anikó Imre in the Hungarian context (2008), we need to account for the ‘continuing power of the nation-state and of nationalist discourses’ in postsocialist spaces (Imre 2008: 262). The fact that queers have no place in the national body is a widely shared common-sensical truism in Estonia, as reflected in main­ stream politics and in the opinion of about half of the population (Albrant 2010; Tiidenberg 2013; ERR 2016; Human Rights Centre 2017). But the ever-present nationalist discourse also provides space for playful resistance with the potential to subvert the originally heteropatriarchal meanings of nationalist slogans and events. So, in the following section, I will have a closer look at the negotiation between nationalism and LGBTIQ+ politics in the organization of Tallinn Pride parade. It must be noted that the examples that I am referring to were not part of any official policy of Tallinn Pride, instead, I collected the material during the Tallinn Pride planning meetings and during a banner-making workshop the day before the actual parade. There were various attempts at queering nationalist references during Tallinn Pride. For example, some of the banners that were prepared for

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Tallinn parade made an attempt of playing with the slogan for the year 2017 Song festival ‘Mina jään’ [Here I’ll stay]. Considering the large wave of emigration to more affluent countries that has occurred since Estonia joined the European Union in 2004 (Włodarska-Frykowska 2017: 70), such insistence on remaining in the country can be interpreted as a patriotic act. The queer version of that nationalistic reference of ‘Here I’ll stay’ was cre­ ated through the addition of ‘as well’ – ‘Mina jään ka’ [I will stay as well]. It functioned as a counter-narrative against the common queer exodus – that is, queers participating in the emigration wave in search of a more liveable life elsewhere rather than making change happen locally. Claiming ‘I will stay as well’ was thus meant to be an in-your-face gesture, aiming to disrupt the supposedly harmonious heteropatriarchal unity of the country by insist­ ing on queer presence. Moreover, in February 2018, Estonia’s first LGBTIQ+ choir was formed, with the clear intent of participating in future Song festivals. Thus, the queer presence in the heart of one of the most nationalist events was not only nominally achieved in 2017 through paralleling the Pride procession and Song festival procession as well as playing with the theme of the Song festival, but it will also very soon be a physical and material presence. Moreover, the name of the choir – Vikerlased – is also significant, as it conceals a double meaning, a word play that is not easily translatable. On the choir Facebook page, the following explanation is provided, ‘The word “vikerlased” signi­ fies Vikings in Estonian. As it happens, “VIKERkaar” means rainbow in Estonian’ (Vikerlased 2018). Moreover, Vikerlased is the title of Estonia’s first national opera, written in 1928 by Eevald Aav (Mikk 1999). This opera was celebrated as a great achievement of national culture and is thus a rel­ evant part of Estonian cultural history (ibid.). What seems to be a direct reference to LGBTIQ+ culture – a rainbow – at first glance, also reveals simultaneous connotations of a mythical old age of Estonian Viking warriors and a national opera from the first Estonian independence period on closer inspection. As will be shown further in the next examples, it is evident that drawing on mythical or ethos-bound periods and characters is very common in Estonia, and LGBTIQ+ activists are tapping into the cultural resources with the same eagerness as the rest of society. The period that provided the most inspiration for attempts of re-negoti­ ating ways of belonging to the national body was the Singing Revolution. The

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Singing Revolution designates the period of a major political breakthrough in Estonia at the end of the 1980s, when the resistance to the Soviet occupa­ tion culminated in regaining national independence in 1991 (Lauristin & Vihalemm 2017: 61). Estonian political culture in the years of the Singing Revolution has been described as mythological. It was characterized by spon­ taneous mass gatherings of people who engaged in ritualistic behavior (such as joint singing, holding hands) under the leadership of charismatic lead­ ers. Political activity at the time was guided by highly emotionally charged devotion rather than rational policy-making (Vihalemm, Lauristin, & Tallo 1997: 199–200).4 ‘Political discourse was also ritualistic in its character, often consisting of repetitive exclamations of certain values formed into ‘magic’ slogans’ (ibid.). Among the examples of such mythical slogans that were significant at the time of the Singing revolution was ‘Ükskord me võidame niikuinii’ [We shall win one day anyway]. This sentence, which it is a very well-known cultural reference from the period of the Singing Revolution, was transformed on a Tallinn Pride banner into ‘Ükskord me abiellume nii­ kuinii’ [We shall marry one day anyway]. This kind of teleological projection into the future needs to be understood in the local context where same-sex marriage is not even on the political agenda of the mainstream LGBTIQ+ organization. In a country where the Registered Partnership Act has been stalled in the political machinery, arguing for the inevitability of same-sex marriage is considered highly provocative, while in many other contexts it could be considered a depoliticized act of normalization. Another banner that queered the nationalist heritage was the rework­ ing of a phrase from a well-known nationalist song that was also commonly performed during the Singing Revolution. The original line goes ‘Maa tuleb täita lastega’ [The land needs to be filled with children] and is a rather crude reference to reproducing the nation, both symbolically and physically. The phrase was then reworked into ‘Maa tuleb täita lesbidega’ [The land needs to be filled with lesbians], which is a tongue-in-cheek expression of a repro­ ductive fantasy beyond the general familialism, a call and yearning for the reproduction of queers within the national body.

4

While civil society activism was high during the Singing Revolution, people in Estonia have lost interest in such public forms of civic activism (Allaste 2018).

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It is thus evident that mythical nationalist references play an impor­ tant role in LGBTIQ+ organizing in Estonia. However, it is necessary to clarify that neither the umbrella event of Baltic Pride nor the parade organ­ izers under the name Tallinn Pride officially endorsed patriotic or nation­ alist movements in their activity. As mentioned before, Baltic Pride was intended to be engaged in cultural matters and was organized around the theme ‘United.’ At the same time, the group of activists around Tallinn Pride positioned themselves as political in the discussions that occurred during the preparation meetings. Many of them were aligned with queer theory and politics and were thus critical of both the state and the mainstream political orientation of the LGBT Association. With Tallinn Pride parade, they were aiming to disrupt the careful politics of respectability by bringing ‘rough hairy-legged women to the streets,’ as one of the participants put it. At the same time, they were by no means immune to the promise of intelligibility that national culture provides, as they wrapped their political messages in the very locally specific nationalist references. Imre’s (2008) observation about the Hungarian feminist negotiations of nationalist culture holds thus also very much true in Estonia – ‘the critical distance from nation and nationalism, which often manifests itself in subversive transgressions and eroticized prohibitions, coexists with a desire to be seen, to be placed within, a specific national history and culture’ (Imre 2008: 269). The centrifugal pull of nationalist discourse also proved to be irresistible to the Tallinn Pride activists, who were otherwise critical of the heteronormative national culture.

Cracks on the Surface of ‘Unity’ Playful re-negotiations of nationalist discourse or not, none of those attempts moved beyond the dominant Estonian nation-centered focus of history or towards acknowledging the Russian-speaking minority that does not neces­ sarily share this version of history. The semi-nostalgic references to breaking apart from the Soviet Union through ‘singing ourselves free’ may actually be a source of complicated historical traumas for the third of Estonian popula­ tion who are Russian speakers. Unlike the Estonian-speaking majority, more

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than half of Russian speakers are nostalgic for the Soviet Union (Ekman & Duvold: forthcoming). This section of the population suddenly found themselves in the position of being a disadvantaged minority when Estonia regained independence, as the government refused to provide citizenship to a large proportion of Russian speakers who resided in the country (Shevel 2009: 273). The de facto segregation of these ethno-linguistic communities, which dates back to Soviet times, has increased rather than diminished ever since (Leetmaa 2017). Not taking ethnic minority positions into consideration is, however, endemic in Estonia in general and also among LGBTIQ+ people. Allaste points to the wide-ranging language- and ethnicity-based fragmentation that hasn’t been bridged within the LGBTIQ+ community (2014: 9). In the 2016 report from the Office of the Gender Equality and Equal Treatment Commissioner, the ethnic power imbalance became equally clear. Estonian-speaking partici­ pants, blind to their privilege, did not even bring up relations to the Russianspeaking community, while Russian-speaking participants always reflected upon it as an element of concern. They were highly critical of the queer movement’s incapability to integrate the Russian-speaking community in their work and to provide information and support in Russian (Aavik et al. 2016: 94). While it is very difficult to say how high the number of Russian speakers was among the 1,800 Tallinn Pride parade participants, in the preparations for and in the outline of the Prides, the Estonian-speaking majority was preva­ lent. The abundant nationalist references that were inspired by the Singing Revolution or current nationalist events like the Song Festival were aimed at an Estonian-speaking public, while no mention was made of any alternative historical or cultural references that could at least attempt to include people from other ethnic backgrounds. If the aim of Baltic Pride was ‘unity,’ then the highly nationalistic framing of both Prides in 2017 did certainly not contribute to any unity between different ethnic groups living in Estonia. Not only did the Prides fail to take into account the Russian-speaking population, but it is also questionable whether the promise of the theme ‘Unity’ was fulfilled in terms of the two Prides themselves. After the unexpectedly successful parade had drawn to a close and the final concert took place in the heart of the Old Town, the heads of the Estonian LGBT Association, as well as Latvian and Lithuanian representatives, entered the stage in order to give thank-you speeches. The Tallinn Pride representatives, the activists who had

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in fact organized the march through the center of Tallinn for the first time in ten years, were standing next to the stage and were never invited on stage to share the publicity. When talking to some of the activists in the aftermath of the Pride, this fact was dealt with resignation rather than outrage. Already in the planning stages of the Tallinn Pride, many activists had been reluctant to involve straight allies in the organizing due to previous experience of them hijacking the political fight over the partnership law. But in the case of Tallinn Pride, it was the LGBTIQ+ allies who, in the name of cooperation and under the banner of ‘Unity,’ were taking pride in [sic!] and praise for the Pride that they had not organized themselves. The cracks in the community were just as visible after the end of the two simultaneous Prides as they had been at the beginning. But there is a way in which a certain failure of unity and inclusion in the context of Prides in Estonia could provide subversive potential. LGBTIQ+ activists’ cooperation with state institutions has been widely criticized in cer­ tain Western contexts, as tolerance and inclusion through the state often co-constitutes a racist Othering of immigrant populations (Puar 2007). This is where the Central Eastern European context offers an interesting twist in the progress narrative of liberal versus homophobic states. In some particular ways, places like Estonia could be considered a positive example rather than a laggard. Some of the Pride participants jokingly expressed their relief over not having to deal with ‘luxury problems’ like pink-washing through corporate support or the police, army, and political elite marching in the parade. (The only high-scale endorsement of the Pride in Tallinn was a Social Democrat minister joining the public concert after the actual parade, while the march itself was attended by only one marginal member of the parliament). If corpo­ rations and institutions do not want to be associated with Pride and do thus not shape it to as high a degree as Pride parades in various Western contexts, then perhaps this leaves more space for local LGBTIQ+ organizing? It is of course too early to say with only such a short history of Prides in Estonia.

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Conclusion In this chapter, I have shown that the previous understanding of Estonian LGBTIQ+ activism as passive and weak is not a very accurate description of the local context. This understanding is largely based on assumptions about a particular way LGBTIQ+ community and politics should appear – organized around identity-based groupings and forming a steady part of civil society. While queer spaces and sites of resistance may look very different than the Western model of publicly organized opposition, it is also obvious that no nation state, including Estonia, is situated in a cultural vacuum but is always in a constant transnational exchange of ideas and practices. The Europeanization of LGBTIQ+ rights does form a very important back­ ground for LGBTIQ+ political mobilization in Estonia, as it relates to the cultural self-understanding of belonging to European modernity. Looking at the unusual situation of two parallel Prides being organ­ ized in 2017, I have shown the clash of political views on what community organizing is supposed to look like. An institutionalized version of a cul­ tural festival in the shape of Baltic Pride did not fulfill the political goal of more confrontational visibility that a group of activists shared. Organizing a Pride parade after a ten-year break stirred up issues relating to politics of belonging, as it raised questions about how compatible a Pride parade is with Estonian culture. Both Prides were highly supported by transnational forces such as inter­ national organizations and embassies, which provided much of the financial means. The downside of such transnational solidarity becomes evident in the pedagogical disciplinary measures that are put in place to keep the political actors in the predetermined framework of sexually liberal and progressive countries. Both the financial means as well as the expertise that is provided by transnational forces form a subtle form of control on local activist circles. However, the pull by transnational forces was balanced with the mag­ netic field of nationalist discourse that is highly prevalent in Estonia. Thus, I have discussed the entanglement of nationalist discourse and LGBTIQ+ politics that emerged during the Prides at length. The activists relied on the rich archive of nationalist references that they re-appropriated for their political means. Rather than asking whether this constitutes a cooptation

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into nationalist discourse or subversion through the slight deviation in the repetition of norms, I have accounted for the complex and contradic­ tory negotiations that the activists participated in. In any case, flirting with nationalist discourse excludes the Russian-speaking population, with their alternative understanding of history and national belonging. Finally, I have argued that while the attempt to conjoin the two Prides under the same umbrella had limited success and did not manage to bridge the fragmented nature of LGBTIQ+ circles in Estonia, it remains to be seen whether future Prides in Estonia can subvert the problematic aspects emanating from both national and transnational forces.

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Davydova, Darja. 2012. ‘Baltic Pride 2010: Articulating Sexual Difference and Heter­ onormative Nationalism in Contemporary Lithuania,’ Sextures 2(2), pp. 32–46. Ekman, Joakim, and Duvold, Kjetil. Forthcoming. ‘Ethnic Tension in the Baltic States: Coping with an Ongoing Crisis?’ in: Oltenau, Tina; Jaitner, Felix, and Spöri, Tobias (eds.). Crisis in the Post-Soviet Space – From the Dissolution of the Soviet Union to Frozen Conflicts. ERR. 2016. Uuring: enamik Eesti elanikest ei toeta samasoolistele paaridele võrdsete õiguste andmist, available online at (accessed July 11, 2019). Human Rights Centre. 2017. Avaliku arvamuse uuring LGBT teemadel (2017), avail­ able online at from (accessed July 11, 2019). Imre, Anikó. 2008. ‘Lesbian Nationalism: Winner of the 2007 Catharine Stimpson Prize,’ Signs 33(2), pp. 255–282. Jagose, Annamarie. 1996. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York Uni­ versity Press. Koobak, Redi. 2013. Whirling Stories: Postsocialist Feminist Imaginaries and the Visual Arts. Linköping: LiU-tryck. Kotter, Lilian. 2006. ‘Homoseksuaalsus Eestis,’ in: Luhaäär, Ingvar (ed.). Seksuaalsus Eestis: Ajalugu. Tänapäev. Arengud. Tallinn: Eesti Akadeemiline Seksoloogia Selts, pp. 297–304. Kulpa, Robert. 2014. ‘Western Leveraged Pedagogy of Central and Eastern Europe: Discourses of Homophobia, Tolerance, and Nationhood,’ Gender, Place & Culture, 21(4), pp. 431–448. Kulpa, Robert, and Mizielińska, Joanna. 2011. De-Centring Western Sexualities: Central and Eastern European Perspectives. Farnham: Ashgate. LaSala, Michael C., and Revere, Elyse J. 2011. ‘“It Would Have Been Impossible Before”: Reflections on Current Gay Life in Estonia,’ Journal of Homosexuality, 58(3), pp. 427–439. Lauristin, Marju, and Vihalemm, Peeter. 1997. ‘Recent Historical Developments in Estonia: Three Stages of Transition (1987–1997),’ in: Lauristin, Marju; Vihalemm, Peeter; Rosengren, Karl E., and Weibull, Lennart (eds.). Return to the Western World: Cultural and Political Perspectives on the Estonian Post-Communist Transition. Tartu: Tartu University Press, pp. 73–93. Lauristin, Marju, and Vihalemm, Peeter. 2017. ‘Eesti tee stagnaajast tänapäeva: Sotsiaal­ teaduslik vaade kolme aastakümne arengutele,’ in: Vihalemm, Peeter; Lauristin, Marju; Kalmus, Veronika, and Vihalemm, Triin (eds.). Eesti ühiskond kiirenevas ajas: Uuringu ‘Mina. Maailm. Meeda 2002–2014 tulemused. Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli kirjastus, pp. 60–95.

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Leetmaa, Kadri. 2017. ‘Place of residence as a measure of integration: changes in eth­ nolinguistic residential segregation,’ in: Estonian Human Development Report 2016/2017: Estonia at the Age of Migration. Cooperation Assembly Foundation, available online at (accessed July 11, 2019). Leivak, Verni. 2017. ‘Baltic Pride – miks ja kellele,’ Postimees, July 7, 2018, available online at (accessed July 11, 2019). LGBT Association homepage. 2017. Homme algab üheksas LGBT kultuurifestival Baltic Pride, available online at (accessed July 11, 2019). LGBT Association homepage. 2018. Ühingu ajalugu, available online at (accessed July 11, 2019). Mazylis, Liudas; Rakutiene, Sima, and Unikaite-Jakuntaviciene, Ingrida. 2014. ‘Two Competing Normative Trajectories in the Context of the First Baltic Gay Pride Parade in Lithuania,’ Baltic Journal of Law & Politics 7(2), pp. 37–76. Mets, Reimo. 2010. ‘Seadused ja homoseksuaalsus,’ in: Davidjants, Birgitta (ed.). Kapiuksed valla: Arutlusi homo-, bi- ja transseksuaalsusest. Tallin: MTÜ Gei Noored, pp. 82–90. Mikk, Arne. 1999. ‘70 aastat Evald Aava ooperi “Vikerlased sünnist”,’ Teater. Muusika. Kino 1, pp. 47–55. Mizielińska, Joanna, and Kulpa, Robert. 2011. ‘“Contemporary peripheries”: Queer Studies, Circulation of Knowledge and East/West Divide,’ in: Kulpa, Robert, and Mizielińska, Joanna (eds.). De-Centring Western Sexualities: Central and Eastern European Perspectives. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 11–26. Navickaité, Rasa. 2014. ‘Postcolonial queer critique in post-communist Europe: Stuck in the Western progress narrative?’ TVGEND 17(2), pp. 167–185. Pawłusz, Emilia. 2016. ‘The Estonian song celebration (Laulupidu) as an instrument of language policy,’ Journal of Baltic Studies, pp. 1–21. Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sander, Maris, and Samma, Jaanus. 2001. ‘Lühike Eesti geiajalugu,’ Eesti Ekspress 42 (1141), pp. 28–30. Shevel, Oxana. 2009 ‘The Politics of Citizenship Policy in New States,’ Comparative Politics, 41(3), pp. 273–291. Stella, Francesca. 2013. ‘Queer Space, Pride, and Shame in Moscow,’ Slavic Review 72(3), pp. 458–480. Sullivan, Nikki. 2003. A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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8  Transition Narratives on Polish Trans Blogs: A Discursive Colonization Approach

Introduction This chapter examines transition narratives on Polish trans blogs, offering a critical perspective on the colonizing character of Western – especially U.S.-American – medical discourses. The argument here has been inspired by, and partially supports, Rodrigo Borba’s analysis of discursive coloniza­ tion of the transition in Brazilian gender clinics. Borba (2017) considers the global circulation of the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the way it guides doctors’ clinical gaze – the act of selective perception that focuses only on biomedical components of a person’s narrative and/or imposes certain interpretations on it (Foucault 1973) – in Brazilian gender identity clinics. This chapter extends Borba’s research by examining the influence of the U.S.-American DSM in Poland, a country in Central and Eastern Europe (further CEE) rarely considered in mainstream postcolonial and trans studies. It suggests that Polish transi­ tion discourses could be – at least partially – the result of a similar discursive colonization process. After briefly introducing the medical, legal, and social conditions of transition in Poland and describing the theoretical-methodological frame­ work of the study, I offer my reading of transition narratives on Polish trans blogs through the conceptual lens of discursive colonization. In doing so, I try to show how the bloggers whose stories I look at, just as the clients of gender identity clinics in Borba’s study, are ‘thrown into a socialization trajectory’ that imposes on them certain rehearsed life narratives that have ‘little relevance with their lived bodily and subjective experiences’ (2017: 331). I hope to make visible that these narratives exemplify the discursive

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colonization of Western gender transition discourses, modified by/for the specificity of Polish gender norms, and are partly adopted by the bloggers to make sense of their experiences and partly used strategically to convince others of their suitability for transition. The chapter frequently uses the word trans as an adjective, meaning both transsexual and transgender. Because the study is based upon a corpus of blogs whose authors self-identify predominantly as transsexual (one as transgender), the lack of references to other ways to identify (agender, bigen­ der, (gender)queer, etc.) is not an oversight or an exclusion: rather, it is con­ ditioned by the available material and pays respect to the self-description of the bloggers involved in this project. The study applies the principles of participatory action research (MacDonald 2012), that is, research on, for, and with social groups under investigation (Cameron et al. 1992). Members of the Polish NGO Akceptacja have provided material, support, and feedback, without which this research would not have been possible. In a commitment to ‘de-centring,’ I chose an organization not based in the capital but still very active and quite wellknown in the Polish trans community. I have been in touch with its mem­ bers regularly since February 2017. We hope that our collaborative research reports, disseminated through both academic and activist networks, can contribute to increasing the visibility and awareness of trans issues in Poland. I propose understanding my collaborative research approach as a meth­ odological contribution on the theme of solidarity: a suggestion on how to enliven solidarity as a pragmatic working principle and not just a declaratory concept, blurring the borders between academic and activist work. I should note that although my relationship with my gender has always been far from straightforward, I do not identify as trans. After a childhood in which gender hardly played a role, I was suddenly and brutally confronted with what it meant to be a woman in post-socialist Poland, rebuilding its wounded national identity through the return to traditional values (Savicka 2004). Although I cannot possibly comprehend the experience of a trans person – in terms of their gender identity being different from the sex they were assigned to at birth – I believe I can empathize with the experience of struggling with other people’s expectations based solely on what they think they see. Unfortunately, being a trans ally does not guarantee that I will never make a mistake. Also, claiming solidarity does not mean disclaiming

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responsibility. Thus, any failures and shortcomings that may occur in this chapter are of course my own.

Medical, Legal, and Social Conditions of Transition in Poland In the first recorded case of a transsexual person in Poland in 1964, a court allowed the correction of sex on the birth certificate from male to female; the first surgeries took place only in the 1980s (Dębińska 2014: 58). While Polish pioneers of sexual reassignment surgery (SRS) learned from U.S. doctors (including John Money), the socialist ideology, with its criticism of Western bourgeois culture, ‘created a field for different conceptualization of sexual­ ity and transsexuality within the official discourse of sexology’ (ibid.: 54). Polish sexologists popularized the perception of transsexuality as a pathology deserving compassion and pity; in the context of extreme hostility towards homosexuality, transsexuality was more accepted, as a condition that, when ‘cured,’ could produce proper heterosexual socialist citizens. Furthermore, their work was motivated by the sexual knowledge deficiency of the society and their own scientific curiosity: their goal was not ‘expanding the area of freedom, but reducing the area of ignorance’ (Dębińska 2014: 55). Dębińska emphasizes that the discursive category of transsexuality should be treated as a ‘specifically Western creation’ (2014: 51) adapted by Polish sexology for the sociocultural context of the late People’s Republic (p. 53) and translated into the ‘language of socialist ideology’ (p. 54). This peculiar hybrid remains ‘the frame of reference for the treatment of trans­ sexuality in Poland’ (Kłonkowska 2015: 124). It was only possible to conceptualize sexuality in terms of identity – and to initiate an LGBT rights movement – after the democratic transforma­ tion of the early 1990s, which brought a shift in thinking about the West, no longer demonized as decadent and spoiled but instead idealized and considered a role model. Western identity labels and styles of political and social engagement were partly willingly adopted by activists in CEE coun­ tries and partly imposed by the mushrooming Western-sponsored NGO sector. The Polish queer theorists Joanna Mizielińska and Robert Kulpa

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argue that ‘[a]fter the collapse of the “Iron Curtain,” CEE countries quite unanimously adopted a Western style of political and social engagement, without much questioning of its historical particularism and suitability for their context’ (2011: 14). But this early engagement did not include trans issues. In fact, the Western label LGBT was adopted in the 1990s by a move­ ment that focused on lesbian and gay activism only; for about two decades, the letters B and T meant nothing. Transgender activism itself only began to emerge around 2007–2008 (ibid.). Today not much has changed in legal terms: since no gender recogni­ tion regulations have ever been adopted, courts still rely on the precedents established in the 1960s. In practice, legal gender recognition takes place on the basis of case-by-case cooperation between judges and doctors. The requirements for allowing legal recognition can vary and often have a gate­ keeping function. The whole process can take many years, involves suing one’s own parents or guardians for wrongly marking gender at birth or may end in divorce (Śmiszek & Dynarski 2014; Kłonkowska 2015; TGEU 2017), as Poland does not allow same-sex unions. The process requires a real-life test – a kind of a probation time, usually between six months and two years, when transgender individuals live in their preferred gender role before any actual legal changes have been made – and at least some medical procedures, for example, hormone therapy or chest reconstruction, excluding those who cannot afford it or simply do not wish to transition medically. All these steps must be preceded by ‘a complete psychological and psychiatric evaluation, which in itself leads to self-pathologization (a feeling of being sick or dis­ ordered)’ (Dynarski 2014: 5). Moreover, most of these administrative and medical procedures must be paid for privately, as they are not considered to be basic healthcare needs. Poland also lacks a national protocol for medical transition (ŚledzińskaSimon 2013: 174), giving doctors almost absolute freedom in how to handle it. In practice, most doctors rely on textbooks and manuals developed in the West and that reflect the Western context, most notably various editions of the DSM, which are also broadly cited in Polish academic publications and mass media (Kłonkowska 2015: 124). Additionally, the tenth edition of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems from the World Health Organization (ICD) is also widely used. While the WHO is a global organization, it can be seen as Western-oriented

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and as propagating Western lifestyles (Bennett 2017). This means that these texts, even if not explicitly quoted, circulate within and consequently shape public discourses on trans issues in Poland. When it comes to trans visibility in Poland, a milestone moment took place in 2011, when Anna Grodzka, co-founder of Trans-Fuzja,1 an NGO working for gender education and trans rights and against transphobia, became the first openly transgender member of the Polish parliament. She remains both one of the most recognizable trans people and the face of the trans rights movement. The representation of trans topics in popular culture has also been increasing. Most notably, many autobiographies have been published by transwomen in recent years, some of them receiving quite a lot of public attention (e.g. Anna Grodzka’s Mam na imię Ania, Marianna Klapczyńska’s Dzikie gęsi, Kinga Kosińska’s Brudny róż). However, in spite of this vis­ ibility work, transness is still perceived predominantly negatively by Polish society (Grzejszczak & Krzywdzińska 2013: 259–260). The authors note, however, that social awareness and support for trans issues is increasing among younger generations.

Theoretical and Methodological Framework of the Study This chapter takes a discursive colonization approach to CEE trans studies. The potential place of the CEE region in general, and Poland in particular, within postcolonial studies is a hotly debated issue (e.g. Kelertas et al. 2006; Račevskis 2006; Korek 2009; Annus 2012) that cannot be resolved here. Instead of investigating the possible ideological dominance or influence of the Soviet Union on the Polish People’s Republic, which existed from 1947 to 1989 as a satellite state (although ‘the language of socialist ideology’ mentioned above could be considered, at least partly, a Soviet cultural/ideo­ logical imposition), the study recognizes the contemporary global reach of

1

See .

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the cultural practices of a few Western/global North states, most notably the U.S. (e.g. McClinton, Mufti, & Shohat 1997), also in the domain of sexual­ ity discourses and politics. One of the most influential recent publications tackling this issue with regard to CEE is the volume edited by Kulpa and Mizielińska (2011), which considers ‘how Western hegemonic imposition/ dominance work[s] in local contexts’ and how “Western discourses/theories” influence the process of the ‘construction and conceptualisation of sexuality and LGBTQ activism in CEE’ (Mizielińska & Kulpa 2011: 13). It does not, however, offer much on (trans)gender issues or discourse, which are gaps that the present research attempts to fill. Also, as indicated in the previous section, the discourse on transsexu­ ality in Poland was established before the Iron Curtain collapsed and con­ stituted a particular hybrid of U.S. and local elements. This medicalized and predominantly pathologizing view is still represented by many doc­ tors offering medical transition services and thus continues to be visible in transition narratives of Polish trans bloggers, who must comply with their doctors’ expectations. With the trans rights movement emerging in the late 2000s/early 2010s, new discourses have started to appear, rejecting the medical understanding with its full transition imperative. Arguably, these alternative discourses are also being adopted from the Western, particularly U.S.-American, context and so far, they have had no detectable influence on the current medical practice.

The Concept of Discursive Colonization Publications such as the already mentioned anthology Decentering Western Sexualities by Kulpa and Mizielińska (2011) do the important work of chal­ lenging Western bias in sexuality studies, where research conducted on and in Anglo-American contexts predominates. However, it is still often the case that Western paradigms and models are adapted to study non-Western societies. While this might bring interesting and valuable research results in some cases, it equally reinforces the dominance of Western ways of think­ ing and perpetuates the Western perspective as the ‘normal,’ ‘objective’

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perspective. In this study, I wish to engage with a model developed in Brazil. More specifically, this chapter uses Rodrigo Borba’s concept of discursive colonization, which can be defined as ‘the ease and rapidity with which certain authoritative Western discursive frameworks and their respective texts circulate globally and end up imposing […] institutional standards of textuality by which the global South must comply’ (Borba 2017: 321–322). In Borba’s research, discursive colonization refers to the approach to trans­ sexuality as a medical disorder, propagated by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and disseminated worldwide by way of the DSM. Borba (2017) examines how the reliance of Brazilian gender clinics on the DSM forces individuals seeking state-funded treatment to construct ‘rehearsed’ transition narratives that may not reflect their personalized experiences, stripping them of subjectivity and agency (not to mention the possible repercussions of misdiagnosis). Although the historical, political, and sociocultural circumstances in Brazil and Poland differ, parallels can still be drawn in the way Western, particularly the U.S., discourses of gender transition become disseminated in the two countries. It could be argued that due to the globalization of medical texts and their epistemologies, which tends to universalize ‘Western’ theo­ ries, the DSM manual ‘shapes trans-specific healthcare policies worldwide’ (Borba 2017: 323, emphasis mine), which means that it affects Brazil and Poland in a similar way. The resulting local discourses of gender and sexual­ ity are ‘a work of local (inter)textual bricolage based on globally available discursive frameworks’ (p. 340), emphasizing the role of the local context in explaining the differences that still exist in spite of the influence of global medical epistemologies.

A Few Notes on the Corpus In this study, I look at the phenomenon of discursive colonization, apply­ ing qualitative discourse-analytical procedures to texts selected from a corpus of twenty-seven blogs written in Polish by trans authors, which I built for my postdoctoral project on strategies of constructing femininity,

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masculinity, and sexuality in CEE social media discourses (University of Bremen, 2015–2019). To the best of my knowledge, the corpus contains the majority of per­ sonal blogs by trans authors (excluding informative websites, discussion fora, etc.) that are written in Polish, longer than a few posts, and discoverable with simple search procedures (at the time of material collection in spring 2017). It consists of sixteen transmen’s blogs, ten transwomen’s blogs and one blog of a transgender person (assigned female at birth, using female and male pronouns interchangeably and not planning to transition). The first five blogs appeared in 2003 and were published by transmen; the earliest transwoman’s blog appeared in 2005. Out of these six pioneer blogs, four ceased to be updated before the time of material collection; by the time of writing (April 2018), only one has remained active. With just some excep­ tions, the blogs are usually maintained and updated for at least one year. Most of them were written for around five years or less (seventeen titles or 56.67 percent). Three blogs were updated for more than ten years. For each blog, all the posts were copy-pasted into a .txt document in reverse order (i.e. from earliest to latest). All the .txt files were then loaded into the qualitative textual analysis program MaxQDA for the purpose of coding and analysis. For the present chapter, which is concerned with transition nar­ ratives, I consider fragments addressing this aspect of the bloggers’ experience. My work with the corpus for the larger postdoctoral project involved multiple close readings of all collected texts and a deductive, data-driven coding process, which, although not relevant to this study, contributed to and reinforced my familiarity with all bloggers and their self-presentations. I contacted the bloggers whenever possible. Most of the authors I approached gave consent to use their texts for analysis. Still, I decided not to reveal the blogs’ titles, web addresses, or bloggers’ personal information. I also decided to translate all my examples into English and provide only these translations in the text (to prevent the possibility of finding the blogs by copy-pasting the Polish examples into a web browser). For each example, I provide a number that every blog was assigned (1 to 27) and the date of publication. The blog data is complemented by comments and feedback from mem­ bers of the Polish NGO Akceptacja, elicited during a focus group meeting on April 26, 2018.

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(Trans) Blogs in Discourse Analysis While blogs may currently be losing popularity due to social media, which rely more on the convergence of offline and online self, the central aspect of ‘traditional’ blogging – anonymity – is still very relevant to LGBTIQ+ users: ‘the majority of LGBTQ Internet studies points out that […] a strong sense of anonymity online translates into a greater authenticity of LGBTQ self-presentations’ (Dhoest & Szulc 2016: 1). At the same time, however, the ‘performance of blogging is based on the assumption that experience congeals around a subject, and makes a subject who can be written and read’ (Rak 2005: 166). This means that in spite of anonymity, a blog is understood to represent a ‘real’ and ‘true,’ integral and cohesive offline self (ibid.: 175) that makes ‘use of offline experiences as a guarantor of identity’ (ibid.: 176). The concept of identity plays an important role in discourse analysis, as it is through text and talk that identities are constructed: ‘our ways of talking do not neutrally reflect our world, identities and social relations but, rather, play an active role in creating and changing them’ ( Jørgensen & Phillips 2002: 1); discourse ‘does not transparently reflect the thoughts, attitudes, and identities of separate selves but is a shared social resource that constructs identity, as individuals lay claim to various recognizable social and shared identities’ (Ainsworth & Hardy 2004: 237). This point emphasizes the usefulness of both blogs as sources and dis­ course analysis as a method: written over a longer period, blogs make it pos­ sible to trace shifts and changes in identity construction, which are otherwise difficult to prove empirically. And applying discourse analysis guarantees an approach to blog texts that provides a focus on the use of language – ‘that is, the precise workings of language too easily overlooked or dismissed as a transparent medium of human interaction’ (Hodges & Nilep 2007: 11). In other words, the discursive approach concentrates on the role of language in constituting ‘situations, objects of knowledge, and the social identities of and relationships between people and groups of people’ (Wodak 2002: 7). Critical discourse analysis (CDA) in particular focuses ‘on the role of discourse in the (re)production and the challenge of dominance’ (van Dijk 1993: 249). In CDA, discourse helps to sustain the social status quo and

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contributes to its transformation at the same time (Wodak 2002: 8). In this study, discourse is defined as the socially meaningful activity […] in which ideas are constructed over time. When we speak of a discourse, we refer to a particular history of talk about a particular idea or set of ideas. Thus when we talk about a discourse of gender, […] we refer to the work­ ing of a particular set of ideas about gender in some segment […] of society. (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 2003: 42)

Discourse analysis offers well-established procedures for examining gender and sexual identity (e.g. Baker 2008; Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 2003; Kulick & Cameron 2008; Valentine 2003). However, while trans repre­ sentation has become established as a topic of research in media, espe­ cially social media, studies (e.g. Horak 2014; Raun 2012; Serano 2007), it rarely figures in strictly discourse-analytical research (a notable exception is Dame 2013). In what follows, after general observations about the blogs’ themes and functions based on repetitive readings of the whole corpus, I zoom in on those fragments that describe and reflect upon the process of gender transition. I identify features of medical discourse in the construction of a particular way of understanding transness, showing how bloggers fix, rein­ force, and resist this understanding.

Transition Narratives on Polish Trans Blogs All the bloggers explicitly refer to their transness. Most of them publish a direct coming-out statement very early in the blog’s existence (first, some­ times second post), for example: ‘My name is […], I am 21 years old and yes, I am an tm transsexual’ (7, November 2, 2013); ‘I am 20 years old and begin­ ning to fight for my future. I am an ftm trans…’ (10, August 13, 2003); ‘my parents gave me [a male name], but actually, on that day, a transgender girl was born’ (18, March 30, 2015). A few others come out using more indirect means, for example: ‘How to be trans and not go crazy?’ (15, March 20, 2015), ‘How do we discover ourselves? How have I discovered my transgenderism?’

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(27, March 25, 2007). A few blogs contain the word trans in the title, header, or the blogger’s nickname. The bloggers use a variety of nouns and adjectives to label their identity (listed here in the singular (1) feminine and (2) masculine nominative forms): • • • • • • •

trans – used as a noun or adjective, 355 tokens (i.e. the number of times the term was used); transseksualistka, (2) transseksualista [a transsexual] (noun), 256 tokens; transgender – used as a noun or adjective, indeclinable, 210 tokens; transseksualna, (2) transseksualny [transsexual] (adjective), ninety-seven tokens; transpłciowa, (2) transpłciowy [transgender] (adjective), fifty-seven tokens; transkobieta [a transwoman], fifteen tokens; transfacet (eight tokens, colloquial), transmężczyzna (three tokens) [a transman].

Trans can function as an indeclinable adjective, usually in the postpositive position (osoba trans [a trans person]), sometimes in the prepositive position (trans chłopak [a trans boy]); as a noun, it can be declined: jestem trans-em [I am a [male] trans] (sing. masc. dat.); trans-ka [a [female] trans] (sing. fem. nom.). Some terms are used almost exclusively by only one blogger: 185 out of 210 tokens of transgender were found on blog 27; forty-six out of fifty-seven uses of the adjective transpłciowa/-y were found on blog 18; twelve out of fifteen uses of transkobieta on blog 26 and six out of eight uses of transfacet on blog 8. Sporadically, the neologisms emka and kaem (from m/k and k/m, meaning male-to-female and female-to-male, respectively) are used (as nouns). To refer to transsexuality, the following terms are used: transseksualizm ‘transsexualism,’ 218 tokens; transpłciowość ‘transgenderism,’ twenty-eight tokens; and transseksualność ‘transsexuality,’ nine tokens. Almost all (twenty-five out of twenty-seven) bloggers mention transi­ tion. Out of these, one briefly considers transitioning (from female to male), using feminine and masculine first-person pronouns interchangeably and identifying with the ‘TG/TS community;’ eventually, she decides against it, using feminine pronouns consistently and in one post referring to herself

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as ‘genderqueer’ (27, November 1, 2010). Another blogger starts posting (5, July 10, 2003) using feminine first-person pronouns, but at some point (December 1, 2004) switches to male pronouns and other grammatical markers and thus performatively comes out as a transman. He writes about transition a few times, but it never becomes clear if he decides to go through with it. Another transmale teen wants to transition but is too young at the time of writing (16, 2009–2014). Finally, one transwoman shares her wish to transition repeatedly but does not begin it due to family, health, and financial reasons (e.g. ‘I’m not going to have SRS – so operations – I’m not going to because my family situation won’t allow it and I don’t want to destroy my daughter’s life’ (19, September 4, 2004)). All the remaining (21) bloggers start legal and/or medical transition while writing the blog or before establishing it. There appear to be three main reasons for the bloggers to start posting:2 (1) as a therapeutic device, to help them deal with emotional difficulties (e.g. ‘I have started this blog to do something with myself. And I have to do something with myself, otherwise I will land on a psychiatrist’s couch’ (16, December 28, 2009)); (2) to document their transition (e.g. ‘On the blog I will describe my experi­ ences associated with sex reassignment surgery (SRS)…’ (23, December 30, 2013)); and (3) to help other trans people and, to a lesser extent, educate the main­ stream audience3 (e.g. ‘I want to show people that transsexual persons in Poland can get good healthcare and support’ (6, October 10, 2016)).

2 3

It should be noted that this categorization is a useful but approximate and by no means absolute analytical device; individual blogs may, of course, contain elements of two or all the categories. It should be emphasized that the goal of educating a mainstream audience is relatively recent and not very widespread. The focus lies definitely on helping other trans people who are looking for information and support. One of the bloggers has another website offering information to both trans readers interested in transition and cis readers look­ ing for information (). A recently established YouTube channel Transbros also aims at both trans and cis audiences.

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Transition narratives can be defined as stories that ‘document the subject’s transition from social recognition as one gender to another’ (Horak 2014: 572). While blogs under (2) and (3) typically contain transition narratives, not all texts under (1) do. These texts seem to focus more on the feelings and emotions that accompany their authors as they mature towards the decision to come out to their families and friends and to transition. They often finish when the actual transition begins (e.g. with the first testosterone shot, blog 11), as their authors no longer need the emotional comfort provided by both the process of writing and the feedback from their followers. Other blogs under (1) deal with the mental burden of being unable to transition due to health, financial, family, or other reasons (blog 19), or with being unsure whether to transition or not (blogs 5 and 27). Some blogs under (2) focus exclusively on documenting the medi­ cal part of their transition; for example, one transwoman starts her blog a few days before flying to Thailand for her SRS and closes it seven months later, declaring her physical transition complete (blog 23). Such texts tend to focus more on the facts and figures of medical procedures and physical changes and less on the emotions that accompany them (with the exception of coping with physical pain). Texts under (3) describe both the physical and emotional aspects of transition and tend to contain a lot of factual information, such as names and addresses of doctors, costs of procedures, lists of necessary diagnostic tests, etc. Such a blog, while offering an account of the author’s personal experiences, can also be read as a collection of generalizable guidelines and recommendations. Some blogs here are written at the time of transition (e.g. blogs 2, 9, 18), others years later (e.g. blogs 13, 20, 26), and many continue beyond it, with the blogger functioning as an established expert and role model (often also an activist), well-known in the online and offline trans community (especially blogs 4 and 14).

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Transition as a Physical/Medical Process: The Use of Medical Discourse Reading the corpus reveals that trans-specific healthcare in Poland is based upon the understanding of transness as a medical issue and of gender transi­ tion as a physical/medical process. The medical personnel approaches it as a ‘problem,’ meaning it can be ‘solved’ – medical transition is a solution, after which the problem is fixed and does not exist anymore. The consistently used term leczenie [treatment] (from leczyć [to cure]) emphasizes the understanding of transition as a medical, curative process with healing/recovery as its result. All bloggers writing about transition construct it as such a clearly defined process, dividing the time of their transition narratives into three stages: before, during, and after treatment (one blogger (14) actually uses the tags ‘ts-before’, ‘ts-during’ and ‘ts-after’), for example: • • •

before: ‘young transsexuals before treatment’ (8, May 31, 2010); ‘we met right before I started treatment’ (13, March 1, 2004); during: ‘everybody needs to go through this’ (26, February 22, 2009); after: ‘biographies of its people after treatment’ (5, May 6, 2005), ‘he got pregnant after treatment’ (13, December 23, 2009), ‘after the com­ pletion of treatment’ (13, March 18, 2004).

Furthermore, what is also common to all bloggers is the consistent use of formalized medical discourse in their transition narratives. They make fre­ quent use of medical terms such as ‘gender dysphoria syndrome,’ ‘gender identification disorder.’ They write about ‘symptoms’ (objawy). They freely use terminology associated with medical testing (‘karyotype, EEG, RTG of the Turkish saddle (sella turcica), fundus examination’ (6, October 11, 2016)), quote their prescriptions (names and dosages of medicines) and diagnosis statements (‘ftm (female to male) ts with indication for hormonal and sur­ gical treatment’ (13, June 21, 2003)). The use of expert discourse shows the extent of their personal initiative in managing their transition and lets them assume the discursive role of experts (Dame 2013). But this personal initiative is also necessary due to the apparent lack of knowledge, competence, and experience of many doctors that the bloggers come in contact with. With

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the bloggers discursively positioned as experts, many doctors are seen as administrators or bureaucrats, only interested in ticking off the right boxes, disregarding the subjective experience of the human beings in their care. The problem with such extensive use of medical discourse is that it can reinforce the pathologization of transness (Dynarski 2014: 5). Also, it may suggest that ‘trans people’s psychic and social problems derive from their own “disorder”, rather than from the cisnormative social structure which fails to acknowledge any gender variance’ (Borba & Milani 2017: 18). This is not to say that all the bloggers perceive their transness as a medical problem – in fact, many of them resist such a view. In some cases, it is clear that the rehearsed narratives expected by doctors (as in Borba’s 2017 study) are published on the blogs as a kind of script for others to follow (especially on blogs in the third category – offering advice and support) or as a form of re-appropriation.4 There is also a clear difference between transitions under­ taken in the 2000s and 2010s. Younger bloggers are increasingly critical of medicalization and pathologization discourses and seem more prepared to take responsibility to tailor their experience according to their own needs rather than the doctors’ expectations. Still, the problem with discourse is that it fixes and reinforces particular understandings of phenomena and concepts, even if they are being named in order to challenge or criticize them. It also proves extremely difficult to be constantly on guard about one’s language use and constructing alterna­ tive discourses takes time and effort. In light of the history of transsexuality as a medical problem – this ‘specifically Western creation’ (Dębińska 2014: 51) reinforced by powerful Western/U.S.-American texts, including DSM and ICD, through the pro­ cess of discursive colonization – I see the medicalization of discourse on transness as the most manifest result of the Western influence on the ways of thinking and talking about it. By providing the definition (i.e. the under­ standing of what trans means) and the language (i.e. the established, fixed code that needs to be shared in order to be understood) of transsexuality, it predetermines what can be said about it and how. The medical discourse

4

For a brilliant example see the YouTube video: .

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provides a kind of frame that can be filled with various, sometimes even contradictory meanings, and it is particularly challenging – although not impossible – to think and talk outside of it.

Variability/Unpredictability of Gender Transition The second striking feature of transition narratives, in addition to the common and consistent use of medical discourse, is the variability of indi­ vidual experiences reported by various bloggers. These differences occur at each stage of the process. When it comes to diagnosis, for some people, it takes up to two years and many visits to the doctor; others receive a pre­ scription for hormones at the first visit. Some bloggers are asked to see a sexologist or an endocrinologist, others are not. Most, but not all, transmen are required to visit a gynecologist. Also, the number of tests the bloggers are asked to undergo varies and may include any of the following: an electroencephalogram, genetic tests such as karyotype test, an X-ray or computed tomog­ raphy scan of the head, an ophthalmoscopy exam, liver and kidney puncture lab tests, blood morphology, tests of luteinizing and follicle-stimulating hormone levels, an abdominal ultrasound, and a urological/gynecological examination. (Kłonkowska 2015: 126)

After receiving the ‘diagnosis of transsexualism’ (explicitly named as such in 3, 4, 8, 9, 18, 26), the ‘treatment’ phase starts. Also here, vast differences are visible: some bloggers undergo psychotherapy as an obligatory part of their treatment, others do not; some doctors require a real-life test, others do not. The transition process is described in a factual, matter-of-fact way, often using bucket lists of things to be done that are copied and updated (their components ticked off, crossed out, etc.) in successive posts as the narrative proceeds, as in the following example: 1. sexuologist (that’s what you begin with and it will usually be the leading doctor) 2. psychologist

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3. medical tests (endocrinologist, karyotype, EEG, RTG of the Turkish saddle, fundus examination, etc.) 4. psychiatrist 5. endocrinologist, hormone therapy 6. COURT – filing the case/sittings/verdict 7. F/M – mastectomy […] 8. remaining surgeries – for both ftm and mtf […] only AFTER the verdict. (6, October 11, 2016)

As we have seen, not everyone has to accomplish all the tasks on the list (e.g. not all trans bloggers actually see sexologists or endocrinologists). Regardless, such lists, even if they differ in details, can be found on numerous blogs which collectively construct transition as a well-defined process, consist­ ing of clear-cut elements that can be ticked off when completed. This has certain discursive effects. While it certainly gives the impression of transi­ tion being perfectly manageable, it also solidifies it into a norm, marginal­ izing trans people only interested in a selection of elements (e.g. hormone therapy), not interested in (medical) transition at all, or looking for a more holistic approach. Such marginalization plays a part in the prioritization of the ‘true transsexual’ archetype, resulting in internal hierarchization of the trans community (more on that in the next section). Bloggers are aware of these marginalization discourses and attempt to engage with them criti­ cally, for example: Only with time have I understood that being a transgender woman does not auto­ matically mean that you need to undergo SRS. One can live in a man’s body (or vice versa) and be fulfilled […]. Every transgender person WANTS, but does not HAVE to, undergo SRS. (18, April 1, 2015)

This statement illustrates trans bloggers’ ongoing search for a more inclu­ sive definition of their community, although its author draws the line at wanting to undergo SRS, which still excludes trans people who do not want it. What I find particularly problematic is that the ‘mechanical,’ perfunc­ tory understanding of transition represented by Polish doctors leaves out the whole psychological, emotional, mental side of the process. Doctors seem to rarely ask their clients if they need emotional support (they only seem to be interested in their psychological state if they doubt their fitness for

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transition); even psychologists or psychiatrists participating in the transition process focus less on their clients’ emotional well-being and more on how well they match the stereotypical norms of the gender they identify with. This is a case in point for the concept of clinical gaze, where doctors selectively perceive only those parts of their clients’ narratives that are relevant for the interventions they are tasked with. Most bloggers are aware of and critical towards this ‘mechanization’ and generalization (de-individualization) of transition practices, but they do not challenge their doctors about it for fear of risking their own progress. While doctors often appear incompetent, they are still the gatekeepers who need to be appeased, won over, convinced to grant their approval. For some bloggers, many things on the bucket lists are not reasonable or genuinely useful healthcare practices but rather annoying obstacles thrown their way. For example, one blogger mentions a ‘commit­ tee meeting’ that was required in order to receive a hormone prescription that cost 800 PLN (c. 200 EUR) and was completely unnecessary from a medical point of view (13, July 6, 2003) or a gynecological examination whose only purpose was to demonstrate the effects of testosterone on female reproductive organs to a group of medicine students (December 11, 2004). The corpus shows that trans healthcare specialists can be unpleasant, arrogant, aggressive, dismissive. One blogger notes of his doctor, ‘he treated me, to put it mildly, like the last rag. After visiting him, I needed a long time to recover’ (12, December 13, 2005). Another blogger’s doctor was of the opinion that all trans men are actually socially awkward lesbians. He writes, ‘if not for this man, I would probably be in university now, with papers changed one and a half years ago. And through his actions I was excluded from life. I lost a year at school (after my last visit with him, I did not leave the house for several months)’ (8, September 22, 2009). While doctors who do not specialize in trans-specific healthcare may be more approachable or empathetic, their knowledge and experience often disappoint. Such variability of bloggers’ experiences may be caused by the already mentioned lack of a national trans healthcare protocol as well as by the way transsexualism and gender dysphoria are defined in the ICD and the DSM, respectively, leaving a lot of interpretative freedom to practition­ ers. This means that in many cases, the treatment will be affected by their own personal beliefs and attitudes concerning the interpretation of criteria. For example, the DSM refers to the ‘symptoms’ of gender dysphoria in a

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very general way, leaving it to the doctors to decide what exactly damskie ubrania [women’s clothes], kobiecy wygląd [feminine appearance], ubiór typowo kobiecy [typically female clothing], role płci przeciwnej [roles of the opposite sex], zabawki, gry i czynności […] uczucia i reakcje typowe dla płci przeciwnej [toys, games and activities […] feelings and reactions typical for the opposite sex] are (DSM 2015: 207). The binary understanding of sex/ gender (‘opposite sex’), a lack of differentiation between sex and gender, and a very traditional, stereotypical approach to gender ‘roles’ and ‘norms’ (e.g. brutalne zabawy [brutal games] as typical for boys!) should also be empha­ sized as very problematic. To summarize, formulated in this vague manner, the ICD and DSM can only provide a general framework that leaves doctors free to act on the basis of their own beliefs and attitudes concerning gender norms and roles. In Poland, these tend to be polarized (male/female as dichotomous and mutually exclusive), androcentric (male more valued than female), and essentialist (Grzejszczak & Krzywdzińska 2013: 260).

The ‘True Transsexual’ The concept of the ‘true transsexual’5 is usually attributed to Henry Benjamin and his 1966 book The Transsexual Phenomenon and also discussed by Borba (2017) as playing a vital role in the diagnosis of transsexuality in Brazil. Kłonkowska notes that Polish government agencies and health services as well as mass media representations also still refer to this concept of the ‘true transsexuals.’ Such a ‘true transsexual’ is defined as a person whose desired gender is the exact opposite of that gender assigned to them at birth; who sexually desires the opposite of his gender identity (in other words, is a heterosexual); plans to do a sex reassignment surgery, and wants to change their legal gender status (Kłonkowska 2015: 124).

5

Quotation marks are used consistently to indicate a critical position towards the stereotype.

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There is strong evidence that Polish doctors rely on the ‘true transsexual’ stereotype when deciding upon a patient’s suitability for treatment: accord­ ing to a survey by Transgender Europe, 92.5 percent of respondents feel not ‘trans enough’ and 92.1 percent feel forced into the gender binary when accessing trans-specific healthcare (TGEU 2017: 39). The ‘true transsexual’ stereotype is exactly what forces Polish (and Brazilian) people interested in transition to present themselves in particular ways and to claim rehearsed life histories in order to qualify for treatment, also when these stories do not reflect their actual experiences or even contradict them. The corpus sug­ gests that the stereotype is realized in the form of three relatively frequently mentioned requirements posed by the bloggers’ doctors: (1) to present stereotypically gendered appearance and behavior, (2) to express a wish to undergo all possible surgeries, and (3) to be heterosexual. A close reading of the corpus suggests that Polish bloggers are aware of and critical towards the ‘true transsexual’ stereotype and its role in the internal hierarchization of the trans community, for example: ‘Hard to believe it? Trans folk are arguing who is more true?6 Well, unfortunately that’s how it is’ (8, December 23, 2009). None of the bloggers themselves aspire to be perceived as ‘true’ within the community. In fact, many of them actively oppose the legitimacy of the requirements. It must be noted, however, that this critical engagement comes in many cases after their own transition has been completed (e.g. 13, 14, 18, 26) or does not affect their own transition trajectories. Most bloggers are still interested in all available surgeries and, as a result, need to be perceived as ‘true’ by their doctors – which means that the stereotype has a hold on their lives, for example: I am quite an unusual transwoman. I do not like high heels, stockings, lipsticks, nail polish, etc. It does not mean that I am not a woman or that I am a freak. There is this stereotype of transsexuals that they have to show their affiliation to their real gender in a particular way. It is not true. Everyone is different. Of course, I did not want to get into some conflict with my psychologist and wanting to settle my case positively I bent 6

‘Tru’ is the spelling used by some bloggers to emphasize their critical attitude towards the term.

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a little to his old-fashioned views. It’s just old-fashioned. The gentleman was really old and his views on the topic of femininity were seriously archaic. (26, February 22, 2009)

This blogger felt the need to present to her doctor more stereotypical femi­ ninity than she generally does, in order to convince him of her suitability for treatment (she presented an appearance expected by the doctor because she wanted to qualify for SRS). Of course, the fragment also shows her strong agency in negotiating her identity and working out strategies to avoid con­ flicts and achieve desirable outcomes. But this only provides evidence for the claim that the current medical practice imposes certain narrative demands, instead of responding to individual, nuanced, and multiple needs. Many transwomen feel that the expectations they face are much stricter than the expectations faced by cis-women: ‘Cis-women are allowed every­ thing, to wear a tie, pants […] no matter how they dress at work or on the street, it will be tolerated, while I need to try so much harder’ (19, July 22, 2010). Another transwoman describes her recent visits to her two doctors – a sexologist and a psychotherapist – with the following words: ‘Both my ladies are now saying openly that I am very convincing in the social role of a woman’ (18, October 2, 2015). These fragments suggest that doctors in charge of gender transition assume the role of judges of gendered presenta­ tion and behavior, which is problematic for many reasons: subjectivity and changeability of beliefs, attitudes, and expectations concerning gender, increased variability, and unpredictability of requirements, consequent reinforcement of old-fashioned and harmful gender stereotypes and of the ‘true transsexual’ stereotype, etc. When it comes to the wish to undergo all possible surgeries, I have found only one blog fragment that seems to support it (‘Honestly, if someone gives up treatment, and as the reason mentions fear of pain or narcosis, or that their sense of the aesthetic would not bear the view of the mutilated body, then… they are not transsexual’ (13, August 23, 2003)). To be fair, it may have been written to make sense of and justify the author’s own, extremely painful, and traumatizing transition (which the whole blog testifies to), or to exemplify internalized transphobia. Also note that the same author says elsewhere: ‘hormonal treatment and surgery were to change my life, but the truth is that for most trans guys, this is not the most important thing; what counts is the sense of their own masculinity’ (13, November 4, 2003). This

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is not a contradiction and it does not necessarily mean a change of heart; rather, this is a case in point for the claim that attitudes, just as identities, are fluid, changeable, and context-dependent. Also, again, it is necessary to emphasize possible differences between what the bloggers consider imagi­ nable within the definition of transness in general and what they want for or apply to themselves in particular. To summarize, the bloggers are quite aware of the artificiality and unrelatability of most narrative demands posed by their doctors and have no qualms presenting a rehearsed life narrative as a strategy to receive the expected diagnosis and subsequent treatment. This means that while they may personally hold different views as to what transness is – views that reject the ‘true transsexual’ stereotype and oppose the marginalization of those who do not match it – overly medicalized and pathologizing dis­ courses of transsexuality are reproduced within and inform trans-specific healthcare practice. While I agree with Borba (2017) that the ‘true transsexual’ stereotype is part and parcel of the Western medicalized discourse on transsexuality, and thus relevant to the discussion on discursive colonization, I believe that it is much broader than the understanding of a transsexual person hinted at in the ICD and DSM, and its origin is much more complicated. For example, neither document (at least in the versions I have examined) mentions the heterosexuality requirement, but it does play an important role in practice, as reported by most bloggers and confirmed by the focus group and the literature. I believe that the heterosexuality requirement and the specific gendered appearance and behavior stereotypes have at least as much to do with the Polish gender system (which is very traditional when it comes to gender roles and extremely heteronormative) as with the imposition of Western gender transition discourses. This is well-illustrated with the frame metaphor introduced earlier: while the process of discursive colonization has provided the frame (i.e. the medical language to talk about transness as a health issue), it is the local culture that fills the frame with sociocultural content.

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Conclusions This chapter has been concerned with transition narratives on Polish trans authors’ blogs, which means that its conclusions apply to persons self-iden­ tifying as transsexual and transgender who have chosen the medium of a blog to talk about their experiences. While these blogs construct transness as a medical issue subject to treatment, and most of them contain transi­ tion narratives, it must be kept in mind that a study of other media, and not limited to authors self-identifying as transsexual/transgender, could yield different results (and remains a challenge for the future). With this in mind, transition narratives across blogs do have the power to instate transition as a norm, although – which is something Horak also noticed in transition vlogs (video blogs, usually published on YouTube) – many bloggers emphasize that it is not the only option (2014: 574). While the three main reasons to start a blog on transition are to provide emotional relief, document the process, and help other people, blogging also turns out to be able to help bloggers reclaim their subjectivity, agency, and integrity after depersonalizing and often humiliating encounters with healthcare practitioners. What is more, ‘the repetitive and shared narrato­ logical structure of transition [b]logs […] cumulatively (and performatively) produces a community’ (Horak 2014: 582). The role of such a support net­ work in the lives of often very young and lonely bloggers (and their readers!) as well as its potential to raise awareness and lead to real political change cannot be overestimated. There are also some significant differences in the way different bloggers experience transition, associated with the variability and unpredictability of requirements, resulting from the lack of national guidelines and the doctors’ standard practices and personal attitudes. Having to navigate these and many other difficulties, next to coming across doctors who are either incompetent or too bureaucratic, makes many bloggers see the diagnostic process not as help but rather as an obstacle or hurdle they need to cope with on their way to hormonal and/or surgical therapy. Together with the ‘bizarre’ (Dynarski 2014: 5) legal procedures, the whole transition thus appears to them as an ordeal, a challenge, and a hindrance on the way towards their goal rather than the way itself.

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I agree with Borba then that individuals, who identify as transsexuals and their doctors interact through ‘textually constrained’ performances that prevent the formation of trusting relationships and environments (Borba 2017: 320). I also agree that the pathologization of non-normative bodies and genders, which, as we saw, takes place both in Brazil and in Poland, can be seen as a device of colonial control (Borba 2017: 343). I do not think, however, that ‘the globalization of medical episte­ mologies and their textualities’ (Borba 2017: 320) is the only reason for all the problems in gender transition described in this chapter. While the discursive colonization of gender transition does contribute to the dis­ cursive construction of transsexuality as a health problem and provides the language to talk about symptoms and treatment, Western medical discourse has come to work together with the local, culturally shaped understandings of gender roles, norms, and the attitudes and expectations towards femininity and masculinity. This is, in my opinion, a side of the story that Borba overlooks. It should also be mentioned that Western, overly medicalized, and pathologizing discourses of transsexuality are currently giving way to alter­ native narratives – of gender fluidity, queerness, and transness that do not impose transition trajectories – many of which originated in the West as well. As mentioned a few times, they are integrated in what the bloggers imagine to be a legitimate trans experience and are becoming increasingly frequent among younger bloggers, especially after 2010. Other sources would be needed to explore these discourses. In contrast to Brazil, Poland has no national gender transition protocol to guide medical gender transitions. This could be seen as an opportunity and a challenge: to create standards that would guarantee an individualized approach, appreciating each transitioning person’s expert­ ness on their own body and taking their needs and wishes seriously, while also offering high-quality medical services and psychological support without judgment.

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Part III

The Solidarity ‘Stress Test’ – Solidarity in Action – Empirical Studies of Queer Migration and Western Solidarity Projects

Elena Smirnova

9 Could You Show Me Chechnya on the Map? The Struggle for Solidarity within the Support Campaign for Homosexual Refugees from the North Caucasus in France1

In April 2017, when information about the persecutions of gay people in Chechnya, a Republic of the Russian Federation, reached French media and civil society, a large number of petitions were signed to denounce these acts, unanimously qualified as homophobic. The French authorities and diplo­ mats did not react to the petitions immediately and during the first month, the local LGBTIQ+ community seemed confused about concrete acts they may engage in support of people murdered and tortured in Grozny and the surrounding areas. For individuals who signed the petitions, the main ques­ tion was ‘What can we do?’ One of the spontaneous reactions of several French citizens was to create an association called ‘Urgence Tchétchénie’ [Emergency Chechnya], in order to spread information and, as its founder underlined in one of his first interviews, to prove to people that the facts described in papers about homophobic violence in Chechnya were not ‘fake news’ (Daire 2017). Several weeks after its creation, the inclusion of activ­ ists from post-Soviet Russia allowed the group to reach out to the ‘Russian LGBT Network,’ the Russian-based non-governmental organization that facilitated most of the departures of persecuted people from the Chechen Republic during this crisis and transformed ‘Urgence Tchétchénie’ into a sup­ port organization. Through a complex diplomatic process, bringing together

1

I kindly thank Mona Claro and Shira Havkin for their attentive proof-reading of this chapter, and my partner Noa for our discussions and his support of my work. I would also like to acknowledge the reviewers for their comments and suggestions that were very useful for improving my arguments.

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activists and functionaries, a narrow ‘corridor’ for persecuted persons to seek asylum in France was established. As a member of ‘Urgence Tchétchénie’ from May 2017 to September 2018, I participated in welcoming people who arrived on French territory through this specific procedure of ‘exfiltration’ of people targeted by the homophobic campaign in the Chechen Republic. Since June 2017, I assisted these and several more people from other regions of Russia with their administrative procedures, such as applying for asylum in France, and facilitated, if needed, in setting them up with housing, lan­ guage courses, and psychological support. My work at ‘Urgence Tchétchénie’ consisted of several tasks: negotia­ tions with the French embassy in Russia for visas, getting in touch with evacuated people, preparing for their arrival, meeting them at the airport in France, and referring them to competent sources of information about the asylum application process. Additionally, I advised the applicants on their asylum seeker application forms for the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (OFPRA) and also helped them to prepare for their interview with OFPRA, often but not always with juridical assistance (for details, see ‘The Ideal Genuineness of Homosexuality: Solidarity Put on Trial by Western Identity Politics’ below). I also acted as an interpreter for my French colleagues and for NGOs, advocates, different institutions, and numerous journalists, who conducted anonymized interviews with recently migrated people who hoped to support their peers still remaining in Russian Federation and believed that media attention would be benefi­ cent for their asylum case. This chapter aims to present both my experiences as a volunteer impli­ cated in solidarity actions and my analyses of the broader situation from the perspective of a researcher with an academic background in Soviet history. As a cis-gender woman and migrant from the post-Soviet territory, I am also interested in investigating this topic from the perspective of feminist and deco­ lonial critique. The main question I will address is how solidarity with arriving people is constructed and what prevents it from being successful. To approach this question, I will ask why terms such as ‘protection’ and ‘help’ are used in the non-professional activist discourse instead of ‘solidarity.’ Furthermore, I analyze the way in which plural subjectivities are perceived and considered in the country of arrival and how identity politics intervene in this process. I investigate how micro-oppressions related to gender, race, and economic or

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social status reveal themselves through media representations and communi­ cation within activist circles. I am convinced that answering these questions can improve the solidarity practices with people fleeing homophobic violence in the regions of the North Caucasus as well as elsewhere. For security reasons, I do not use any personal data or facts in this paper but rather, I offer my more generalized observations. For a deeper understanding of the asylum system and NGOs in France, I especially refer to the works of Didier Fassin (2005, 2018), Miriam Ticktin (2011), Carolina Kobelisnki (2012), and Calogera Giametta (2018). Additionally, I draw on available statistics and data provided by institutions, NGO reports, and normative documents. I analyze media representations in different French magazines, websites, and discussions in social media, such as Facebook, published between April 2017 and May 2018. Although my media analysis is not exhaustive, my involvement in the field as an activist allowed me to systematically follow the relevant publications.

A Hope to Cross the Border: The Exceptional Measures and the Limits of Emergency On June 27, 2018, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) unanimously adopted the resolution on the persecution of LGBTI people in the Chechen Republic (Russian Federation). Its text underlines: ‘[T]his campaign of persecution in 2017, characterized by “systematic and widespread discrimination and violence against LGBTI persons”, has stopped, but its effects continue’ (PACE 2018; Bruyn 2018: 1ff.). It also states that, to date, ‘more than 114 LGBTI people and members of their families have fled the Chechen Republic to other regions of the Russian Federation, other Council of Europe member States and beyond’ (PACE 2018). This number concurs with a report published in April 2018 by the Russian LGBT Network. From April 2017 to April 2018, this NGO received different requests for assistance from more than 200 persons from Chechnya and its neighboring republics in the North Caucasus and evacuated 119

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people from the region (Russian LGBT Network & Milashina 2018: 2).2 Among all of the evacuated persons leaving for various countries, France accepted a very small number of people in July 2018, around 10 percent of all departures from the Russian Federation (the exact number cannot be declassified, due to the large local Chechen community, which presents a danger for the persecuted people, even on French territory). With two exceptions (one rejection and one intermediate decision, which I describe below), everyone who made a request made through the Russian LGBT Network and ‘Urgence Tchétchénie’ received humanitarian visas for the specific intent of seeking asylum in France. From June 2017 to October 2018, everyone who arrived with the assistance of the Russian LGBT Network and was accompanied by ‘Urgence Tchétchénie’ in their administrative proce­ dure in France received International Protection status from OFPRA, and 2

This chapter was written during the summer of 2018, while the persecutions of queer people in Chechnya seemed, if not stopped, at least subsided. Nevertheless, the Russian LGBT Network continued to receive numerous requests from people in peril on its hotline. Also, not all the people evacuated from Chechnya were able to get travel documents to leave Russia: some of them remained in shelters established by Russian LGBT Network and were still in danger, while their relatives or Chechen authorities searched for them. The Russian Federal authorities never opened an investigation, despite numerous evidences and the official appeal of one of the victims, Максим Лапунов/Maxim Lapunov, to the Investigatory Committee. Thus, on November 1, 2018, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) made ‘alle­ gations of impunity for reported human rights violations and abuses in Chechnya’ (which mean not only violence based on (affirmed or presumed) sexual orientation or gender identity, but also other types of repressions, such as those against human rights defenders or drug consumers, for instance). The Report, published on December 20, 2018, confirmed the major allegations and especially pointed to the impunity of security forces in Chechen Republic (which perpetrated most of denounced viola­ tions). It formulated a number of recommendations to the Russian Federation, the Chechen Republic, and OSCE member States (OSCE, Benedek 2018). Since the end of December 2018, a new wave of persecutions was reported: around 40 persons were arrested and at least 2 murdered because of their (affirmed or presumed) sexual orientation, according to the Russian LGBT Network, which renewed evacuations in January 2019. On February 13, United Nations experts urged Russian authorities ‘to protect people who are, or presumed to be lesbian, gay or bisexual’ (UN 2019). Despite this large international pressure, no action was undertaken by Chechen or Russian authorities.

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not one request was rejected in the first instance. In its statement, PACE encourages international loyalty and effective solidarity in this matter, by calling on the Council of Europe member states to welcome persons fleeing the Chechen Republic after being the victims of persecution motivated by actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity, as well their family members and witnesses of such persecution, by granting them international protection within the meaning of the 1951 United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. (Bruyn 2018: 4)

The reactions to the homophobic Chechen campaign from French admin­ istrations and, in particular migration and asylum authorities, can be seen both as exceptional and as typical for French (and European) asylum policy in general. The issuing of humanitarian visas to persecuted persons, however, needs to be seen as exceptional. Whereas most asylum seekers cross the border with other types of travel documents such as tourist visas or illegally, humanitarian visas are a particular kind of visa, issued spe­ cifically to people entering the territory of a member state of the Geneva Convention with the intention of applying for asylum. The debate around this type of visa was especially intense in 2016, when the Belgian Conseil du Contentieux des Etrangers (CCE) examined the case of a Syrian family to whom a humanitarian visa was refused by the Belgian state. On March 7, 2017, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) decided in this case that European states were not obliged to deliver humanitarian visas to any person who flees inhuman and dangerous situations, causing great disappointment for NGOs (FIDH 2017). Nevertheless, on the local level, national states, and in particular France, have shown that they are rather willing to deliver special asylum visas in some cases, for example to Syrians since 2012 or to Iraqis since 2014 (European Area of Freedom Security & Justice 2015; FRANCE 24 2017). A humanitarian visa for the purpose of seeking asylum can be granted to individuals in need of international protection who have lodged a request with French consulates in their country of origin. The request is pre-assessed during an interview by the consulates based on the criteria laid down in the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and the EU subsidiary protection regime and taking into account the applicants’ vulnerability and their risk of being subjected to refoulment. (European Area of Freedom Security & Justice 2015)

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According to this procedure, in 2017 and 2018, the French embassy in Moscow examined a number of files of Chechen people brought forth by the Russian LGBT Network and issued humanitarian visas of the type ‘D’ (National Visa for Long-Term Residence, Schengen Visa Info 2017) in most of the presented cases. However, this situation should not be seen as ideal, for two reasons. Firstly, French consular authorities in Russia were not obliged to deliver ‘D’ visas to the individuals affected by the Chechen anti-homosexual campaign. Thus, the first French visa granted had been Type ‘C’ (Schengen Visa for Short-Term Residence, Schengen Visa Info 2017). Having a ‘C’ visa is not a problem or obstacle for legally crossing the border and seeking asylum. However, in the context of an increasingly exclusionary migration policy, it is enough to make individuals suspicious to border police, who can deny their entrance to French territory at the airport. Although there are no official restrictions, in practice, since the large wave of emigration provoked by the two Chechen wars, people from Chechnya are often suspected by border police of seeking asylum (Szczepanikova 2014: 257–258). Border police can use this suspicion as a pretext for preventing their entrance, even with legal documents. This is exactly what happened on May 30, 2017, in the Charles de Gaulle airport. Two weeks before, on May 15, 2017, during their daily press-briefing, French diplomats confirmed that they were ready to examine requests for humanitarian visas from people suffering from homophobic violence in Chechnya, but that not one single request had been received to date (France Diplomatie 2017). Despite this claim, the first (simple, not humanitarian) visa had been negotiated at that time, and on May 30, 2017, a man persecuted for alleged homosexual contacts in Grozny, who had been evacuated by the Russian LGBT Network, arrived on French soil with Category ‘C’ visa. While I was waiting for him in the arrival area of the airport, he lost his mobile connection and disappeared. After two hours, I learned that he had not been allowed to pass through passport control and was placed in the Waiting Zone for Persons with pending immigra­ tion status (‘Zone d’Attente pour des Personnes en Instance’ – ZAPI) – in other words, the airport detention center – by the border police. Due to the impressive mobilization of local authorities and the assistance of the French Ambassador for human rights, Azamat (the name he used in the media during the first days on French territory) was able to leave the ZAPI

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within twenty-four hours. The next person was not only issued a Type ‘D’ humanitarian visa, but also in addition, upon request of the Ministry of Interior Affairs, a special reception in the airport was provided by ‘France Terre d’Asile (FTDA),’ an NGO admitted in the border zone of the airport. At this point, the consideration of the Chechen anti-homosexual campaign as a human rights violation lead to the adoption of exceptional measures for victims of this crisis, such as the issuing of humanitarian visas, arguably due to diplomatic pressure and media resonance. The second problem was that the French embassy in Russia requested involved NGOs, in particular ‘Urgence Tchétchénie,’ to take full responsibil­ ity for all the administrative and financial needs of the asylum seekers and provide them with accommodation, medical care, particularly in the case of a positive HIV status, and all of the everyday living expenses in France. The embassy made this commitment, which needed to be agreed upon in writing, the precondition for granting humanitarian visas, and although it had no legal implications and few practical consequences, it was met by the NGOs. According to current legislation, each person seeking asylum in France is eligible for free accommodation in the asylum seekers welcome centers (Centre d’Accueil de Demandeurs d’Asile – CADA) or, if there are no free places in these centers, in free hotels, and they are eligible for free medical care (Couverture Médicale Universelle et Complémentaire – CMUC). Asylum seekers are also eligible for financial support from the govern­ ment (Aide aux Demandeurs d’Asile – ADA), but they are not allowed to work during the first ten months of their asylum application. All these social benefits are supposed to take effect quasi automatically, once the asylum seeker makes their claim to authorities and files the application. After being recognized by the system, they receive access to social benefits. De facto, the accommodation situation is critical, one can wait for medical care assurance for months, and the ADA (a very small sum, with regards to expenses for living and especially for rent) is disbursed for the first time around one and a half or two months after the file application, that is, several months after arriving in France. A large number of asylum seekers live on the street, and those who can find work, often work illegally (cf. Kobelinsky 2012; AIDES, ARDHIS 2018). Thus, the requirements imposed on the assisting NGOs by the French embassy in Russia does not result in any formal changes of the procedure on French soil. This demand is, in my opinion, a way to relieve

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the state of their responsibility to deal with the crises of migration poli­ cies. With resources collected through a crowdfunding campaign, ‘Urgence Tchetchénie’ was able to provide financial support for people from their first day on French soil and find housing solutions through their solidarity network via Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Preoccupied by the effective support of concerned people, ‘Urgence Tchétchénie’ has always fulfilled the above-mentioned requirements and has never publicly criticized French authorities for evading their responsibilities in terms of offering certain conditions for asylum seekers. The main message the association sent during the crowdfunding campaign was the search for ‘the decent’ conditions for refugees who suffered from homophobic violence in Chechnya.3 But it might be pertinent to ask if this struggle for dignified (or less horrible) conditions does not exclude, discriminate, or make more invisible others, namely those who were not granted the support of NGOs. How is social change possible in a context in which individual and associative initiatives exempt the state from its responsibility, structural action can not be expected from the part of the state, and, consequently, it is impossible to struggle for social change? As exceptional as they are, the conditions for asylum granted to people persecuted during the anti-homosexual campaign in Chechnya show that the current French migration policy is rather willing to make exceptions from

3

This formula was mainly used in Facebook communication, for example: Facebook, Urgence Homophobie (ex. Urgence Tchétchénie), August 8, 2017, available online at

(accessed July 9, 2019). Later, the slogan of crowdfunding campaign, which started around Christmas 2018, was ‘Making a donation is saving a life’: Facebook, Urgence Homophobie (ex. Urgence Tchétchénie), Videos, available online at (accessed July 9, 2019); and Facebook, Urgence Homophobie (ex. Urgence Tchétchénie), December 12, 2018, available online at

(accessed July 9, 2019). In the newest crowdfunding campaign, the association insists that they ‘are trying to help each asylum seeker to find the taste of life again’: GoFundMe: Urgence Homophobie, March 12, 2018, available online at (accessed July 9, 2019).

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the general rules for a clearly defined group of people then to uncondition­ ally accept all individuals who need protection. Didier Fassin (2005; 2018) and Miriam Ticktin (2011) show that French migration policies since the late 1990s helped to define the existing model of humanitarian action by granting a residency permit on the grounds of ‘humanitarian reasons,’ ‘excep­ tional motives,’ or important health problems, which cannot be treated in the country of origin. The temporality of this action is always urgent. It is founded on compassion for the sufferance of others and is often based on par­ ticular vulnerabilities such as gender, illness, sexuality. It is a way to manage migration through compassion and repression (Fassin 2005; Fassin 2018; Ticktin 2011). The logic filtering ‘true’ migrants from ‘false’ ones, especially humanitarian cases from so-called ‘economic migrants’ (Fassin 2005: 369), provides compassioned exceptions for a few cases, while at the same time justifying the repression of the many who do not fit in adopted categories.4 The urgency of humanitarian action does not allow for the possibility of providing a retrospective analysis of the historical reasons of the problem, and it does not allowS imagining a political alternative to the existent order (Ticktin 2016: 263–264). An eternal prisoner of urgency, humanitarianism has no time to think: neither about the past nor about the future. From this perspective, even the title of the NGO I was involved in is symptomatic. ‘Emergency Chechnya’ managed to provide solidarity with people fleeing homophobic violence in Chechnya by (unwittingly) adhering to a system that privileges humanitarian exceptions, based on ‘feelings rather than rights’ (Ticktin 2016: 264). The organization succeeded to benefit from the atten­ tion of media by (instinctively) employing a discourse of humanitarian compassion, with a central focus on emergency.

4

It should be said that new changes in migration policies introduced by law on September 10, 2018, ‘[f ]or the controlled immigration, effective asylum right and successful inte­ gration,’ consequently reduced compassion and extended repression. At present, the residence permit on the grounds of important health problems can only be requested simultaneously with an asylum claim, and not afterward as had been possible in the 2000s, thus leaving no possibility for people whose asylum claim was rejected for the second time. See AIDES, ARDHIS 2018.

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‘Homosexuals Hunted, Tortured and Detained in “Secret Prisons” on the Doorstep of Europe’: Decolonizing Media Representation and Activist Practices from Within At the beginning of this crisis, the media sought attention using sensational­ ism, as can be seen in the Le Monde headline ‘Homosexuals hunted, tortured and detained in “secret prisons” on the doorstep of Europe’ (Alouti 2017). They reflected the reality of what was happening in the Republic; they were also, at least sometimes, doing it in a simplifying or exoticizing way. However, this language of exceptional horror did not originate in Western magazines. The very first coverage by Елена Милашина/Elena Milashina in Новая Газета/Novaya Gazeta (Милашина 2017; Гордиенко & Милашина 2017) was already full of terrifying terms that all too readily drew parallels between Chechnya and Nazi Germany, with its concentration camps and politics of eugenics. Елена Костюченко/Elena Kostuchenko, another Новая Газета journalist, confirmed to the audience at the Queering Paradigms VIII Conference in September 2017 that the use of terms, though approximate, was totally deliberate. They reacted to the fact that diplomatic authorities of the Geneva Convention member states were not pressured at all to react to the crisis, which threatened to literally eliminate most of the queer people in the Republic of Chechnya. Sacha Koulaeva, head of the Eastern Europe and Central Asia Desk at the International federation for human rights (Fédération Internationale des Droits de l’Homme – FIDH), stated on May 29, 2017, very clear that they had known all along: The use of arbitrary detention places and torture is not new at all. In this crisis there is only a target – this time, homosexuals – that changes. It does not make victims less suffering. But I read in a lot of newspapers words such as ‘concentration camps, purges, genocide’: I think the West is lacking understanding about what this society is. (Koulaeva 2017, translation E.S.)

Thus, after finding out about what was happening, and following the urgency to reach an effective decision from foreign states, the Russian LGBT Network, in collaboration with journalists from Новая Газета, made the choice to try

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to create an extraordinary media resonance in order to evacuate people from Russian territories and fortunately, it worked out. Nevertheless, the ‘lack of understanding’ born from this media campaign was somehow inevitable. It revealed, in my opinion, three important problems that needed to be over­ come to manifest queer solidarity in the most pertinent and conscious way. Firstly, in French online publications, it was often underlined that the horrible persecution of homosexual persons was taking place ‘on the doorstep’ or ‘on the border’ of Europe (Alliance européenne LGBT de centre-droit 2017; Alouti 2017; Envoyé spécial 2017). This cliché, not merely reflecting the geographic reality, is far from being innocent. To say that it is happen­ ing ‘on the doorstep of Europe’ encourages the imaginary of Europe as the bastion of civilization, superior and separated from the rest of the world. This follows the logic that the closer the catastrophe is, the more danger­ ous it seems, because it threatens the foundations of European civilization. It also allows for the consideration that if it were further away, it would not be so terrible. In comparison to the resonance that the homophobic violence in Chechnya reached in the French media, the persecutions of LGBTIQ+ people in other places all over the world remain invisible. It is worth noting, for example, that the grave violations of LGBTIQ+ rights in Donbass (a territory in Ukraine that has been at war since 2014, in which separatists, backed by Russian military forces and resisted by the Ukrainian army, are due to claim to independence) and Crimea, as documented in 2016 in a report from the Anti-Discrimination Center Memorial, a Russian NGO based in Brussels (ADC Memorial 2016), did not get any media attention in France. On a general level, the 2017 edition of the ILGA State-Sponsored Homophobia report certified that on the date of its publication, seventy-two countries criminalized queer sexual practices or expression and in eight states, the death penalty remains a legal punishment for such activities (ILGA 2017: 8, 37–42).5 In France, the largest number of asylum requests related to sexual orientation comes from people arriving from the African continent, accord­ ing to OFPRA (OFPRA 2018a: 45). The oldest French NGO specialized in the right of residence and asylum for LGBT+ people, ARDHIS, reports

5

For updates, see the latest edition: ILGA, 2019. In particular, India decriminalized homosexuality in September 2018.

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that in 2017, they were contacted by around 780 asylum seekers, 75 percent of whom were from Sub-Saharan Africa, 9 percent from the Americas, 6 percent from the Balkans and Central Asia, 6 percent from North Africa, and only 2 percent from Europe (AIDES, ARDHIS 2018: 32). The ARDHIS report, which reflects the situation of those seeking asylum on the grounds of (fear of ) persecution due to their sexual orientation or gender identity, denounces the numerous denials and sometimes utter ignorance of the responsible authorities regarding LGBTIQ+ rights and the conditions of life of queer people in the asylum-providing countries during the examination of protection requests (AIDES, ARDHIS 2018).6 Unlike the situation in other countries, homophobic persecutions in Chechnya received a large amount of media attention. Thanks to this resonance, people fleeing persecutions were able to leave the Russian Federation and obtain protection in Europe or Canada. The question that follows is thus why there is no equivalent media support for other LGBTIQ+ people fleeing homophobic violence in the rest of the world. Moreover, one could ask why the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe does not recommend ‘exceptional’ measures, that is, the granting of humanitarian visas or protection for all LGBTIQ+ people fleeing homophobic violence in their states. Secondly, the entire media discourse, with the exception of a series of very precise analyses published by Le Monde diplomatique in April 2018 (Le Huérou & Merlin 2018; Clech 2018), showed a kind of short-term memory regarding the human rights violations in Chechnya. Actually, the use of tor­ ture, deliberate arrests, and the use of non-official or secret places of detention by the official law-enforcement system were first developed in the region 6

After my departure from ‘Urgence Tchétchénie / Urgence Homophobie,’ I collaborated with ARDHIS in September–October 2018. This work allowed me to make some fruitful comparisons in different ways to deal with asylum problematics within French LGBTIQ+ community. While coordinating the report on discriminations in access to the right for asylum, I was in charge of writing about the situation in Chechnya (AIDES, ARDHIS 2018: 41). One of the volunteers of ARDHIS told me he didn’t understand why this case reached such media attention. From his point of view, the discrimination of queer people in Chechnya, taking consideration of all detentions, tortures, and murders, was neither a unique phenomenon, nor the worst in the world. So ‘Why especially Chechnya?’ he asked. I’m trying to respond to this question by looking through media discourse related to the crisis.

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during two violent interventions by Russian military forces on its territory and greatly expanded after the Second Chechen War under the presidency of Ramzan Kadyrov (Le Huérou 2014). Numerous reports, including those of Amnesty International, were published on this subject during the 2000s (Орлов & Черкасов 1998; Amnesty International 2007; Hughes 2007); a number of documentary films give testimony to the Russian-Chechen con­ flict and the difficult transition to relative peace (Bergkraut 2005; Marcie 2006; Sauloy 1997; Sauloy 2004). Media reports on homophobic persecu­ tions in Chechnya in 2017, however, rarely mentioned this regional context. Rather, they pointed to the ‘tyrannical’ character of Kadyrov’s rule and the Russian Federation’s President Putin’s unwillingness to control the situa­ tion (Le Monde 2017; Peyre 2017). None of the analyses put the Chechen homophobic campaign in the broader prospective of the Russia’s homopho­ bic policies (Healey 2018) and the methods already employed by Russian security forces, prison system, or the police, such as arbitrary arrests and tortures (see, for example, the 2018 statistics collected by Медуза/Meduza media from reports of Russian Human Rights organizations). Only Arthur Clech, a historian studying homosexual desire in the U.S.S.R., remarked at the one-year commemoration of the revelation of the crisis that the repression of homosexuality in the North Caucasus was not new (Clech 2018). The penal code of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (1991–2000, self-proclaimed by Chechen separatists, neither officially recognized by Russian nor interna­ tional law) reintroduced the penalization of ‘sodomy’ in 1996, inspired by the previous Soviet law. After the Ichkerian regime fell apart in 2000, the region, becoming part of the Russian Federation, accepted the federal legislation on this matter: homosexuality was decriminalized in the Russian Federation in 1993, but the federal law on ‘Promotion of Non-Traditional Sexual Relations Among Minors,’ which considerably restricted all sort of positive public mentions or expressions of LGBTIQ+ subjectivities, was introduced in 2013. Both Kremlin protégés Akhmat Kadyrov, President of Republic of Chechnya from 2003 to 2004 and, following his murder, Ramzan Kadyrov, his son and the current president, acted within this legislative frame. ‘[I]n order to sap radical Islamism’s influence, [they] made the anti-terrorist fight the ordinary administration rule, advocating at the same time [for] religious rigorism’ (Clech 2018). Promoting a mixture of the local traditional moral code ‘adat’ and sharia, Kadyrov’s government de facto introduced a new

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justice system, which reinforces the patriarchal structure of society and is based on reinvented traditions (Hobsbawm & Terence 2014). By tolerating (and implicitly encouraging) ‘honor killings’ since 2008, Chechen authori­ ties ‘cunningly managed to exploit existing practices of social control’ (Clech 2018). As concerned people have reported, a common sentiment addressed to the relatives of detained individuals upon their liberation is: ‘Now you take care of this.’ It is exactly this system that brutally attacked Chechen queer people, starting with men having or presumed to have homosexual contacts and moving to other categories of LGBTIQ+ people thereafter. Finally, through an exclusive focus on homosexual men, the media rep­ resentation confirmed the existing misbalance of visibility within different LGBTIQ+ subjectivities. It is true that at the beginning of this homophobic campaign in the region, cis-gender homosexual men were especially targeted. At the same time, it is important to point out that women were subject to repressions for quite some time before. In particular, ‘honor killings’ were initially directed against cis-gender women (without regard to their sexual orientation) who violated prescribed behavioral norms (Sugaeva & Klimova 2017). The problem is that while men in Chechnya may have at least rela­ tive autonomy, women are subject to the quasi-total control of their family members and rarely have the possibility to go away without being pursued and punished. On the one hand, as Ekaterina Petrova, a psychologist from the Russian LGBT Network working with lesbian, bi, and transgender women who escaped from the North Caucasus, points out: ‘the invisibility of concrete LBT-women in the North Caucasus Region is the matter of their survival’ (Petrova 2018). On the other hand, she notices, in this concrete case, the silence around these women did not prevent their persecution this time. The already quoted report of the Russian LGBT Network includes the testimony of three LBT women, one of whom was presumably murdered by her family after a failed attempt at escape (Russian LGBT Network & Milashina 2018: 37–39). Since the publication of this report, activists learned not only about cases of murder inside families but also about arrests and raids of women accused of having homosexual contacts. Several trans women also asked for assistance from the Russian LGBT Network to leave the country. If it seemed pertinent at one moment to focus the media campaign solely on homosexual men in order to not provoke even larger repres­ sions, the lack of representation increased the vulnerability of women,

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transgender, and other gender and sexually non-conforming people. Notably, in the French context, the first article openly questioning this imbalance of representation was published in September 2018 by a queer journalist from the post-Soviet region who interviewed one of the vol­ unteers from ‘Urgence Tchétchénie,’ a lesbian Russian refugee in France (Volfson 2018). In another interview, published in May 2018, Katya, who was born in Chechnya but lived in another part of Russia until recently having been granted asylum in France, articulated the importance of speak­ ing in solidarity with others (Laffeter 2018). Still, on a general level, the media coverage of the phenomenon decontextualized and over-simplified the violence directed against queer people in Chechnya. In the non-professional activist milieu that I discovered due to my involvement with ‘Urgence Tchétchénie,’ the same lack of understanding of Chechen context prevented activists from providing solidarity in a respectful and effective manner. Especially in the beginning, part of the arriving people’s words and actions were difficult for welcoming activists to understand. This gap manifested itself in a paternalistic, sometimes very unceremonious atti­ tude towards the arriving people. For example, activists labeled those arriving as ‘our persecuted friends’ or ‘our first exfiltrated’ on Facebook. Some of the ignorance towards structural hegemonies, white Western privilege, and the danger of paternalistic benevolence can be explained by the history of the emergence of ‘Urgence Tchétchénie.’ The NGO was founded by a few cisgender homosexual men perceived as white, most of them are professional artists, actors, authors, and singers, who had never worked with refugees before. They had not been LGBTIQ+ activists before either and were not politically aware of structural micro-oppressions related to gender, race, and economic or social status. Several weeks after its creation, two women, Russian refugees in France and LGBTIQ+ activists, joined the association, and then I, a queer woman and Ph.D. student with experience in activism, though not in the field of migration, also joined. The last key member, a Russian-speaking gay man and professional social worker joined the NGO after he provided a home for one of the newcomers accompanied by ‘Urgence Tchétchénie.’ Initially, ‘Urgence Tchétchénie’ was conceptualized by its found­ ers as an information campaign, as already mentioned. It began as a support organization for refugees from the North Caucasus due to the initiative of one of the Russian-speaking volunteers who was in contact with the Russian

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LGBT Network. Most other, more experienced French NGOs working with LGBTIQ+ migrants were not able to support the asylum seekers prior to their arrival in French territory. The Russian LGBT Network, however, needed assistance for people who were still in Russia, in order to negotiate humanitarian visas and collaborate with the French embassy in Russia (cf. ‘A Hope to Cross the Border: The Exceptional Measures and the Limits of Emergency’ above). Because ‘Urgence Tchéchénie’ was one of the very few organizations able to respond to this demand, the founders of the association were suddenly and unexpectedly brought into contact with individuals with a very different and unfamiliar social and cultural background. As an interpreter, I was often preoccupied with the question of how I could or should instruct French colleagues during their exchange with per­ sons who had just arrived. I asked myself: Are volunteers in the organiza­ tion in need of supervision? How do we stand in solidarity with each other? How are we (not) sensitive towards the problems of the people arriving, with varying conditions of psychological and physical trauma? How are we dealing with crises and with all types of disconnections and misunderstand­ ings between us? How are we checking our privileges? In the beginning, the distribution of tasks was automatically gender-marked: Russian-speaking women, me and the two refugees I mentioned above, were carrying out the largest part of the administrative work and the exchanges with asylum seek­ ers due to language abilities and because our professional and intellectual backgrounds allowed us to deal with the complex French asylum system. The (male) founding members of the association on the other hand com­ municated with media and organized, thanks to their social links and media visibility, the financial support for the association’s activities. With time, due to the involvement of other volunteers, the extensive collective work on internal communication, and the community-building process, a more horizontal structure was built. Nevertheless, I still see the importance of underlining this problematic and emphasizing that activists must feel con­ cerned about this issue. Instead of activating a discourse around saving lives, and thus benevolence and charity, there is a need to practice solidarity and support. It would help to become aware of the involuntary ignorance towards the context and to start investigating the deeper and larger understanding of the situation. This would also prevent the reproduction of oppressive structures within activist groups.

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During the first year of mobilization, ‘Urgence Tchétchénie’ real­ ized that the exclusive focus on homophobic violence in Chechnya was misrepresentative in terms of asylum demands from LGBTIQ+ migrants in the French context. Accordingly, the name was changed to ‘Urgence Homophobie’ [Emergency Homophobia] during 2017, in reaction to the diversity of migrants from other geographical spaces approaching the NGO. With the new name, the group also changed its mission and modified its public discourse by saying that homophobic violence does not exist exclusively in Chechnya. Through the practice of solidarity, it became evident that the isolation from other regions made no sense. Because the NGO had developed competences in the asylum field, it was able to and was asked to extend its action. However, the problematic notion of ‘emergency’ remains inherent to ‘Urgence Homophobie’, and the public discourse and action strategy equally keeps dealing with the issue of homophobia as an exceptional situation.

The Ideal Genuineness of Homosexuality: Solidarity Put on Trial by Western Identity Politics The French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons pro­ vided a report in 2018 for the period of 2017, noticing the general increase in the number of asylum claims from people from the Russian Federation, which was 23 percent more than in 2016 (OFPRA 2018a: 40). The report also underlines that this year was marked by a significant number of claims from people from the Russian Federation on the basis of sexual orienta­ tion, mentioning the Chechen case in particular. According to the Geneva Convention on the status of refugees, every person is eligible for interna­ tional protection, owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country. (UNHCR 2010: 14)

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However, since the implementation of the Geneva Convention, the rate of protection has drastically decreased in France. In the mid-1980s, the situ­ ation radically changed from one in which the majority of refugees were granted protection to the current state in which most claims are rejected. The rhetoric of ‘bogus refugees’ began appearing during this period, serving to justify the denials (Fassin & Kobelinsky 2012). In 2017, the rate of granting protection by OFPRA was 27 percent, and 36 percent following the deci­ sions of the ‘Court national du droit d’asile’ (CNDA), the administrative court that reviews appeal against decisions of the OFPRA (OFPRA 2018b). Today, according to immigration sociologists such as Calogera Giametta and Deniz Akin, asylum seekers are ‘under suspicion’ of misusing the system until proven innocent (Akin 2016: 1), and the entire asylum administra­ tion is meant to function as a filtering device (Giametta 2018), separating migrants who are seen as eligible for protection from those who are not. Thus, Giametta, in his comparative study of ‘queer asylum’ in France and the U.K., distinguishes three principal filtering criteria related to claims based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The first goal is to distinguish if migrants are ‘really’ asylum seekers or just ‘economic migrants in disguise’; the second is to prove their LGBTIQ+ identity, in other words to evaluate if there are ‘really’ gay, trans, etc.; the last goal is to decide if the fear of per­ secution is ‘well founded,’ that is, if there is a ‘real’ danger for this person on grounds of being queer in their country of origin or not (Giametta 2018: 8). This mechanism is unable to consider the complexity of migration practices, thus questioning and threatening the plural subjectivities of those arriving. The procedure itself is standardized. The individual applying for protec­ tion has to fill out the asylum seeker application form, providing personal data such as name, date of birth, state of birth, state(s) of residence, nation­ ality, ethnicity, religious views, family, relatives, relatives living in French territory, the date and manner in which they crossed the border into the receiving country, and the language in which they prefer to be interviewed. A personal ‘story’ (‘récit’) of the asylum seeker should be attached to this form, which narrates their individual history related to (the fear of ) perse­ cution and the exact facts and reasons for departure from their country of origin and for their asylum claim. After the form and the attached story is sent to OFPRA, the Office confirms receiving it and sets a date for the oral interview. This procedure should give the asylum seeker the opportunity to

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present their claim for protection in a more subjective and possibly emotional way. An instructor designated as ‘officer of protection’ is in charge both of the instruction of the dossier and of conducting the interview. NGOs offering administrative support for asylum seekers disagree whether the written asylum claim should be as complete as possible or rather short and condensed, offering the possibility to complete it during the oral interview. However, there is no doubt that the way the claim is written greatly influences its chances to be taken seriously and understood by the officer who will examine it. Yet, as the application should be written in French, many asylum seekers need the assistance of a translator to do so. There are also some implicit codes needed for the story, which the asylum seeker has no way of knowing, since they are not official. Therefore, numerous NGOs, the CADAs, and individual volunteers and private translators offer their assistance. But in fact, the way the procedure is organized privileges people who feel confident in written and oral expressions, which is often equal to having a relatively high degree of education. It should also be noted that the final version of the story often can’t be read by the asylum seekers themselves. As the stories are submitted in French, they cannot verify the exactitude of translation and, consequently, evaluate if the transmission of their words is correct. A very negative example for the possible consequences of this was the 2016 mediatized case of Souleyman, an asylum seeker from Eritrea. A considerable part of his story was lost in the translated version of the docu­ ment (Hauchard & Charnet 2016). He discovered the omission by chance, before sending the claim to OFPRA. In my experience, persons accompanied by ‘Urgence Tchétchénie’ expressed great fear of the potential partiality of the OFPRA interpreter during the interview, and especially their potential homophobic attitude or at least ignorance in matters of sexual orientation and gender identity. For this reason, none of those assisted by ‘Urgence Tchétchénie,’ who were persecuted or feared persecution because of their (presumed) homosexual contacts in Chechnya, accepted to be interviewed in Chechen.7 They also feared that Chechen translators may be connected to the diaspora, meaning that they could be potentially outed, and that this

7

Most of the persons accompanied by ‘Urgence Tchétchénie’ currently speak both Chechen and Russian.

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information could reach their relatives in Chechnya and draw ‘dishonor’ upon the whole clan. A Russian translator, they said, will at least not be in contact with the Chechen community in France and there is a greater chance that such a translator will be more indifferent to their story. Luckily, to date, there were no problems with translations during the interview. But this does not mean that the fear is unfounded or that such a risk does not exist. More precisely, it shows that communication about the safety and anonymity of the entire procedure could and should be improved. While the asylum administration does not respond to this need, NGOs do indeed try to address the situation. The degree to which they are able to, however, depends on the status, experience, and proportions of the NGO. A more generalized NGO that deals with thousands of asylum seekers has less possibilities to work on stories in an appropriate way. Smaller and more specialized NGOs can work with more attention to detail. They can effectively offer feedback throughout the entire process of working on the story, and more generally, better gain the trust of asylum seekers. At the same time, the smaller the NGO is, the less institutional support and resources for promotions it has, and thus, the more difficult it is for asylum seekers to be informed about it. The role of the NGO as a multi-functional interpreter between an asylum seeker and asylum administration cannot be underestimated. In the case of claims based on sexual orientation or gender identity, the appli­ cant has to prove that they belong to a particular social group by display­ ing a lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, or intersex identity, or through contacts with people displaying these identities, or being accused by third persons of having had such relations or identities. These criteria are hardly verified with precision and without leaving doubts. But the need for verification pushes asylum instances to create imaginary typical LGBTIQ+ profiles and, consequently, influences the way that individual narratives of asylum seekers will be considered and received. During the examination of the asylum dossier, this filter may be reflected in the type of questions asked by the officers during the interview. Legally, in France the asylum admin­ istration has no right to ask questions about intimate practices. Therefore, it is interested in a person’s self-perception, private life, and social links. Until recently, the recurrent question asked by officers of protection, and widely used by NGO’s volunteers and advocates during the preparation of interview, was: ‘When did you understand that you were homosexual?’ To

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the people I assisted within ‘Urgence Tchétchénie,’ this question seemed ‘stupid,’ ‘nonsensical,’ or ‘vain.’ Naturally, one may say with equal chances ‘I always knew it’ or ‘I’m still not sure about it,’ because what does it mean to ‘be’ lesbian, gay, bisexual? Is it a question of romantic attraction, sensual attraction, self-representation, or rather a question a heterosexual person asks about the otherness of the Other? Some of the men I assisted in the editing of their story used the world гомосексуалист/gomoseksualist [homosexual­ ist] for their self-description, which is currently used in Russian language to speak about homosexual persons in a derogatory and pathologizing way. They did not use the ‘neutral’ identity terms to describe themselves because they are not familiar with them. This prompts the question if people living non-heteronormative sexualities in a homophobic context have the same recognition of their identity than those in the context of relative accept­ ance or normalization of LGBTIQ+ individuals, communities, practices, and identities. The response is obviously ‘no.’ But the establishment of these criteria creates a sort of normative framework that is applied to a multitude of subjectivities in order to verify people’s intentions and the foundations of their protection claims. The same characteristics appear when questions about social relations, in particularly about meeting and chatting with other LGBTIQ+ people, are asked. ‘Did you ever visit the LGBT club?’ an officer may ask the asylum seeker. Certainly, in almost any environment, even in the most homophobic of contexts, there could be places of community sociali­ zation, places where people meet each other, some relatively safe spaces for chatting, drinking, sometimes for sex. Some people from the older genera­ tion confirmed that in the 1990s in Grozny, there was a café where queer people met, and while most inhabitants of the city knew about this place, non-queer people rarely visited it. But within the restrictive political and religious climate under Ramzan Kadyrov’s presidency, such places could no longer exist and all meetings had to happen exclusively in private spaces and with a lot of precautions, which did not always help in terms of avoid­ ing homophobic attacks. Therefore, it is not the type of question itself, but instead the terms that are symptomatic and reflect, once more, the frame within which asylum seekers are perceived. The point is that the framework of the entire asylum procedure reflects European identity politics and their respective experiences and is actually communicated to asylum seekers even before the asylum administration examines their file.

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Deniz Akin used the term ‘rainbow splash’ to describe the way asylum speakers adapt their self-descriptions and self-perceptions to the implicit expectations of the receiving country (Akin 2016). While in her study, the ‘rainbow splash’ is the way asylum seekers translate themselves for the asylum administration, I observed that in the context of NGO assistance, this trans­ lation is often done within the support of the NGOs, during the period of the personal story narration and preparation for the interview. Calogero Giametta, when speaking of asylum as ‘filtering device,’ noticed that refugee support may also play a role in policing and selecting. Based on the inter­ views with persons assisted by ARDHIS, he concludes that the suspicion on the ‘genuineness’ of sexual orientation is present not only within asylum instances, but also inside NGOs supporting LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers (cf. Giametta 2018: 5–7). By trying to maintain their credibility in front of insti­ tutional interlocutors, NGOs may internalize some of their expectations, applying ‘the very filtering logic characterizing the asylum system which they structurally fight’ (ibid.: 5). My experience within ‘Urgence Tchétchénie’ confirms Giametta’s thesis, showing how the ‘rainbow splash’ dilemma may shake the intention of solidarity. International reports (for instance OSCE, Benedek 2018; UN 2019) repeatedly underline that the current persecutions in Chechnya touched people suspected of having homosexual practices, without their necessary self-perception or self-representation as gays, lesbians, bisexuals, trans people, or queers. It was also shown that a lot of these repressed persons had het­ erosexual unions. The Russian LGBT Network equally emphasized the necessity for many to leave the Republic and the country with their family, arguing that in case of departure of the persecuted person, repressions may affect their closest family members as well. Thus, ‘Urgence Tchétchénie’ coordinated with the Russian LGBT Network to welcome and accompany some heterosexual families in their asylum procedure in France. Yet, their arrival challenged the established politics of the NGO and led to internal conflicts. Before that, ‘Urgence Tchétchénie’ only worked with individuals who asked for asylum on the grounds of persecutions based on their actual sexual orientation, meaning they referred to themselves as being gay and/or being persecuted for their homosexual contacts. In the case of these families, persecuted men never affirmed the link between the motives of their perse­ cution and their self-perception, romantic attractions, or sexual lives. As an

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activist, I was confused: my collaboration with jurists, social workers, and volunteers from asylum NGOs had shown me the importance of making asylum claims coherent and comprehensive to the asylum authorities. For NGOs working with LGBTIQ+ migrants, this often meant translating their narrative into the language of the asylum administration using the ‘rainbow splash.’ This, however, was not a strategy that could be adopted for those who arrived in France as heterosexual families. Moreover, when it became clear that these people would not self-identify as gay, the assistance for them provoked a fervent debate inside ‘Urgence Tchétchénie.’ If the pro­ file of the association is to accompany LGBTIQ+ people, should ‘Urgence Tchétchénie’ assist families who are perceived as straight? Or: What if these persecuted people are gay but do not want to come out? Should the NGO interfere in this case? To me, this situation demonstrated the inadequacy of the previous strategy regarding the asylum administration and the plural subjectivities of asylum seekers, whereas for my French colleagues, it became a difficult choice between universal or particular solidarity. For the NGO in this case, the internalization of Western identity politics led to obvious confusion and, furthermore, to uncertainty about solidarity with the afore­ mentioned groups. It also confirmed the double invisibility of women in the perception of homophobic persecutions in Chechnya. Within this quest for the establishment of the ‘genuineness’ of persecuted men’s homosexuality, how much solidarity and attention could be afforded to their wives? These women, who had supported and attended to their husbands throughout their persecutions, were forced with them into exile, and were being hosted by LGBTIQ+ organizations, had never perceived the members of their family as being queer. The reason that in the course of one year not one single request from people assisted by ‘Urgence Tchétchénie’ was rejected is, in my opinion, the result of an unprecedented mediatization of homophobic violence in Chechnya. This media visibility made the claims for asylum on the grounds of persecution in Chechnya for the (affirmed or presumed) homosexual contacts plausible in the eyes of the authorities. Moreover, somehow, this case ideally fit into the Geneva Convention’s standards, by presenting a very concrete persecuted social group. The fact that this group was very small made protection relatively easy to obtain, without having to adhere to the selective logic of asylum. The small structures of the assisting NGO

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‘Urgence Tchétchénie’ and its direct collaboration with the Russian LGBT Network assured that the asylum seekers belonged to the concerned social group, with the NGO thus playing the role of an inherent filter. This very productive mobilization enabled people fleeing homophobic violence in Chechnya to receive international protection status in France. At the same time, the logic of this mobilization revealed important weak points in the field of the humanitarian action to which it belongs, and more precisely, in the way in which solidarity with arriving people is conceptualized and manifested by supportive NGOs.

Conclusion Chechnya appeared on the map of struggles for LGBTIQ+ rights in France as an exceptional humanitarian case. Reaching a high level of media atten­ tion, this homophobic violence led to the adoption of exceptional measures such as humanitarian visas and international protection recommended by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. The spontaneously created non-governmental organization ‘Urgence Tchétchénie’ aimed to support persecuted persons seeking asylum in France and during one year, not one request for asylum from people assisted by ‘Urgence Tchétchénie’ was rejected. By manifesting effective solidarity with persecuted people, the goal of this support campaign was not to respond to the structural problems of the asylum system in France and unfortunately, the way in which it was organized did not leave much space for such a response. By being based on exceptions, the current French migration policy uses compassion to ensure, by the same measure, repression and filtering. Instead of unconditionally accepting all people who need protection, only some clearly defined groups or individu­ als (in this case, Chechens fleeing homophobic violence) may be protected. Furthermore, the urgency of humanitarian action prevents an analysis of the deeper roots of the migration system and does not allow for reflection about political alternatives. The problematic use of the word ‘emergency’ in the name ‘Urgence Tchéchénie’ shows that the NGO somehow ensures

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the continuum of the existing order. Additionally, the emergency of this compassioned action does not leave time for the internal work needed to prevent the reproduction of oppressive structures within activist groups (i.e. paternalism, gendered task distribution, cis-gender and white supremacism). The media coverage focused solely on Chechnya, while persecutions of LGBTIQ+ people in other places in the world remained invisible and allowed the public to presume that homophobia further away from Europe borders would be less unexpected or less dangerous. In this chapter, I suggest that the Chechen homophobic violence should be rethought in the broader perspective of Russia’s homophobic policies and Chechen history. Within activist circles, a deeper understanding of the cultural and geopolitical con­ text would help to prevent involuntary ignorance toward arriving people and to improve the solidarity practices. Since the asylum system functions as a ‘filtering device’ (Giametta 2018), separating migrants who are seen as eligible for protection from the others, this procedure does not allow asylum seekers to enjoy equal rights. In order to confirm expectations about the ‘genuineness’ of sexual orientation or gender identity, the asylum authorities create imaginary typical LGBTIQ+ profiles. But suspicion about this ‘genuineness’ is also present inside NGOs support­ ing LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers. There is an inadequacy between asylum procedures and the plural subjectivities of asylum seekers, which creates a push for normativity. Within the experience of ‘Urgence Tchétchénie,’ the internalization of these filtering criteria was apparent in the (lacking) soli­ darity toward persecuted people who did not identify as LGBTIQ+. Both the media representation, which focused almost exclusively on homosexual men, and the internalization of Western identity politics within these NGOs reinforced the double invisibility of women, who may also be subject to repression or choose to attend their persecuted husbands in exile. To take into consideration these weak points of the support campaign for homosexual refugees from the North Caucasus in France is to improve our sol­ idarity practices with people fleeing homophobic violence all other the world. I suggest that we may overcome the false dilemma between universal and particular solidarity by enlarging our view on the structural problems caused by repressive migration policies and the homophobia in a heteronormative society. To do this, we should try to leave the emergency framework and to question the foundations of the violence: the one operated by homophobic

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persecutions and the other perpetuated by the filtering logic of protection. Thus, intersectionality will appear a necessary tool. By modifying our per­ ception of the existing order, we can stop reacting and start acting. Then, solidarity will appear as a continuous effort of questioning, deconstruction, reconstruction, and reform.

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PACE. 2018. ‘PACE urges the Russian Federation to investigate persecution of LGBTI people in Chechnya,’ June 27, 2018, available online at (accessed July 9, 2019). Petrova, Ekaterina. 2018. ‘Queer Women in the North Caucasus – Doubly Powerless,’ OC-Media, May 17, 2018, available online at (accessed July 9, 2019). Peyre, Philippe. 2017. ‘Ayrault, Merkel, Poutine… Le sort des gays tchétchènes devient un enjeu géopolitique,’ Têtu, May 10, 2017, available online at (accessed July 9, 2019). Quotidien. 2017. ‘Le premier réfugié homosexuel tchétchène en France répond à Hugo Clément. L’interview,’ Quotidien, May 31, 2017, available online at (accessed July 9, 2019). Russian LGBT Network and Milashina, Elena. 2018. ‘They said I’m not a human, that I am nothing, that I should rather be a terrorist, than a faggot’. LGBT Persecution in the North Caucasus: A Report. Saint Petersburg: Russian LGBT Network, available online at (accessed July 9, 2019). Sauloy, Mylène (director). 1997. La ballade du loup et de l’Amazone [Documentary], France: La Huit Production. Sauloy, Mylène (director). 2004. Paroles des femmes [Documentary], France: ARTE. Schengen Visa Info. 2017. ‘Schengen Visa Types & Validity,’ Schengen Visa Info, available online at (accessed July 9, 2019). Sugueva, Julia, and Klimova, Maria. 2017. ‘“Honour killings” in Russia’s North Caucasus,’ openDemocracy, August 16, 2017, available online at (accessed July 9, 2019). Szczepanikova, Alice. 2014. ‘Chechen Refugees in Europe: How Three Generations of Women Settle in Exile,’ in: Le Huérou, Anne; Merlin, Aude; Regamey, Amandine and Sieca-Kozlowski, Elisabeth (eds.). Chechnya at War and Beyond. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 256–273. Ticktin, Miriam. 2005. ‘Policing and humanitarianism in France: Immigration and the Turn to Law as State of Exception,’ Interventions 7(3), pp. 346–368. Ticktin, Miriam. 2011a. Casualties of Care. Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ticktin, Miriam. 2011b. ‘The Gendered Human of Humanitarianism: Medicalising and Politicising Sexual Violence,’ Gender & History 23 (2), pp. 250–265.

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Ticktin, Mariam. 2016. ‘Thinking Beyond Humanitarian Borders,’ Social Research: An International Quarterly 83 (2), pp. 255–271 UN. 2019. ‘Chechnya: UN experts urge action after reports of renewed persecution of lesbian, gay and bisexual people,’ United Nations, Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, Geneva, February 13, 2019, available online at (accessed July 9, 2019). UNHCR. 2010. Convention and protocol relating to the status of refegees. Geneva: UNHCR, Communications and Public Information Service, December 2010, available online at (accessed July 9, 2019). Volfson, Olga. 2018. ‘Lesbiennes et personnes trans: grandes oubliées de l’indignation quant aux purges LGBTphobes en Tchétchénie,’ Komitid, September 9, 2018, avail­ able online at (accessed July 9, 2019).

Pauliina Lukinmaa and Aleksandr Berezkin

10 Migrating Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ Activists: On Displacement, Sense of Belonging and Transnational Activism

Introduction This chapter1 analyzes transnational Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+2 activ­ ists’ stories of migration. We follow six Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ activists’ cross-border migratory paths in connection to their transnational 1

2

We would like to express our gratitude to the six activists depicted here in this chapter. We are aware that this chapter manages to reflect only parts of your skills, ambitions, and desires, which are truly inspiring and admirable. At the same time, we hope that the text could open up new discussions of the aspects that had to be left out in this chapter. In addition, we would like to expand our gratitude to the activists in move and on spot, all connected to various Saint Petersburg LGBTIQ+ communities, with whom we had a pleasure to discuss, debate, and cooperate. Thank you. We also want to thank the editors’ team. Your suggestions and comments helped tremendously to improve the manuscript. Despite the challenges, you never lost hope in us. Thank you for your trust. We also express our gratitude to the anonymous reviewers whose wise comments reach beyond this text. We use LGBTIQ+ (lesbian, gay, bi­-sexual, trans gender, intersex and queer) when referring to the broader movement that the activists in question are active in, although individual groups might identify with different acronyms. We do so to emphasize marginalized QI and other minorities. Yet, we are aware that the simple ‘+’ is far from resolving the challenge of the othered gender and sexual minorities and the problem of homonormativity, transphobia, and bi-phobia existing also within the LGBTIQ+ movements. Furthermore, identifications as lesbian, gay, trans, and queer can be understood in different way, according to the context. In the Russian context terms previously used such as goluboy [blues] or rozovyi [pink] might have differing meanings to the English terms of gay and lesbian. Sexual orientation was understood

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activism, especially in Saint Petersburg, Russia but also in other countries. Migration by LGBTIQ+ people from Russia to other countries has risen since 2013 (Coming Out 2018),3 however, with the exception of a few stud­ ies (Stella 2015; Stella, Moya, & Gawlewicz 2018; Mole 2018), it has been studied only rather scarcely. This seems surprising, since research as well as transnational human rights advocates have demonstrated an increased interest in the LGBTIQ+ activist movement in Russia after the recent introduction of homophobic legislations4 (Kondakov 2013; Healey 2015; Stella & Nartova 2016; Andreevskikh 2018) and the increasing oppression against civic activism and civil society organizations (CSO)5 (Romanov &

3

4

5

as a private matter in the Soviet Union (Stella 2015), and some researchers suggest that sexual orientation was considered fluid in the Soviet Union and Russia (Tuller 1996; Essig 1998). In addition, some activists adapt ‘queer’ into ‘kvir’ in an attempt to decolonize it for and within the ‘global east’ (Wiedlack & Neufeld 2014: 147). In the quotations, we have not changed the definitions that the activists used in the interviews. The lawyers of the Saint Petersburg LGBT Initiatives’ group offered legal aid for on issues of asylum, housing, blackmail, threats, family issues, slander, violence, relationship with state authorities, discrimination, and miscellaneous other issues to 138 LGBTIQ+ people in 2017, the number gradually growing since the unified reporting as of 2014. Most consultations in 2017 were about asylum (25 percent). The numbers have been given to us anonymized and excluded detailed case descriptions. The Russian federal law ‘For the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values’ (195-FZ Article 6.21), interna­ tionally known as ‘gay propaganda law’ or ‘anti-gay law,’ amended the country’s child protection law and the Code of the Russian Federation on Administrative Offenses. The law was passed on June 29, 2013, and prohibits positive depiction of non-traditional relations among minors in Russia. The Russian legislation on foreign agents (121-FZ, since July 20, 2012) requires Russian citizens, independent groups, and organizations to register as foreign agents if they receive monetary assets and other property from foreign states, their state bodies, international and foreign organizations, foreign persons, stateless persons, or from the persons authorized by them and/or from Russian legal entities receiving mon­ etary assets and other property from the cited sources and engage in political activity in the interests of foreign sources in the Russian territory. The sudden requirement has resulted in fines for many groups. In addition, the space for holding public rallies and events has been further restricted due to the law on public assemblies (legislative amendments to the previously, law about meetings, rallies, demonstrations, marches and pickets, 54-FZ, 2004). Since June 6, 2012, only one-man pickets are allowed

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Iarskaia-Smirnova 2015: 362–364; Dauce 2015: 58). Furthermore, studies dealing with Russian speaking LGBTIQ+ activists’ transnational activ­ ism (Andreevskikh 2018) rarely include migration in their analysis (Mole 2018). The suppressive legislation (Andreevskhikh 2018; Mole 2018) led to an increased mobilization in LGBTIQ+ activism. In this sense, the legis­ lation also had positive side effects. Neither Western academia nor media have considered the diversification and internationalization of Russianspeaking LGBTIQ+ activism but have rather focused, as Virkkunen (2010: 95) notes, on ‘the violence and arrests of the pride movement in Russia.’ Our analysis wants to shed light on the transnationalism of Russianspeaking LGBTIQ+ activists’ activities at the intersection of migration. Our experience as activists has shown us that Russian LGBTIQ+ activ­ ists both follow transnational LGBTIQ+ discussions and are aware of the transnational human rights advocacy networks’ increased interest in their movement. As a result, many have extended their transnational networks, and have joined transnational advocacy networks outside of Russia. Some have founded new organizations abroad, often in collaboration with Russianspeaking LGBTIQ+ people who migrated from the Soviet Union during Perestroika in the late 1980s and following the dissolution of the Union in 1991.6 All of them organize and participate in solidarity activities for and with Russian-speaking activists inside of Russia. We focus on offline activism while similarly recognizing the importance of online activism for LGBTIQ+ communities in Russia. We are interested in the following questions: (1) What motivates migrating Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ activists to con­ duct solidarity actions for Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ activists in Russia?

6

without Russian authorities’ prior approval. The punishments for breaking the law vary between 300,000 rubles (individuals) and 600,000 rubles (officials) and compulsory community service – a new type of administrative punishment. For example in Berlin there is an organization ‘Quarteera – Russian queer in Germany’ (Русскоязычные ЛГБТ в Германии)’ for Russian-speaking LGBTQI+ people. In New York, there is ‘RUSA Russian-Speaking American LGBT Association’ (русскоязычные ЛГБТ в США). Aside the organizations, there are several self-organized groups, often transnational in their character, such as the feminist group Eve’s Ribs (Рёбра Евы), working across Saint Petersburg and Helsinki.

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(2) How do these migrating activists describe their mobile role within the localized activist movement? We acknowledge that the specific vulnerabilities, struggles, and experi­ ences of the migrating subjects are structured by multiple forms of inequali­ ties in connection with sexuality, race, class, and ethnicity (Walby 2009: 60; Bell & Binnie 2006). Accordingly, we analyze their motivations for solidarity and self-positioning as mobile agents by using the concept of intersectionality, aiming to avoid the pitfall of using a single primary axis of social inequality, such as class or gender (Walby 2009: 18). In the following, we will describe our methods and theoretical dis­ cussion on migration and methodology. We explain why the communityengaged research approach (Martz & Bacsu 2014) is vital for studying migrating Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ activists’ stories. Referring to Judith Butler (1999) as well as to Nira Yuval-Davis, Kalpana Kannabirān, and Ulrike Vieten (2006), we argue that a sense of belonging plays a cru­ cial role for the choice to do or continue LGBTIQ+ activism for and with the Russian community and will introduce our model of belonging in the next chapter. Then, we will conduct a micro-level analysis of Russianspeaking LGBTIQ+ migration by introducing six Russian-speaking migrat­ ing activists in more detail. In relation to one another, these stories show the multi-vocal and multi-ethnic reality of the Russian-speaking activ­ ist migrant population. We analyze the mobile activists’ differing posi­ tions and activities by looking at their migratory routes from and to these LGBTIQ+ activist collectives and examine their activities in relation to their expressions of their senses of belonging, considering factors of tem­ porality, spatiality, and intersectionality.

Mobile Migrants and their Presence in Multiple Places We understand migration as a fluid and often incomplete process, which may include back-and-forth movements (Habti & Elo 2019: 114). The residency of a migrant in a new country may be temporal and does not need to signify leaving one’s country for good. Moreover, migration does not mean that

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migrants leave behind all social relations in their country of origin. Their everyday lives may be highly mediated, enabling them to keep in touch with different communities worldwide (Andreevskikh 2018). Due to their simulta­ neous presence in multiple locations, migrants can build broad transnational networks. Their sense of belonging might be with international networks, with their communities in the countries that they left, and/or with other migrants they encounter in their new environments. Following Judith Butler (1999), we define belonging as a performa­ tive act towards a community or a group, which follows distinctive norms. There are multiple forms of belonging in difference (140) that make bodily action possible (Butler 2016: 16). We consider belonging to somewhere and to something as occurring on the intersections of exclusion, inclusion, and construction of otherness. Gurminder Bhambra argues that feelings of belonging to a location can be both activated and defined through experi­ ences of exclusion rather than being included per se (Bhambra 2006: 37, 39). A sense of belonging can also be born out of feelings of displacement and may also include expressions and experiences of inequality and uncertainty (Anthias 2002: 2, 25). The wish to belong to a certain collective network may be a longing for a ‘stability of the self ’ that is, however, ephemeral and fluid in its character (Bhambra 2006: 33–35). Shared values, rights, and obligations play a key role in forming a sense of belonging. In the case of our activists’ stories, such an obligation is the need to give back to activists that stayed in Russia. Nira Yuval-Davis (2006) and others (Yuval-Davis, Kannabirān, & Vieten 2006: 7–8) argue that the politics of belonging is constructed tem­ porally, spatially, and intersectionally. The senses of belonging are born out of specific national political historic, technologic, economic, and political developments as well as contexts. They are affected by global trends, yet in a regionally specific way. Last but not least, politics of belonging vary inter­ sectionally. Even if the specific politics of belonging would happen at the same time and in the same place, it would not follow that people experience them and are affected by them similarly (Yuval-Davis, Kannabirān, & Vieten 2006; Manalansan 2005).

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Community-engaged Research Approach We use a community-engaged research approach in which equal participation of communities and academic researchers is crucial (Martz & Bacsu 2014). It allows us to address the ‘politics of location,’ wherein struggles and experi­ ences are to be studied in their physical locations (Rich 1984; Kuntsman & Miyake 2008). Following this approach, the chapter is a cooperation between the activist-migrant Aleksandr Berezkin and the researcher-activist Pauliina Lukinmaa, who are both active in local and transnational civil rights activ­ ist groups. We formed and constructed the idea and argumentation for the research as well as analyzed and wrote the chapter together. The ethnographic fieldwork7 was done by Pauliina in connection with her Ph.D. research in Saint Petersburg. The analysis includes reflections of Aleksandr’s experi­ ences as activist-migrant from Russia as well as Pauliina’s experiences and observations in Saint Petersburg. We additionally discussed the ideas and the argumentation of the chapter with some of the Saint Petersburg-based and migrating activists during the writing process. Dialogue, reflection, consciousness raising, mutual skill development, and equity throughout the project are vital for community-engaged research ( Jeffery & Clarke 2014: xxi–xxv). At the heart of it is participation between academia and community that focuses on unpacking ‘the role of power and privilege in the research relationship’ (Wallerstein and Duran 2006: 315). Following this approach, our goal for the research is that all those involved can benefit from it (Martz & Bacsu 2014: 4–8). The choice for a community-engaged research approach is a response to Pauliina’s experiences with her ethnographic fieldwork in Saint Petersburg

7

Ethnographic research method most commonly builds on a long-term fieldwork in the surroundings of the community that is in the focus of the research. Ethnography involves both critical theoretical practices and mundane activities, as well as quotidian ethical and improvisational practices of the localized, everyday knowledge construc­ tions by the communities that form the core of the data (Malkki 2012: 180; 182). This way, ethnographic fieldwork provides detailed and localized micro-level information. It can, however, also shed light on macro-level phenomena and reflect longitudinal courses of events and aid in estimating the futurities.

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in spring 2018. Upon participating in local activities as well as conducting interviews, Pauliina introduced herself, the Ph.D. research setting, and its goals according to the ethics standards of ethnography. These underline that research subjects should have sufficient information on the research and that one can be sure of their consent to participate in it (Bourgois 2012: 319). Yet, many of the activists asked additional questions about Pauliina’s personal background, the research goals, the type of research, the selection of par­ ticipants, etc. Furthermore, the participants inquired about Pauliina’s moti­ vations and her connections to the Saint Petersburg and other LGBTIQ+ activist movements. The information about the research interests was not enough for the activists. They were selective about the types of activities they would participate in. Pauliina was expected to be interested in doing activism and not just studying it – in other words, to have other motivations than simply building a professional career with their help. All the research participants were also interested in reading prospective publication drafts connected to them as well as the transcriptions of their interviews. In addi­ tion, they highlighted their expertise on activism and some also expressed an interest in writing texts together. Although this research is indirectly beneficial for Pauliina’s Ph.D. research project, as the data used and analyzed here is part of it, the idea for this chapter was not initiated by academia but instead born during the discussions with the activists. We believe that the interlocutors have much to say and show about their activities, which have not yet been dealt with in detail, neither in academia nor in transnational human rights advocacy networks. The research aids Aleksandr in building a career in civic activism and academia. Furthermore, the work has given him a chance to reflect on his own experiences through the experiences of other migrating Russianspeaking activists. Aleksandr has been active in LGBTIQ+ activism since 2011 and has been an intersex activist since 2012. Pauliina has observed and participated periodically in the Saint Petersburg LGBTIQ+ activist since 2013. In spring 2013, Pauliina interned at a Saint Petersburg LGBTIQ+ organization. During the same summer, the ‘anti-gay propaganda law’ was implemented nation­ ally. We noticed that LGBTIQ+ activists mobilized and built communities in a previously unseen intensity (Roldugina 2018) against the backdrop of a suppressive atmosphere for civic activism in Russia and the Western-oriented

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focus on homophobia in Russia. They created collective and temporal safe spaces, often with very scarce financial support. Their collective activities created a positive atmosphere, and the movement became stronger and more heterogeneous. Moreover, the activities strengthened the sense of belong­ ing, enhancing the movement’s attractiveness for people to join and stay within the movement. However, the fear of prosecution and homophobic violence equally increased. Aleksandr personally suffered from the intensi­ fied suppressive atmosphere and oppression of gender and sexual minorities in Russia. In 2014, he fled Russia to the U.S. as a political refugee and in 2018, he founded the initiative ‘Intersex Immigrants Network’ in New York. Studying the activists’ collaborating and organizing activities within the Russian LGBTIQ+ activist movement through a community-engaged approach allows us to include our own experiences in the analyses. Additionally, it enables us to challenge the dominant role of Northern/Western countries as points of reference for LGBTIQ+ activities and ‘safe havens’ for LGBTIQ+ people from the so-called peripheries of the dominant LGBTIQ+ movement (Suchland 2011; Altman & Symons 2016). Manalansan (2005) highlights how the increased transnational interaction with Western or Euro-American sexual ideologies create ‘hybrid’ syncretic processes in postmodern frameworks. In this line of thought, we are interested in activists’ knowledge-practices (CasasCortés, Osterweil, & Powell 2008), which are constructed in their mobile, transnational activities, and situate them in a continuum of ‘here’ and ‘there’ instead of considering them as fixed or binary categories (Anthias 2002: 22; Chari & Verdery 2009: 9). This way, we look beyond the peripheral approach to the LGBTIQ+ activist movements in Eastern Europe and focus on the dialogical aspects (Salmenniemi & Kangas 2017) that these activists engage in in their activities in Russia and other former Soviet countries.

Method Our research method is a qualitative content analysis of six biographic inter­ views, as well as participatory observation. During 2017–2018, Pauliina con­ ducted six months of ethnographic fieldwork within the local LGBTIQ+

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activist movement in Saint Petersburg, participating in different events and activities, organized by both NGOs and grassroots groups. Some of the groups were coordinated by migrating Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ activists. Additionally, Pauliina conducted nineteen interviews with mobile LGBTIQ+ activists living outside of Russia. The interviews with the mobile activists focused on their transnational networks, contacts, and activities within the LGBTIQ+ activist movement in Russia, especially in Saint Petersburg but also in other places. The interlocu­ tors explicitly connected their experiences of emigration to a new country and the challenges as well as opportunities that the moving entailed with regards to the possibility to conduct transnational activism. We selected six of the nineteen interviews with Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ activist-migrants. The six interviewees have migrated to dif­ ferent Northern/Western countries, such as Sweden, Germany, and the U.S. The criteria for selecting precisely these six activists was that they are currently connected to Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ communities in PostSoviet countries and have physically participated in the Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ activist movement in Russia and other countries. The interview­ ees emigrated between 1995 and 2017 and are of different ethnic, religious, socio-economic, and educational backgrounds. Moreover, they have differ­ ent sexual orientations and gender identities and different migratory routes and forms of activities. All of the six activists are connected in different ways to one or several Saint Petersburg LGBTIQ+ communities. Pauliina met four of the inter­ locutors during her fieldwork in Saint Petersburg, at LGBTIQ+ events or smaller community activities. Some activists also organized events in other cities in Russia as well as in other countries, such as in Finland and Ukraine. Pauliina interviewed two activists via Skype. We call the six migrating LGBTIQ+ activists Sasha, Artur, Kirill, Evgeniya, Anastasia, and Alina.8 Each of them knows at least one other person from the group. For the sake of anonymity, we do not identify their relationships to one another. The activists are pseudonymized and any

8

Pseudonyms follow the activist’s gender identification (for example, Sasha can refer to person identifying as a female or male).

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possibly identifiable information, for example, biographical factors such as more detailed dates of migration or the city where a person has migrated to, is de-identified. We do not mention the names of trans* or queer groups or LGBTIQ+ organizations where the interlocutors are or were active, since it could mean revealing their identities. The interviews lasted one and a half to two and a half hours and were often followed by shorter discussions online or by a follow-up interview. Pauliina spoke Russian with two interlocutors, with four others she spoke in English mixed with some Russian. Pauliina translated the Russian quo­ tations into English for this chapter. All the activists interviewed have read the chapter and given their consent for publishing it. In addition to the interviews, Pauliina met Sasha, Anastasia, Evgeniya, and Artur at different activist events. This enabled us to compare her observations with details from the interviews, a method commonly used in ethnography (Favret-Saada 2012: 528–529) to get a more nuanced picture of their activities. In addition to the interviews, discussions continued in written form on Facebook with all six activists. We acknowledge that these six activists do not represent all migrating Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ activists. Following the ideas of the ethno­ graphic research method (Malkki 2012: 178–180), we do not aim to con­ struct generalizations of their motives, activities, and sense of belonging. The interviewees’ connection to the Saint Petersburg LGBTIQ+ move­ ment and the limited time frame of the interviews in 2017–2018 suggests that they may all hold rather similar views. Yet, sometimes, Pauliina was especially introduced to activists whose actions deviated from the opinions prevalent among the movement. Despite the limited sample, the experi­ ences of the selected six activists reveal important information about the migrants’ motivation to do transnational activism and about their senses of belonging. The visible differences of their forms of activism and senses of belonging furthermore suggests that migrating LGBTIQ+ activists do not form a homogenous group where culture and identity coincide (Anthias 2002: 25; Bhambra 2006: 34).

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Experiencing Difference, Realizing Potentialities and Acting within the Spaces ‘In Between’ In the following chapter, we will briefly introduce the six migrating activ­ ists in chronological order of their migration, focusing on their migratory routes and their activities. Thereafter, we analyze these interviews using con­ tent analysis and compare the findings to Pauliina’s experience during the ethnographic fieldwork in Saint Petersburg. We are especially interested in the activists’ politics of belonging (Butler 1996 & 1999; Yuval-Davis 2011) in regards to the intersection of temporal, spatial, and intersectional aspects of their transnational activism. The questions we address in this part are: How have they managed to migrate and to do activism? What has hindered them in the realization of their activities? In connection to this aspect, we need to make it clear that not all activists currently wish to do transnational activ­ ism. Some openly said that for the sake of their own well-being, they needed to withdraw from activism altogether or at least for the time being. Their stories are nonetheless interesting for our study, since they expressed a sense of belonging to activist friends and former colleagues that they left behind.

Six Russian-speaking Migrating LGBTIQ+ Activists Alina emigrated in 1995 from Ukraine to the U.S. as a Jewish asylum seeker with her mother, while her father and her extended family stayed in Ukraine and Russia. She was 16 years old at the time. Alina could be described as a person with multi-located, -national and -religious background: Her father is from central Russia and moved to the Ukraine to study in the 1960s, her mother is Jewish. Throughout her childhood, they traveled to meet family members across the Soviet territory that is now divided into Ukraine and Russia. Alina identifies as ethnically Russian but also emphasizes her ethnic identity with regards to her Soviet family history rather than on the basis of

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today’s borders or of religion. This is also reflected in her recent extended residencies in both Ukraine and Russia. I grew up in Kiev. But there were never any borders: I felt really ethnically Russian, mainly Russian essentially. And then I left [from Ukraine] in ’95. So, it was only few years that it had actually been in Ukraine. In my mind, I’m from Ukraine. But I’m not really, I never identify as Ukrainian, I identify as Russian.

Alina came out as a lesbian and got involved in LGBTIQ+ activism in the U.S. immediately after her emigration. She worked at a domestic violence shelter focused on LGBTIQ+ people in the past and is currently involved in different art projects, including queer dance and performance activities. Alina worked in various fields, also as a sex-worker, in order to fund her studies. Her approach to feminism and queer is based in activism not academic theo­ ries. She has organized different art-based workshops that combine dance and performance with LGBTIQ+ empowerment and community-building aspects in the U.S. Earlier visits to and seasonal residencies in Russia and Ukraine were motivated by family ties in these countries. Only recently did she travel to Ukraine for her artistic projects and activism. ‘When I started visiting [Ukraine and Russia], it was for family. The last visits were about my work as an artist. It kind of marked a huge change in terms of my own relationship to Kiev-Ukraine-Russia.’ By coincidence, or in Alina’s words, ‘organically,’ she met Russian and Ukrainian organizers during her activi­ ties in the U.S. Cooperating with different English- and Russian-speaking emigrant-artists has enabled her to build new ties to her home country of Ukraine and to Russian-speaking people. Currently, Alina works in the U.S. and visits the Ukraine periodically. She dreams of coordinating her own long-term queer-focused art project in either Russia or Ukraine. Sasha identifies as a gender non-binary person; thus, we refer to Sasha as they/them. They emigrated from Russia in 2003. For a few years, they were an undocumented immigrant, suffering from this status in various ways that they wish not to disclose here. It was difficult for them to legalize their immigrant status. Today, they have a dual citizenship. Their second home country, and especially the city where they live, is transnationally considered to have a liberal gender policy and sexually liberal society with lively and large queer communities.

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The first visit back to Russia was a life-changing experience for Sasha. ‘Friend of a friend introduced me to a group of feminists. That kind of blew my mind that this happens in Moscow. That was a new reality for me, and I could become part of it!’ Sasha came out in Russia as a gender non-binary lesbian in 2008. The trip was initially connected to the studies they were doing at the time. After three months in Moscow, Sasha returned back to their second home country. During a second trip in 2010, Sasha became more active in LGBTIQ+ activism in Russia. ‘That’s when I got really involved with the feminist-lesbian groups.’ In 2017, Sasha moved to Russia for almost a year. Since late 2018, they have been working for the local LGBTIQ+ com­ munity in Saint Petersburg. Kirill moved to a EU country in Northern Europe as an asylum seeker in 2015. This was his second time as a refugee, since he had already been a refu­ gee in Russia since the early 1990s. ‘In some way, I never felt myself home in Russia. We [Kirill and his family] were always outsiders.’ Already vulnerable as member of a migrant family in Russia, his problems with governmental officials started in connection with his LGBTIQ+ activism. In fall 2015, a case was opened against him due to alleged suspicion of extremism in con­ nection with his activism. The case is still pending. Kirill fled Russia the same year and applied for political asylum. The application process took one year. At first, he was placed in a shared flat with Russians, which made him feel very uncomfortable and where he was even violently assaulted. Eventually, he moved to a refugee center. There, he met Iraqi LGBTIQ+ people with whom he felt safe. ‘It was such a luck for me. Also, I realized then that Russia was not after all the worst place.’ Later, he had to move to a small town in the Northern part of the country, where he currently attends language courses as part of the integration program offered by the government. I have not much to do here. People are not used to foreigners here. Luckily I work at the moment in a youth center as part of the integration program. But as soon as I learn the language, I will move to the capital.

Due to his status as a refugee, he is not able to visit Russia. He is very active on social media and tries to be in contact with the Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ movement in this way. He also helps others with their asylum processes. Occasionally, he travels to different countries to share his experiences as an

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LGBTIQ+ activist from Russia and as a refugee in his current country of residence. After studying linguistics in Russia, Evgeniya worked as a language teacher in Russia. She openly shared her identification as a lesbian feminist with her students and talked about her liberal views on gender and sexual­ ity. Most of her students respected her opinions. Evgeniya also shared her wish to continue her studies abroad related to her activism. With the help of one of her students, she was able to get a loan that enabled her to study abroad. Since fall 2016, Evgeniya has been living in a mid-sized German city, where she studies at two universities. She was motivated to emigrate to Germany because it is considered to be safe for lesbians. She also spoke German and a person close to her lived in Germany. Yet, most importantly, she saw emigration as a possibility to gain knowledge that would help her activism: ‘Being an activist is not enough. I wanted theory and academic background for my visions and to strengthen my arguments.’ She studied topics related to civil society, gender, and sexuality independently while in Russia in order to quickly advance with her studies in Germany. According to Evgeniya, being an expert in activism would enable her to work for Russian civil society and its LGBTIQ+ movement, ‘to give back to it.’ However, sometimes she is afraid to keep in contact with people in Russia and post anything related to LGBTIQ+ issues online. She describes her feelings as ‘this typical paranoia of a dissident emigrant.’9 She fears for their safety, but also her own, especially when being public about her LGBTIQ+ activism. ‘Crossing the border is not easy. The border check-ups scare me and even cause panic. I’m afraid of not being able to exit Russia.’ Yet, she still continues to visit Russia and works at local LGBTIQ+ events. She also has a partner living in Russia with whom she is planning to get married in Denmark. Anastasia is also highly educated. She has been active in the Saint Petersburg LGBTIQ+ movement since 2010. Starting as a volunteer, she was soon hired by a local LGBTIQ+ organization in a position that requires responsibility. During the public discussions surrounding the ‘gay 9

Evgeniya refers to the case of Evdokia Romanova who was charged and sentenced to an administrative fine after posting in a positive way about same-sex marriage in Ireland ().

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propaganda law’ and the general increase of anti-gay aggression, Anastasia started to suffer from health problems and a burnout. In 2014, she made the decision to withdraw from activism. However, she continued to keep in contact with her friends involved in the movement and did some freelance work for local LGBTIQ+ organizations up until 2017, when she finally made her decision to emigrate from Russia. She highlighted that she ‘never wanted to emigrate from Russia’ but that she did it ‘because of love,’ referring to her spouse, whom she followed abroad. In the new country, she misses her home city Saint Petersburg, her childhood family, and friends. She continues work­ ing for Saint Petersburg- and Moscow-based LGBTIQ+ organizations as ‘a hired interpreter,’ but does not see these activities as activism. During our discussion, Anastasia mentioned that she finds it important to support Russian-speaking activists on an individual level. She consults individual activists, for example, on issues connected to burnout. ‘I just want to make people care about themselves. That’s basically what I want.’ She highlighted how the organization where she worked in Saint Petersburg changed during the peak of the public stigmatization and the mobilization of the LGBTIQ+ movement. According to her, they were denying how really difficult [the situation for the LGBTIQ+ activists] is. And then there were these attacks and people were injured. People moved out of Russia after that. So, it was like really scary things, and like, when I started, we would try to look out for each other, you know if someone was feeling down or sad, and we could always rely on each other. It wasn’t there when I was leaving. It was very classicist.

Anastasia highlighted that her community support responds to acute demands but is also her small rebellion against the organizations that she considered to be too distant from local needs. We know from our own experiences as activists that burnout was indeed often expressed among fellow activists. We are both committed to supporting other activists and LGBTIQ+ migrants in their attempts to increase their well-being. Pauliina, for example, has invited activists from Saint Petersburg for visits abroad to share their knowledge and expertise, and to recover from their stressful daily life in Russia. Aleksandr offered peer-consultation and art-based therapy for LGBTIQ+ migrants. Artur has been active in a Saint Petersburg-based organization and in several self-organized groups since 2014. His long-term dream has been to

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live in Sweden. He says that he values the culture and loves the language. He moved to Sweden in January 2017 to study there for six months and joined the student LGBTIQ+ group there. He went back to Russia in summer 2017. In January 2018, he wrote to Pauliina that at the moment I am still in Moscow, trying to find new options to move [to Sweden]. However, this time it is much more difficult as I do not have sufficient knowledge of the language [for studying MA degree] and enough resources to live there. I am trying to both work and study in Moscow to get my dreams realized and move to [a city in Sweden that he sees as the best option].

Many of the activists had a vexed relationship to their home countries. They had experienced discrimination, physical violence in the forms of hate crimes, and challenging financial situations. Despite Artur’s utterance that he ‘did not directly experience aggression,’ it can be argued that some of his expe­ riences were indirectly experiences of aggression. In fact, when Artur and Pauliina met for the first time at a local LGBTIQ+ event in 2016, they were followed by a photographer who threatened to denounce them to officials as ‘propagandists.’ The situation was intimidating and thanks to Artur’s courageous engagement with the man, the rest of the group managed to leave the situation without him noticing. In January 2018, Artur also wit­ nessed aggression towards a male couple who managed to get registered as a married couple in Russia. Local activists blocked the door to the couple’s apartment, which they had locked themselves in. ‘[F]ortunately it ended well for them.’10 They fled Russia and got asylum in an EU country. With the exception of Sasha and Alina, who migrated with their moth­ ers as teenagers, the activists had emigrated from Russia out of fear for their safety due to their sexual orientation and in search of new opportunities to realize their potentials. Frequently, their individual decision created conflicts with the community left behind in Saint Petersburg. Anastasia described how her decision to emigrate from Russia was criticized by some in the movement. ‘People start to have this… you know: “You are a traitor because you left.” Even if you left for very serious reasons. This kind of lack of respect – lack

10 .

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of understanding.’ After the decision to emigrate, their senses of belonging to the local movement changed. Moreover, the new surroundings opened up a spectrum of imagining new possibilities and further changed the activ­ ists’ senses of belonging. Through the crossing of borders and arriving at other surroundings, the activists came to an understanding of the complex and ever-changing sense of belonging of ‘here’ and ‘there.’ They described the process of find­ ing their place in the new surroundings as challenging and still ongoing. Artur, Evgeniya, Anastasia, and Kirill made great efforts to realize their plans to migrate, and developed new skills to be able to migrate from Russia. They now want to share these new skills and experiences with Russianspeaking groups whose activism takes place in former Soviet countries. If their resources and degree of adaptation to the new situation allowed it, they joined activist collectives they could work with. Furthermore, upon gaining social and financial capital, these activists wished to support Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ communities. To this end, they started crossing borders again, often to the countries they initially emigrated from. This was described as a painful and enlightening process. The successful border crossing gave them confidence, as did the feeling of belonging to a community. Moreover, the ability to cross the borders and have access to security as well as to certain activities and knowledge was described as a privilege that activists in Russia and other post-Soviet countries might not have.

Intersectionality in Senses of Belonging The activists who had migrated recently and by themselves pointed out that they had had no other choice than to leave Russia and, often, stop their activ­ ism. For example, Anastasia shared that she ‘completely burned out. Because it was completely unsustainable.’ She was drained by both the amount of work and the insufficient income she received from it. Her last activities in connection to the organization were also focused on burnout. One specific conference had an especially big impact on her decision to resign from her part-time job at the local organization.

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Pauliina Lukinmaa and Aleksandr Berezkin I talked with this Syrian activist [at a conference for LGBTIQ+ activists suffering from burnout]. And he said that the West wants the story of the perfect victim. As long as you are disempowered and share these horrible stories and are grateful for being alive – to be in the West – and that’s also the attitude that the Westerners have – they really want to teach you how to do the activism.

These experiences enabled Anastasia to see herself through another person’s eyes. They also made her realize that as an activist from Russia, she was reduced to the role of a victim both abroad and in Russia. Furthermore, abroad, she was considered someone who needs guidance despite the fact that she had been active in the movement for the last three years, working under extreme pressure. Artur also describes encounters with rather one-sided views on the Russian LGBTIQ+ movement. When he lived in Sweden, he ‘needed to remind [the Swedish activists who expressed their worries for LGBTIQ+ people in Russia] that like any movement, the LGBTIQ+ movement in Russia has many voices and people have different opinions on many issues.’ Evgeniya shared similar experiences: Although feeling good in Germany, it is at times difficult to make myself understood. They don’t have the understanding of what goes on in Russia. Only the other foreign students, especially those LGBTQI students who come from suppressed nations, understand me. For example, two Iranians who are LGBTQI yet closeted. People who come from countries with very suppressed rights.

The findings from our interviews reflect academic literature that argues that Western-centric discourses tend to victimize LGBTIQ+ activists who work under an extremely oppressive legislation and general surrounding (Calhoun 2003: 532). Dominant discourses expressing solidarity towards LGBTIQ+ people from oppressed environments often fail to recognize the social conditions and instead uncritically express a ‘view from nowhere or everywhere rather than from particular social spaces’ (ibid.). This abstracted and paternalistic discourse reduces activists to their vulnerabilities, infan­ tilizes them, and fails to recognize the power of those who are oppressed (Butler 2016: 23). In many ways, the activists experienced feelings of displacement: as a part of an organization in solidarity with Russian local communities that they

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were no longer part of and othered as LGBTIQ+ migrants from a periphery country (Stella & Nartova 2015). Sometimes they felt altogether not wanted. Kirill, for example, started experiencing othering and prejudices in the Northern European country where he currently lives and which was his first choice for asylum. He shares these experiences via online activism with his Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ activist audience. On April 1, 2019, Kirill wrote on a social media platform: [T]hese ‘gentlemen’ and ‘ladies,’ those white Europeans, make conclusions about me only by the fact that I am a refugee or by the country where I’m from. They never knew poverty, fear, persecution, but teach as if they were the more experienced ones. These pompous persons consider it to be their duty to ask a couple of ‘test’ questions – to entertain their own self-esteem that they talked to a refugee – but they make me feel more vulnerable, and simply show that they actually don’t have questions. Demonstratively they continue to worry how ‘it probably is not easy to be gay in Russia’ – I’m already sick of it. And when I tell this, they are offended, declaring that I have all the rights and possibilities, and that I have ‘chosen to leave.’

Kirill’s description depicts how he is still considered to be an external part of his current country of residence, although the government aims at inclusion through offering housing, language training, and possibly even a job of some kind. It also reflects Northern-/Western-centric ideas of tolerance and human rights. Kirill looks for recognition and interest in him as a person with a personal history, presence, and future, and resists his exclusion, not by demanding inclusion as such, but rather the recog­ nition of his memories of pain and suffering that enabled a special form of mobilization (Kannabirān 2006; El-Tayeb 2011: 127). These depictions resonate strongly with Judith Butler’s (1999; 2016) description of sense of belonging through difference. Both Kirill and Evgeniya, although in different positions, experience their location as a space of displacement as well as presence in many places (Bhabha 1994.) This similarly is a possibility and a limitation for these activ­ ists. In the next chapter, we will take a closer look at the locations and tem­ poralities of belonging.

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Spatiality and Temporality in Senses of Belonging The activists’ descriptions underline that their senses of belonging and activi­ ties transgress the borders of landscapes, ethnic identities, and citizenships (Bhambra 2006). Moreover, the physical place might say only little about the senses of belonging (Mandaville 1999: 653; Yuval-Davis 2011). The migra­ tion of these activists became connected to the imagination of ‘other ways of being in the world’ (Gopinath 2011: 635; Muñoz 2009). For Alina and Sasha, crossing borders equally opened new perspectives, yet they traveled in the opposite direction. Alina stated that during her visits to her family in Ukraine and Russia, she sensed an oppressive and passive atmosphere until the 2010s. She connects her experience to a certain Soviet mentality of her working-class family in Russia and Ukraine. They were used to staying ‘in the survival mood.’ According to Alina, they did not dare to dream and plan another type of future for themselves. During these initial trips to Russia and Ukraine, she felt distant from them: ‘You know, when I went back there, I was already changed. People couldn’t connect with me. And to live there, I don’t know what that could be. I was the weird one. The one that did not fit in.’ She felt that she could neither fit in to her new sur­ roundings in the U.S. nor in post-Soviet Ukraine. Despite having a critical tone in her voice when describing the monetary aid from the EU and the U.S. to Ukraine since the 2000s, Alina thinks it had many positive effects. She describes her trip to Ukraine in 2016 as follows: What I discovered in Ukraine two years ago, – I don’t know what happened to the country, or to me but – I was like ‘these amazing people and they’re so open and they’re so curious!’ They really have the language for knowing what to do and how to move forward from this oppressive society that has been sitting in our DNA for so long. It was like these endless possibilities for doing all these things. – And I felt so connected to them!

The rather sudden change in her sense of belonging could be explained by the abrupt availability of resources thanks to the foreign monetary aid. Alina felt that Ukrainians had become more equal. They had means to focus on issues that had also become important to her in her new home country. Additionally, finding activists who were transnationally involved

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and increasingly sponsored, who shared a similar language and ideas might have influenced her sense of belonging. Alina’s experience shows that the activists’ senses of belonging have a temporal character. Moreover, one’s sense of collective identity and belong­ ing to a location might not necessarily be concurrent: one may identify with a place but not feel ‘belonging’ in the sense of being accepted or being a full member. The activists’ description speaks to Anthias’ argument that belong­ ing is a ‘precondition for the quality of life’ (2006: 19–20), and that politics of belonging may rather depict a process (Bhambra 2006). Thanks to the increase in foreign funding, it became possible for Alina to conduct projects in Ukraine. Alina describes her first queer art perfor­ mance groups in Ukraine as follows: [They were] amazing for people’s self-esteem. There were some straight people in the room, and it was really cool to see conversation, people being honest, having very dif­ ferent type of people speaking together, hearing each other’s stories, from different backgrounds, sexual orientations. I think it was therapeutic experience. And for me, too.

Sasha received funding for their first project in 2017, but the continuation of the funding turned out to be highly uncertain and recently, they were forced to gather money through fundraising. However, this situation has allowed them to get more connected to other activists with similar challenges, especially in Russia. In addition, the fundraising increased the visibility of their project. This process was experienced similarly by other participants. Alina considers that emigrated activists have managed to create additional resources: These are the people who have been under pressure – of emigration. They have devel­ oped many interesting coping skills and ways of being alive. So, when they’re coming back, there’s something injected in them, that isn’t there [among those who stayed]. Because they’re hybrids at that point, their brains and neurons have changed. They’re in this ‘other’ place. And that creates sort of rebel in the society. Oftentimes they have very interesting ways of surviving, being themselves and also grow. They really chal­ lenge the society.

Alina’s rich description of migrants as hybrids can be understood as having been constructed through the activists’ overlapping positionalities in rela­ tion to unequal resources and power (Anthias 2002: 30). This ‘hybridity’ is

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born out of the intersections in which a double perspective, as a simultane­ ous insider and outsider, becomes possible (Bhabha 1994). The six mobile activists envision glimpses of a future for ‘their’ people through their activities in different ways. These possibilities empower them per­ sonally and create feelings of the need to continue their activism within Russianspeaking activist communities: Alina currently practices her artistic skills in the U.S. and plans a long-term art project in Ukraine and Russia; Anastasia offers peer-aid for LGBTIQ+ activists on mental well-being; Artur navigates between LGBTIQ+ movements in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, at the same time devel­ oping new skills in order to fulfill his dream of emigrating; Kirill gives talks and participates in activities where he speaks of the realities of Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ activists in a welfare country; Sasha lives in Saint Petersburg and participates and organizes different activities among local LGBTIQ+ communi­ ties; and Evgeniya offers her interpreter services for different LGBTIQ+ events.

Conclusion: Mobile Subjects of Change? In this chapter, we focused on the stories of six migrating, Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ activists. These ambitious individuals have been active within Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ activist communities in Russia and in other countries since around 2010. They stayed in contact with the LGBTIQ+ movement in Russia through institutional relations with organizations and on a grassroots level after their migration. Their stories suggest that transna­ tional activism has become increasingly easier through different platforms, such as social media. They also speak to the fact that, due to the oppres­ sive legislative amendments, grass-roots projects and community-building activities have increased in numbers and in importance for Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ individuals. After their migration, the mobile activists became allies for these communities in Russia and in other countries. They are part of the communities’ simultaneous mobilization and transnationalization. Our six individual activists had very different resources available and their statuses as migrants deviated greatly. Consequently, their senses of belonging and resources for connecting with Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ activists differed

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significantly. For one of them, it was not legally possible to cross the border into Russia. Some did not have financial capital to do so. The activists also repre­ sent different socio-economic classes: some were highly educated in Russia and could rather easily use their expertise and skills for their transnational activities. Some also received external financial support for crossing the border and their transnational activities. For some of our interlocutors, the challenging individual situation in the new country of residence, such as limited rights and possibilities to participate in a society, made them doubt their skills and the abilities they needed in order to stay connected to the Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ movement. We found that an important motivation for their transnational activities was the need to show solidarity and give back to ‘their’ Russian-speaking activists in Russia and in other countries. Instead of joining a queer diaspora, the activists found communities among fellow activists in Russia as well as other LGBTIQ+ groups in different settings. Their movements between Russia and other countries could be described as pendulum-like. This mobility was often driven by border regimes and migration policies but also by their professional desire and changing senses of belonging. Considering their and others’ increased mobility and the growing transnational populations that cross the borders of several nations, we suggest that categories such as diaspora, cultures, activism, etc., become fluid and be critically evaluated. Acting within the intersections of different contexts, socio-cultural spaces, and communities, these mobile activists could be described as situ­ ated ‘in between’ in several ways. Harnessing their skills and knowledge, gained both ‘here’ and ‘there,’ our mobile activists have become able to be active in different social locations simultaneously. This is a great advantage for transnational communities and their activism. Finding social and finan­ cial capital for realizing their projects, however, is a great challenge. It may be equally difficult to adequately deal with feelings of vulnerabilities con­ nected to their emigration as well as the right assessment of possible risks connected to crossing borders and getting involved in activism in Russia. Being able to cross borders gives them an individualistic sense of choos­ ing to identify and even to belong. On the other hand, they may not be able to fully belong, feeling the double conscience of displacement and belonging. Yet, both the mobile activists and the Russian-speaking activists who are more steadily in Russia and in other countries may share similar

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feelings of displacement. In fact, the sense of not belonging may unite these subjects. Building temporal and relational safe spaces through their activities with activists who share a similar socio-cultural background, language, and oppression in their surroundings, creates possibilities for different futures. These migrants, skillful at crossing boundaries and borders, have gained valuable experiences by living in different contexts. These would add impor­ tant new perspectives to transnational human rights advocacy networks. Migrating activists have considerable resources in their unique social net­ works, which often form part of transnational social networks. Not only Russian but also Western movements could benefit greatly from migrant knowledge, which is oftentimes devalued and made invisible. These activists’ contribution to international collaborations could also aid in highlighting Russian-speaking activists’ important skills.

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Masha Beketova

11 Working with Russian-speaking LGBTIQ Refugees in Berlin

Introduction In this chapter, I explore the existing support structures for Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+1 refugees in Berlin. I examine the developments in the sup­ port landscape for asylum seekers in Berlin from 2015 to 2018, regarding their accessibility for Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ refugees and migrants. I analyze some of the institutional difficulties and structural discrimination using the example of translation work for LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers. After a brief overview of the potential difficulties that Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ refugees encounter in Germany, I focus on the question of where they seek help in Berlin. The currently prevailing lack of support, I will argue, shows the necessity of a more intense cooperation between NGOs/social institu­ tions and queer communities. By highlighting best practice examples as well as examples of the lack of support, I will suggest ideas for practical solidarity within NGOs and queer communities. For those of us who are involved in the support work or the knowledge production about LGBTIQ+ migration and asylum, I propose reflecting upon what exactly we are doing, why we are doing it, and what approaches we are using. It is necessary to critically examine the working environ­ ments and hiring policies of NGOs and institutions regarding the avail­ ability of languages and lived experiences of migration and racism. In order to contribute to such a critical reflection, I would like to offer my subjective view on the current situation, analyzing the experiences of 1

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, inter, queer, and other non-heteronormative and cis-normative.

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Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ people in Berlin from my perspective as a queer migrant, young professional, and academic working with other recent LGBTIQ+ migrants. My analysis brings together the available scientific and informal research literature on Russian-speaking asylum seekers (for example, LesMigraS 2018, LesMigraS 2004 and other NGO publications) with my personal and professional experiences and perceptions as an activist, social worker, and researcher. Despite the fact that there is almost no sci­ entific data on Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ refugees in Berlin, whom I perceive to be a specific social group, there is a range of journalistic publi­ cations and reports from NGOs and individual activists that focus on the experiences of Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ refugees in the area of Berlin. Working with these sources, I used discourse analysis and media analy­ sis to further examine them. Additionally, I conducted a survey among Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ refugees as part of the research seminar ‘Interdependent Research’ at the Department of Gender Studies at the Humboldt University Berlin in 2014. I also conducted five narrative inter­ views with Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ people who applied for asylum in Germany on the grounds of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Subsequently, the interviews were evaluated by means of discourse analysis. To some extent, I have recorded the results of the case analysis in my mas­ ter’s thesis Discrimination Experiences and Resistance Strategies of RussianSpeaking Queer Refugees in Germany (Beketova 2017), to which I often refer in this chapter. Additionally, I include my professional experiences working as a counselor and group facilitator at Quarteera e.V. (2011–2016) and Lesbenberatung e.V. (2016–2018) as well as my personal experience as a queer migrant from Ukraine in my analysis. My own observations as part of the community and as a consultant are taken into account under the critical aspect of secrecy and ethical, transparent research. With my chapter, I hope to contribute to a more differentiated understanding of the multiply oppressed group of LGBTIQ+ refugees and migrants by highlighting the specific problems of Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ in Berlin and offering solutions for better solidarity work.

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What Does ‘Russian-speaking’ Mean? I focus on Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ individuals in Berlin because I have been working with this social group for years. I use the denomination ‘Russian-speaking,’ rather than post-Soviet, to highlight the diverse group’s commonality and designate it as a specific social group among LGBTIQ+ refugees and migrants in Germany. The post-Soviet space is a very diverse and non-homogenous area that is rarely addressed in studies on LGBTIQ+ migrants as a whole. Beyond the constructed borders of the nations, the region’s and people’s common denominator is the Russian language. Due to its colonial heritage, its privileged and official status within the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, the Russian language has about 210 million speakers around the world. Since institutions and NGOs in Germany usu­ ally provide Russian rather than Ukrainian, Belarusian, Kazakh, or Kyrgyz translators, the Russian language remains an important common point for bringing together post-Soviet people.

Observations on Power Relations in Professional Support Networks I am currently working with LGBTIQ+ refugees and migrants in different projects as a counselor, a facilitator for empowerment groups, and sometimes as a lecturer and writer. Over the course of my work in this field, I frequently met white2 German activists, social workers, lawyers, and artists who are eager to do ‘something with refugees.’ I was startled how suddenly aware the German society had become of the problems and needs of asylum seekers

2

I use italic writing ‘white’ in order to underline the usually unnamed societal ‘norm’ and reveal its constructedness. I use such spelling to refer to critical race and critical whiteness studies, which aim to analyze, question, and deconstruct power relations around racism.

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in 2015, wondering why they felt the need to act against racism and antimigrant prejudice now, while they had obviously previously neglected these issues. In many activist circles, people with experience of migration and/or racism were equally suspicious of this sudden emergence of ‘refugee support.’ In my work with refugees, I encountered a similarly critical perception of the emergence of what I call ‘the help businesses,’ which includes NGOs and unpaid volunteers but also companies, lawyers, and other businesses. My respondents and colleagues in queer migrant activism and NGOs emphasized how quickly the well-meant white German helpers’ actions can turn into fetishism, as well as be exoticizing and othering. In my opinion, there is a real danger of perpetuating hierarchies in situations where ‘a privi­ leged person helps a person with less privileges.’ It seems that a self-serving process of re-imagining oneself as philanthropic and generous lies behind the support rather than an honest attempt to improve the living situation of refugees. Moreover, the failure to reflect on their privilege on the helping side is not only a personal or individual lack of awareness but instead the result of an institutionalized paternalistic approach. The programs where a person with a refugee background is assigned a ‘mentor’ – a white German person, whose role it is to help with the ‘integration process’ (Merfort 2015) – are a good example of the institutionalized hierarchies following such paternalistic approaches. I question the understanding of solidarity behind such programs. The power relations that structure this well-meant solidarity can quickly turn acts of solidarity into a humiliating patronizing and discrimination. In my experience, transregional solidarity within the field of LGBTIQ+ support work is frequently connected to homonormativity and the construction of non-Western European societies as backward. Moreover, it follows a Eurocentric perception of queerness. I neither want to say that it makes no sense to support people unless you have yourself received similar support nor that privileged people should not take the initiative to help or care. I rather critique the automatism of perceiving people with migrant or refugee experiences as someone necessarily needing urgent help. This automatism tends to essentialize identities and strengthen present hierarchies. Every individual experience is structured differently and therefore requires an individualized approach. Being aware of the power relations and their dan­ gers as well as reflecting one’s own resources and motivations seems to me

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to be the initial step that must be made by everyone who intends to work with marginalized social groups.

An Intersectional Approach to the Situation of Russian-Speaking LGBTIQ+ Refugees The academic discourses addressing and questioning Western hegemony around issues of forced migration and asylum from a post-Soviet perspec­ tive are not quite developed yet. But especially in the sphere of LGBTIQ+ support, there is an urgent necessity to build critical theories regarding racisms, anti-migrant prejudice, and regional power relations from such a perspective. The systematic nature3 of the emigration of LGBTIQ+ people from post-Soviet states as well as the image of Berlin as an LGBTIQ+friendly metropolis and the resulting specific situation of Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ refugees have not yet been discussed in scientific publications from an intersectional and situated perspective (Beketova 2017). My chapter aims to address this research gap, using the paradigm of intersectionality as central theoretical framework for my analysis. Introduced by Black legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality is a con­ cept with which to analyze the simultaneity of multiple oppressions, such as sexism, racism, and classism, and their effects on individuals. In my research on LGBTIQ+ migrants, I focus on the crucial categories of gender, sexual­ ity, ethnic background, migration experience, and language. The intersec­ tional situation of LGBTIQ+ refugees requires an approach to counseling, group facilitating and therapy that is aware of both discrimination and trauma. While seeking relief and protection in Germany, LGBTIQ+ refugees 3

The so-called ‘homo-propaganda law’ in Russia, as well as the similar tendencies and initiatives in other post-Soviet countries on the legal level combined with the con­ servative backlash in post-Soviet societies force many of LGBTIQ+ persons to think about emigration. Surely not everyone manages to move to other countries, but the rhetoric of ‘пора валить’ – ‘it’s time to leave’ is a commonplace especially in Russian LGBTIQ+ forums and chats.

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repeatedly encounter multiple and interconnected forms of discrimination and re-traumatization, often within their own support network (Beketova 2017; Rajanayagam & Awadalla 2016). Audre Lorde, a Black feminist lesbian U.S. author who lived in Berlin for many years and is sadly hardly known in Russian-speaking communi­ ties, once said that ‘it is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences’ (Lorde 1986). These words are applicable to the context of the support work with LGBTIQ+ refugees and migrants, where differences between the refugees are often negated. Supporters construct the image of the ‘good’ migrant, but fail to see the diversity and complexity of LGBTIQ+ people with non-German backgrounds. Moreover, the image of the Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ migrant often tends to be reduced to a cis-male able-bodied white gay guy from Moscow who speaks English and German, is sexually active, and well connected to the European community. Unfortunately, such an image can obscure the actual diversity of Russian-speaking migrants and refugees. The focal point of intersectional approaches and methods, which I find to be very useful for the analysis of the situation of LGBTIQ+ refugees in general and of Russian speakers in particular, is that discrimination cannot be solely attributed to sexual orientation or gender identity, refugee status, ethnic background, or the experience of racism and migration (see Crenshaw 1989; Combahee River Collective 1978; Moraga & Anzaldúa 1981; Walgenbach 2012). I differentiate between anti-migrant discrimination and racism for two main reasons. First, not only migrants experience racism in Germany; there are Black Germans and people of color with German citizenship who were never migrants but still experience institutional, discursive, and interpersonal racism. For a lot of them, the attribution of a migrant or refugee experience to their identity by society as a whole means a denial of their belonging to German society. Secondly, not all migrants are of color, there are a lot migrants and refu­ gees with white privileges, especially from post-Soviet countries. The scholar Alyosxa Tudor coined the term ‘migratism’ to describe the discrimination against migrants, which is different from racism and enables us to name the specific power relations between people with and without the experi­ ence of migration (Tudor 2013). Thus, post-Soviet refugees and migrants

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can be identified or can self-identify as white migrants as well as people of color. Accordingly, the perception of Russian-speaking migrants as only white neglects the existence of people of color in post-Soviet countries. The term migratism is useful for distinguishing the different experiences of discrimination among white migrants and refugees from racism. Moreover, the differentiation between these two terms can also be helpful for explain­ ing situations in which a refugee with white privilege acts in a racist manner or utters racist sentiments. Only the simultaneous analysis of both racism and migratism as well as further axes of oppression will enable us to approach the complex life realities of LGBTIQ+ refugees. For example, the knowledge and connec­ tion to Russian-speaking communities and specific counseling centers for migrants are not enough for LGBTIQ+ refugees. The lack of Russianspeaking workers in German LGBTIQ+ organizations and the incomplete cultural knowledge about this specific social group cause difficulties for LGBTIQ+ newcomers, whose first or second language is Russian and who do not speak dominant Western European languages such as English, French, or German, in terms of getting the support they need.

Is Everyone a Refugee? Before coming to the core analysis, I would like to explain my usage of termi­ nology, which may differ from mainstream research on refugees. Although the terms asylum seeker and refugee are often used interchangeably, they have different legal meanings. The word refugee defines a person who was forced to leave their country of origin. An LGBTIQ+ refugee could be anyone who migrated because of persecution faced due to their sexual orientation and/or gender identity. For me this term indicates forced migration. An asylum seeker is someone who decided to apply for an asylum and currently has this legal status. There are also illegalized refugees – those who did not apply for the legal procedure or were denied a refugee status but still stayed in Germany. There are people who fled their post-Soviet countries of origin and managed to start to working or study at a German university. They also

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perceive of their migration as a forced one. Finally, a migrant is a person who has changed their geographical position but does not experience discrimina­ tion per se. For instance, this can pertain to white privileged migrants from Western European countries who can return to their countries of origin at any time and, thanks to English as a lingua franca, do not experience dis­ crimination in the labor market and in society, because of their social status (see Tudor 2013). The topic of this chapter is the intersection of the experience of migra­ tion and sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Hence, I focus generally on the experiences of the individuals and not on their legal status. I sometimes use the term ‘migrant’ alternatively to ‘refugee,’ and there are two reasons for that. Firstly, Russian-speaking refugees use various different labels to define themselves. They use words like беженка/beženka [refugee], but also national or regional ethnonyms like русская/russkaâ [Russian], удмурт/ udmurt [Udmurtian], ром/rom [Romani]. Some of them define themselves according to the legal process and use азюлянт/azûlânt [asylum seeker]. Others call themselves немец/nemec, which means German and refers to their ethnicity or belonging, yet must not be confused with citizenship. Many of them do not choose a certain identification, but rather talk about переезд/pereezd [movement, relocation], focusing on the process they have been through and not on the identification with a geographical location or legal status. For some Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ individuals, the identi­ fication with a sexual orientation and/or gender is far more important than identification with migration or the asylum process in general. Secondly, the status of both refugee and migrant is fluid and change­ able. Sometimes, students or volunteers apply for asylum, or asylum seekers marry or enroll in a university and become migrants from a legal point of view. Unfortunately, all these subtle and important differences are neither obvious for the state authorities nor for the media (including the LGBTIQ+ media). What I have instead observed is a discursive silence about Russianspeaking or post-Soviet LGBTIQ+ people in Germany. The result of this discursive silence is that there is no established unified narrative about their experiences. However, the lack of ‘popularity’ makes it possible to shed light on the very individual experiences and diversify the refugee narrative. The legal difference between the asylum seeker, the illegal person with­ out valid documents, the recognized refugee, and the migrant who also

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experienced discrimination and violence in their home country but was privileged enough to study, work, or marry in Germany is vast. However, the assurance of a refugee status does not end anti-migrant discrimination, migratism, or structural racism. It remains difficult, for example, to find an apartment and many asylum seekers are forced to stay in collective hous­ ings for years. They have difficulties accessing the labor market4 and expe­ rience distrust and stereotyping both from the majority society and within LGBTIQ+ communities. Taking these arguments into consideration, I use the terms migrant and refugee alternately when writing about Russianspeaking migrants in the text. Moreover, I want to emphasize that neither of the terms can signify all the experiences that individuals may make.

LGBTIQ+ Refugees and Migrants in Germany According to Mikrozensus, about 3 million Russian-speaking migrants are currently living in Germany (Golova 2015). A European study estimated the LGBTIQ+ population in Germany as making up 7.6 percent of the total population (Dalia Research 2016). Thus, I presume that about 228.000 post-Soviet migrants and refugees belong to the LGBTIQ+ community in Germany. Richard Mole, a political scientist from the U.K., underlines that most of the LGBQ (his research does not include trans, inter, or other gender or sexually non-normative persons) migrants from the former Soviet Union

4

Asylum seekers are officially allowed to work (, accessed May 15, 2019), but before they start a job, they need to get a special permission for it, which is connected to much bureaucratic work. In Germany it is rather difficult for a person without a certain legal status to find a well paid job, and despite obtaining various educations, migrants and refugees often land in a low-income work sector. There are also lot of cases of racist discrimination on the labor market, when persons with ‘non-German’ names, accents or with broken German language are denied jobs despite their high qualification. Very little percentage of people know about the anti-discrimination laws and use them to defend themselves.

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have German or Jewish heritage. Germany has granted privileged admission for post-Soviet migrants who could prove a Jewish or German ethnic back­ ground after the demise of the Soviet Union. Mole argues that other Russianspeaking LGBQ migrants were only able to move to Germany and remain there legally if they had a significant amount of cultural or economic capital (Mole 2018). In the booklet Russische Lesben in Europa [Russian Lesbians in Europe] (Zhuk 2004: 92), a collection of autobiographical texts and essays printed by an NGO, Olga Zhuk writes that in the early 2000s, there was no legal basis for lesbians from post-Soviet states to apply for asylum. I can only assume that Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ people applied for asylum before 2013 on other grounds than persecution due to homosexuality or gender identity and/or managed to stay in Germany in different ways, since there is almost no documentation on issues of migration and asylum of Soviet and post-Soviet lesbians or other GBTIQ+ people to Germany before that year. One exception is the story of Christina Vantaa who moved to Germany and applied for asylum in 2004 (Weitz 2014). In 2013, the first gay cis-man from Russia received refugee status in Germany on the basis of the persecution he faced due to his homosexuality, and his story was publicly discussed in the Russian-speaking press (Петерс 2013) as well as in German publications (Elsner 2013). Persecution due to sexual orientation is a recognized reason for flight under the Geneva Refugee Convention (Markard & Adamietz 2011). According to the European Reception Guidelines, LGBTIQ+ refugees are considered a particularly vulnerable social group (Guideline 2013/33/EU). In the state of Berlin, work is underway to comply with this directive. Whether this directive, if imple­ mented, will actually provide protection to LGBTIQ+ refugees, allowing them to recover from discrimination and violence and build a worthy life, will be discussed below. There are no official statistics on LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers in Germany and no possibility to find numbers according to countries or languages. Yet, it is safe to say that the number of people from post-Soviet countries applying for asylum in Germany because of persecution due to their sexual orientation or gender identity has been growing since 2013. The head of the Schwulenberatung (a gay counseling center) in Berlin estimates the number of LGBTIQ+ refugees in Berlin as being between 3,500 and 7,000 (Laugstien 2016).

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Although the focus of this chapter is not on the particular reasons why LGBTIQ+ migrants and refugees seek support from counseling services or the community, I would like to briefly outline some of the difficulties Russianspeaking LGBTIQ+ individuals encounter in Berlin that make them seek out help. Cases of discrimination and violence in dormitories and on the streets, in the health and education systems, and by the migration authorities are the most common reasons. Less obvious reasons are questions related to social, medical, and legal transition, coming out, marriage, relationships, homesickness, loneliness, isolation, and questions about (multiple) identity as well as physical and mental health. Waiting for the interview as well as for the decision from the Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge [Federal Office for Migration and Refugees], BAMF for short, has been described by all my respondents as the most torturous part of their migration experience. During the asylum process, LGBTIQ+ persons are forced to share living spaces with strangers. Isolation, loneliness, and discriminatory attitudes towards them while sharing small living spaces with not necessarily LGBTIQ+-friendly roommates were repeatedly named as challenging experiences by my respondents. Moreover, ambivalent feelings of nostalgia towards the countries they left and other psychological difficulties made the adaptation to the life in the new country more difficult. These and other challenges were also commonly mentioned in the 10 Porträts von LGBT Geflüchteten [10 Portraits Booklet] (LesMigraS 2018), an interview anthology published by the Lesbenberatung (lesbian counseling center) Berlin. Racist and anti-migrant discrimination on struc­ tural, institutional, interpersonal, and discursive/cultural levels did not end but rather increased with the popularity of the far-right parties like the Alternative für Deutschland (right-wing populist party, AfD for short) and movements such as Pegida (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West). LGBTIQ+ people are a very diverse and complex group, and the prob­ lems of trans and intersex persons often differ strongly from those of cisgender lesbian and gay asylum seekers. For example, the process of changing one’s name and gender marker in legal documents for trans, queer, and intersex persons is very complex. Furthermore, queerness, bi-, and pansexuality are difficult to explain to authorities that operate within outdated and binary ways of thinking. Thus, many asylum seekers are forced to reduce their

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identities during the official asylum interviews. Then again, there are vari­ ous race, class, ability, religion, and age privileges among Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ migrants and refugees. To avoid the common ‘victimizing’ nar­ rative of LGBTIQ+ refugees as the most discriminated and marginalized group, I will further discuss the specific partial discrimination experiences of Russian-speaking migrants and address racisms and issues of privilege inside the refugee communities.

Discrimination in Translation In this section, I focus on the problems surrounding translation as well as potential discrimination and even wrong asylum decisions due to a lack of appropriate translation. On one occasion, while accompanying an LGBTIQ+ asylum seeker during their interview, I heard the translator asking: ‘LGBT is the Zhirinovskij-party, isn’t it?’5 On a different occasion, I heard the transla­ tor interpreting the word ‘gay’ as такой/takoj [like this] and avoiding the word gay or homosexual on purpose, thus eliminating the content of the story and leaving the main topic of discrimination due to sexual orientation aside. The ‘activist’ became the ‘actionist’ in the words of another translator. The substitution of political activism with actionist art is very misleading because the latter is not as dangerous as political activism. The knowledge of the context is crucial for the translator as well as for the one who makes the decision. Although persecution due to sexual orientation and/or gender identity is a reason to apply for asylum, it is actually not enough just to fear discrimination, violence, and structural exclusion. Every asylum seeker has to prove that there was in fact a history of personal persecution in order to convince the authorities that they are not lying. The role of the translators is crucial in this situation (Hassino 2016). Discrimination occurs on an

5

ЛДПР – LDPR – a political party in Russia, which sounds similar to the abbreviation LGBT. Жириновский – Zhirinovskij – a politician who runs this party. ЛДПР has nothing in common with LGBT and is rather discriminating against them.

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institutional level (Rajanayagam & Awadalla 2016) when a lack of informa­ tion and prejudice against LGBTIQ+ people or a simple inattentiveness of a translator could be disastrous for the case and for the future possibilities of the asylum seeker. Even if the translation is sensible and correct, the BAMF decision-makers still often have a Eurocentric homo- and transdiscriminatory understanding of LGBTIQ+ realities. One example for such a Eurocentric perception can be seen in the following case from my counseling work. The BAMF decision-maker claimed that when a gay man is not in a relationship or not visiting gay clubs (which I understand as a sign for being sexually active), despite the fact that he has lived in Germany for two years [sic!], he is lying and cannot be gay.

Here, we can see the complete ignorance of the decision-maker about dif­ ferent gay life styles. Such a narrow understanding of gay identity rejects any possibility of someone being traumatized, not out, not sexually active, asexual, or simply having a life style that differs from the stereotypical image of a gay person who necessarily visits gay clubs. The person from the story received a negative decision on his asylum application, but with the support of an NGO and councellors, it was possible to find a lawyer who filed an objection, and the person was finally granted asylum in Germany. It is important to emphasize that multilingualism should be an essential part of the concept of state authorities and institutions working with refu­ gees. Even if the authorities fail to provide translation into a rare language, the Russian translators should be trained to be familiar with LGBTIQ+ terms, political situations, and common reasons behind asylum claims, to be aware of trauma, and to have a sensitive approach towards people who may have faced violence. The repeated cases of problematic and discrimina­ tory translations in the institutions like BAMF, Ausländerbehörde [Foreign Affairs Office], and the Landesamt für Gesundheit und Soziales [State Office for Health and Social Affairs] (LAGESO), lead me to better understand the great responsibility that NGOs and activist initiatives have. They do not simply support the asylum seekers emotionally and supply them with important information. They additionally compensate for the negligence of the institutions and at times even correct their discriminatory practice.

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What makes the situation even more precarious is that the availability of Russian-language services in an NGO often depends on a single Russianlanguage native speaker. Therefore, the responsibility for the whole group weighs on the shoulders of one person and can result in exploitation and lead to burnout. Another set of problems concerns the fact that activism and support work is mostly informal work, which makes the boundaries between the private and the professional rather blurry. To sum up, I want to highlight the importance of cultural translation as well as sensitization of translators on the topics of trauma, LGBTIQ+ rights, discrimination, and violence. These issues can be easily applied not only to Russian but also to other languages marginalized in Western Europe. The topic of trust is also quite important. LGBTIQ+-focused questions are often very private and, due to discrimination experiences in the past, it often appears to be difficult for some people to seek counseling/support and entrust others with private information. The lack of understanding of German bureaucratic structures among refugees (What is LAF? What is a refugee camp? What is BAMF? How trustworthy are counseling services?) causes insecurity during the counseling process. Often, more time is required to establish trust, and this process may also be slowed down even further due to the necessity of translators.

The Landscape of Organizations Offering Support to LGBTIQ+ Migrants and Refugees in Berlin Over the past three years, many NGOs and grassroots initiatives in Germany have launched projects under the motto ‘queer refugees welcome,’ provid­ ing help to LGBTIQ+ refugees. This help is often motivated by support­ ers’ personal experiences of migration and racism and/or belonging to the LGBTIQ+ community and is therefore based on years of confrontation with discriminatory structures as well as with lived experience (for example, LesMigraS has worked with Black queers and queers of color for twenty years). Through this work, the existing hierarchies and power relations within LGBTIQ+ communities are brought to the foreground. Especially

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in the context of counseling, knowledge about the specific social group of LGBTIQ+ refugees is often missing in mainstream LGBT organiza­ tions, while migrant initiatives often lack the resources and funds necessary in order to conduct relevant research. As a result, there is a discrepancy between benevolent and under-informed NGOs and activists on the one hand and the real needs of Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ refugees on the other. Nonetheless, there are several self-organized LGBTIQ+ migrant projects with varying degrees of sustainability and influence. Below I will give a few examples of projects currently offering support for LGBTIQ+ refugees and briefly explain their focuses. Lesbenberatung [lesbian counseling center] has existed for over thirty years and currently offers psycho-social trauma-sensitive, legal, anti-discrim­ ination, and anti-violence counseling for LGBTIQ+ refugees in various languages, including Russian. Although the organization’s name still only refers to a lesbian identity, the work of the Lesbenberatung has been trans inclusive on every level for years. The counseling services for LGBTIQ+ refugees is open for all genders, which allows gay cisgender men to use them, among others. Besides counseling, there are several empowerment groups for LGBTIQ+ refugees as well as frequent workshops. About twenty years ago, the anti-discrimination and anti-violence project LesMigraS (lesbian migrants and Black lesbians) became an integral part of Lesbenberatung, making an anti-racist agenda as well as the focus on asylum and migration one of the most important aspects of its work. Schwulenberatung [gay counseling] is focused on counseling gay cis and trans men and has existed since 1981. Since 2016, the Schwulenberatung has been offering legal and psychological counseling for LGBTIQ+ refugees. In spring 2016, they opened the first and only state-funded housing for LGBTIQ+ refugees in Berlin (Mai 2017). Since 2017, the counseling center has had a specialist unit that aims to connect state authorities and NGOs. The LSVD, Lesben- und Schwulen Verband Deutschland [German gay and lesbian union], runs the Miles project, which is geared towards gay and lesbian migrants. The project has a history of being criticized for working with racist imagery and using paternalistic language (Yilmaz-Günay 2001). Maneo is an anti-violence center for cis gay men and has an ambiva­ lent reputation. They have repeatedly reported on violence towards gay men through migrants, thus supporting racist narratives as well as erasing

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the existence of migrant LGBTIQ+ individuals (Yilmaz-Günay 2001). Currently, a Russian-speaking counselor is involved in their work, and one of the focuses they have is on LGBTIQ+ refugees. TrIQ (Trans, Inter, Queer) provides counseling for trans, intersex, and queer people on a voluntary basis. They do not offer specific services for LGBTIQ+ refugees and do not have any Russian-speaking staff at the moment. The Sonntagsclub [Sunday Club], the oldest former GDR gay-lesbian organization, currently employs no Russian-speaking staff and has no pro­ jects targeted at LGBTIQ+ refugees and migrants. GLADT is focused on LGBTIQ+ people of color and with migration experience. It provides counseling work for queer refugees and migrants and is run by these groups themselves. However, there is no Russian-speaking staff at the moment. The book Russian Lesbians in Europe (2004) mentions the regular meetings of the голубая свечка/golubaâ svečka [The Blue Candle] and underlines that the group has existed for several years. Голубая свечка still regularly meets today and is a speaking group with regular, round-table discussions, primarily aimed at Russian-speaking gay cis-men. Quarteera e.V. is a registered non-profit NGO, working with Russianspeaking LGBTIQ+ individuals. Founded in 2011, they organize more or less regular meetings on Fridays for Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ people in the LSVD rooms. These meetings are often gay and male-dominated, trans-discriminatory statements and behavior often remain unsanctioned, as is also the case in other primarily gay-lesbian organizations. Quarteera focuses on the fight against discrimination towards gays, lesbians, and bisex­ ual people and does mostly not question other power relations. Nevertheless, Quarteera’s asylum working group was a good example of a very focused and effective support network for Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ refugees. For almost three years, Quarteera collected donations to cover legal costs for LGBTIQ+ refugees. This effort was unique and a very valid form of help for asylum seekers. Unfortunately, the donations have ended and unpaid activist work diminished. However, there are still some people active in the refugee support group at Quarteera. Квирофон/Kvirofon was found as a Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ group for creative writing with a special focus on intersectional approaches, multiple positioning, and the questioning of power relations within the LGBTIQ+

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community. The writing group has turned into a discussion group with selforganized thematic workshops on housing, sexuality, and discrimination. In the last three groups (голубая свечка, Quarteera, and квирофон), Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ refugees can find support, a network, and con­ tacts. The specificity of these groups is that they are run by Russian-speaking migrants and refugees themselves, in comparison to Schwulenberatung, LSVD, and other organizations mentioned above. Despite GLADT’s strong anti-racist agenda, there is no focus on Russian-speaking migrants and refugees or the post-Soviet experience. Participation in these LGBTIQ+ empowerment groups requires a prior engagement with one’s own iden­ tity, for example in a form of a ‘coming out.’ It requires a certain amount of courage and the ability to approach new people, since the groups mostly happen in a format of conversations in a circle. This kind of format is not comfortable for all people, and conversations are often dominated by one or two people. Meetings that happen in bars, such as those of the голубая свечка group, require the consumption of expensive drinks, which refugees often cannot afford. In addition to permanent counseling offices and NGOs, one-time events such as conferences and festivals with multiple workshops and lectures aim to support and provide a network for LGBTIQ+ persons with migration and/or refugee experience. The format of a conference often appeals to an audience that is privileged in terms of education. However, in the context of asylum and migration, this format is often used by organizations as a low-threshold activist approach to knowledge-sharing, networking, and empowerment, not necessarily as an academic format. In 2016, two confer­ ences were held in which Russian-speaking LGBTIQ+ refugees were either in the organizational team (Refugee LGBTIQ* Conference in Brandenburg)6 or were a part of a focus target group (Queer Refugees More Than Welcome conference).7 A further question is how many LGBTIQ+ refugees indeed reach out to professional counseling when they need help. Some of these groups could be difficult to access because of the language barrier, others might be

6 (accessed May 15, 2019). 7 (accessed May 15, 2019).

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difficult to access because of different cultural norms. Another aspect is that for some people from Russian-speaking countries, seeking support beyond their friends and family circle can be embarrassing and not acceptable. I would argue that a lot of LGBTIQ+ individuals are excluded from the activ­ ist scene and find it difficult to approach NGOs or empowerment groups.

Seeking Support in the Media and Online, Finding Community Since not every LGBTIQ+ refugee is able to attend a support group or visit a counseling office, there are various ways for LGBTIQ+ refugees to empower themselves and exchange information online. Print and online media can be an important means of identification, information, and sup­ port for LGBTIQ+ people. In the linguistic vacuum that is present in the beginning of a the migration process, digital media from the country of origin are more likely to be consumed than German publications like L-Mag, Siegessäule, and other similar magazines, which are almost always written in German. In 2004, the brochure Russian Lesbians in Europe was published by LesMigraS. It was the first brochure in a series of similar publications. Most of the content was created by three lesbian cis-women. Thirteen years later, it is noticeable not just how the political language but also the political situation has changed. In 2004, it was almost impossible to apply for asylum in Germany as an LGBTIQ+ person from the former Soviet Union. The booklet works with a narrow understanding of lesbian identity (regarding only cis-female relationships) and focuses only on Russian lesbians instead of Russian-speaking ones. Despite the highly simplified theory and obsolete terminology of the booklet, it is a unique source for this period that documents Russian-speaking lesbian migrant voices. In 2017, the book 10 Portraits of LGBT Refugees was edited and published by LesMigraS. The book contains three interviews with Russian-speaking refugees that shed light on the lived experience of two cislesbians and one transmasculine refugee from the post-Soviet space, through unique and empowering stories. The protagonists of the book report that they found support from young German leftists as well as Russian-speaking

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gay cis and trans men who have been living in Germany for a longer period. They also found support from other LGBTIQ+ people who had applied for asylum earlier or came to Germany in other ways. LGBTIQ+ refugees benefit from the support provided by so-called ‘Kontingentflüchtlinge’ [quota refugees], ‘Spätaussiedler’ [‘late repat­ riate,’ mostly ethnic Germans and Jews], and by other Russian-speaking migrants. The importance of community support is not to be underestimated. Individual activists, artists, and volunteer translators who are part of Russianspeaking LGBTIQ+ communities and, due to various reasons, are not organ­ ized in NGOs and ‘welcome initiatives’ are doing a lot of unpaid work that remains undocumented and even neglected by professionals. Video blogs, groups in social networks such as Facebook and Vkontakte, and WhatsApp groups are means by which a considerable amount of first-hand knowledge is circulated. The possibility to network, reach out for community support and professional counseling, and organize in self-help groups in situations shaped by sexism, racism, migratism, and trans- and homo-discrimination, is often literally lifesaving for LGBTIQ+ refugees and migrants. The pos­ sibility to be in touch with other individuals who have experienced similar challenges can be very helpful for newly arrived migrants in the process of gaining access to their own strengths and resources.

Developments in the Support Sphere for LGBTIQ+ Refugees and Remaining Problems When I look back to 2014, the year I started working with LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers from post-Soviet countries as a volunteer at Quarteera, I can trace a significant change in the support landscape for LGBTIQ+ persons with migration or refugee experience. The growth of local support initia­ tives, volunteer translators, and support groups as well as the emergence of LGBTIQ+ activists raising attention to the specific issues of this group were especially significant after 2015, when about 476,649 refugees came to Germany (BAMF 2016). LAGESO [State Office for Health and Social Affairs] failed to register the refugees for weeks and did not provide sufficient

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services and housing, which lead to institutional and individual challenges. Since the collapse of LAGESO in 2015, alternative institutionalized assis­ tance structures were created (Schulz 2016), including projects targeted specifically at LGBTIQ+ refugees. New job positions were created in the Schwulenberatung, Lesbenberatung, LSVD, and in many other organizations that were not explicitly focused on LGBTIQ+ communities. The necessity of providing training about questions of gender-based violence and LGBTIQ+ topics for people working in refugee camps was partly recognized and cur­ rently there are at least two programs in Berlin in which social workers as well as camp managers are trained using LGBTIQ+ awareness-raising methods. The BAMF and the Landesamt für Flüchtlingsangelegenheiten [State Office for Refugee Affairs] (LAF) created specific job positions that are respon­ sible for LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers’ cases and can be contacted by asylum seekers or by NGOs and other supporters. As mentioned previously, the gay counseling center created a so-called specialist unit for LGBTIQ+ refugee issues, which is also responsible for the implementation of EU guidelines regarding the special vulnerability of LGBTIQ+ refugees. Additionally, several publications and professional conferences have been instrumen­ tal in terms of informing people about the needs of LGBTIQ+ refugees. For example, the Lesbenberatung published a list of non-discriminatory terms for sexual orientation and gender identity in several languages. The Schwulenberatung published a booklet on the same topic, however the publication also includes negative and discriminatory terms. Such materials are very relevant for translators and mediators. Despite the introduction of these support structures, the asylum system is not changing for the better. It is still necessary to prove the personal per­ secution story of each LGBTIQ+ asylum seeker. There are still months and years of waiting times for interviews and results. The problematic of unmarried LGBTIQ+ couples is still unsolved (Siegfried 2017). Racist and anti-migrant discrimination on structural, institutional, interpersonal, and discursive/cultural levels did not end and instead have rather been strength­ ened through the popularity of right-wing parties and movements. Ignorance and a lack of information about the countries of origin is common in cases of Russian-speaking refugees, as is the case with other groups. Under-reporting is a very significant issue, especially when reports from the country of origin are the second-most important factor within the asylum procedure.

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Access to the housing market for migrants is getting worse in Berlin, regardless of legal status, but as an asylum seeker who is still waiting for an answer, it is even more difficult to find a flat. Living conditions in the camps and dormitories are horrible and full of trans-discrimination. The introduc­ tion of the non-visa traveling possibility for Ukrainian citizens in light of restricted possibilities of being granted asylum in Germany will result in many migrants becoming illegal. All in all, the reasons why LGBTIQ+ people decide to move to Germany and apply for asylum range from global homo-discrimination, trans-discrimination, sexism, and gender-based vio­ lence to racism, ableism, ageism, and poverty. They are not disappearing but rather growing in light of the global context of right-wing movements and discourses.

Conclusion: Ideas for Practical Solidarity Since the central topics of this volume are the limits, advantages, and mecha­ nisms of LGBTIQ+ solidarity, it is important to underline the urgent neces­ sity of cooperation between NGOs and social institutions with LGBTIQ+ migrant and refugee communities, initiatives, and individual activists. Although the impact of activist, self-organized, artistic actions and practices can be significant, the support that an NGO can provide is very particular. Therefore, I see an immediate need for structural and institutional changes in the asylum system and in racist and anti-migrant discourses and laws that apply to foreigners, which can only be achieved when those in power start listening to those who are marginalized and discriminated against. Only honest and equal cooperation can bring real change to the system. Hiring professionals with both migrant/refugee and LGBTIQ+ backgrounds, creating long-term job positions and communication platforms where the existent, lived knowledge from LGBTIQ+ migrant communities can be articulated, honored, and applied in practical contexts are possible steps toward such change. There is an urgent need for horizontal collaborations between sup­ porters and refugees. Such collaborations should be a ‘working with,’ not a

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‘working on’ or ‘working for,’ especially when these supporters don’t speak­ ing language or know the needs of the target group. Such a ‘working with’ implies the possibility for criticism of existing paternalistic approaches and hegemonic structures. The ethics of support is intrinsically connected to power relations. Inequality automatically arises in a counseling or case man­ agement situation. The social situation of both counselor and counseled plays a huge role in the process. Shared experiences between the supporter and the support-seeker can not only increase empathy but can also strengthen the professionalism and trust in the situation. The MRBB, Migrationsrat Berlin Brandenburg (migration counsel Berlin Brandenburg), underlines that networking and exchange between different actors such as counseling agencies, self-organized groups, and individual activists is very important. According to MRBB, ‘sustainable, empowering support can only work at eye level’ (MRBB 2015). It is vital that LGBTIQ+ people with migrant and refugee experience all over Germany (especially in small towns and villages, not only in Berlin) feel safe and secure as well as understood and have mul­ tilingual empowerment spaces.

Bibliography Жук, Ольга. 2004. ‘Лесбиянки из России в Европе. Надежды и разочарования эмиграции,’ in: LesMigraS (ed.). Russische Lesben in Europa. Berlin: LesMigraS, p. 92. Миллер, Таня. 2004. ‘В поисках русских лесбиянок по Европе,’ in: LesMigraS (ed.). Russische Lesben in Europa. Berlin: LesMigraS, pp. 100–102. Петерс, Анна. 2013. ‘Как гей из России получил убежище в ФРГ?’ November 8, 2013, available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Moraga, Cherrie. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press.

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Beketova, Masha. 2016. ‘Spezifika in der Beratung von LSBT*I* Geflüchteten,’ in: Wie eine Rose, die aus dem Riss im Beton wächst. Empowerment von lesbischen, schwulen, bisexuellen, sowie trans* und inter* Geflüchteten durch Beratung und Unterstützung. Berlin: Schwulenberatung, pp. 16–25, available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Beketova, Masha. 2017. Diskriminierungserfahrungen und Widerstandsstrategien der russischsprachiger queerer Geflüchteter in Deutschland, Master thesis submitted at the Center for Gender Studies, Humboldt University Berlin. Unpublished manuscript. BMFA. 2016. ‘The 2015 Migration Report,’ December 14, 2016, available online at (accessed May 24, 2019) Combahee River Collective. 1978. ‘Combahee River Collective Statement,’ available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Anti­ racist Politics,’ University of Chicago Legal Forum 1, available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Dalia Research. 2016. ‘Counting the LGBT population: 6% of Europeans identify as LGBT’ Dalia, available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Elsner, Regina. 2013. ‘Erstmals LGBT-Flüchtling aus Russland anerkannt,’ Quarteera, available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Golova, Tatiana. 2018. ‘Postsowjetische Migranten in sozialen Netzwerken,’ bpb. Dossier. Hassino, Mahmoud. 2016. ‘Arbeit mit Sprachmittlung,’ in: Wie eine rose, die aus dem Riss im Beton wächst. Empowerment von lesbischen, schwulen, bisexuellen, sowie trans* und inter* Geflüchteten durch Beratung und Unterstützung. Berlin: Schwu­ lenberatung, pp. 25. available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Jansen, Sabine, and Spijkerboer, Thomas. 2011. Fleeing Homophobia. Asylum Claims Related to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in Europe. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Laugstien, Francis. 2016. ‘Neue Unterkunft für queere Geflüchtete. Coming Out of the Heim,’ Taz February 2, 2016, available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). LesMigraS (ed.). 2004. Russische Lesben in Europa. Berlin.

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LesMigraS (ed.). 2018. 10 Porträts von LGBT Geflüchteten. Berlin, available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Lokshin, Pavel. 2017. ‘Wie viele Russischsprachige leben in Deutschland?’ Mediendienst Integration, April 21, 2017, available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Lorde, Audre. 1986. Our Dead Behind Us: Poems. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Mai, Dominik. 2017. ‘Unterkunft in Treptow Hier finden homo- und transsexuelle Geflüchtete Schutz,’ Berliner Zeitung, July 21, 2017, available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Markard, Nora. 2013. ‘Queerness zwischen Diskretion und Cocktails. Anerkennungskämpfe und Kollektivitätsfallen im Migrationsrecht,’ in: Jähnert, Gabriele, et al. (eds.). Kollektivität nach der Subjektkritik. Bielefeld: Transcript, p. 69–86. Markard, Nora, and Adamietz, Laura. 2011. ‘Keep it in the Closet? Flüchtlingsanerkennung wegen Homosexualität auf dem Prüfstand,‘ Kritische Justiz 44(3), pp. 294–302. Merfort, Kathrin. 2015. ‘Queere Flüchtlinge in Berlin brauchen Hilfe. Mentorenpro­ gramm des LSVD,’ Tagesspiegel, November 27, 2015, available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Mizcelinska, Joanna, and Kulpa, Robert. 2011. ‘Contemporary Peripheries: Queer Studies, Circulation of Knowledge and East/West Divide,’ in: Kulpa, Robert, and Mizcelinska, Joanna (eds.). De-Centering Western Sexualities. Central and Eastern European Perspectives. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 11–26. Mole, Richard. 2018. ‘Identity, Belonging and Solidarity among Russian-speaking Queer Migrants in Berlin,’ Slavic Review 77(1), pp. 77–98. Oppenberg, Frauke. 2017. ‘Ein Wort, ein Geruch, ein Bild – und Erfahrungen werden wieder real,’ March 30, 2017, available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Panagiotidis, Jannis. 2017. ‘Postsowjetische Migranten in Deutschland. Perspek­ tiven auf eine heterogene “Diaspora”,’ available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Rajanayagam, Iris, and Awadalla, Ahmed. 2016. ‘LGBT*I*Q Geflüchtete in Deutschland,’ available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). RICHTLINIE 2013/33/ EU DES EUROPÄISCHEN PARLAMENTS UND DES RATES vom 26. Juni 2013 zur Festlegung von Normen für die Aufnahme von

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Personen, die internationalen Schutz beantragen (Neufassung) available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Rodriguez, Encarnacion Gutierrez. 2011. ‘Intersektionalität: Oder wie nicht über Ras­ sismus sprechen?’ in: Intersektionalität revisited. Bielefeld: Transkript, available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Russlanddeutsche. September 26, 2018, available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Schulz, Berndt. 2016. ‘Ein Jahr Lageso Krise,’ August 5, 2016, available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Siegfried, Dirk. 2017. ‘Eheschließung von LSBT* Geflüchteten. Rechtliche Expertise,’ Schwulenberatung Berlin. Available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Tlostanova, Madina. 2015. ‘Can the Post-Soviet Think? On Coloniality of Knowledge, External Imperial and Double Colonial Difference,’ Intersections 1(2), pp. 38–58. Tudor, Alyosxa. 2013. From [al‘manja] with love: Trans_feministische Positionierungen zu Rassismus und Migratismus. Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel. Walgenbach, Katharina. 2012. ‘Gender als interdependete Kategorie,’ in: Walgenbach, Katharina; Dietze, Gabriele; Hornscheidt, Lann, and Palm, Kerstin (eds.). Gender als interdependete Kategorie. Neue Perspektiven auf Intersektionalität, Diversität und Heterogenität. Opladen: Budrich academic, pp. 23–64. Walgenbach, Katharina. 2012. ‘Intersektionalität – eine Einführung,’ available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Weitz, Tom. 2014. ‘Билет в один конец или история одной эмиграции,’ Kvir.ru, available online at (accessed May 15, 2019). Yilmaz-Günay, Koray. 2013. Karriere eines konstruierten Gegensatzes: Zehn Jahre ‘Muslime versus Schwule’ Sexualpolitiken seit dem 11. September 2001. Münster: Edition Assemblage.

Institutions and NGOs Ausländerbehörde Berlin [Foreign affairs office]: (accessed May 15, 2019). GLADT: (accessed May 15, 2019).

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Landesamt für Flüchtlingsangelegenheiten [State Office for Refugee Affairs] (LAF): (accessed May 15, 2019). Landesamt für Gesundheit und Soziales [State Office for Health and Social Affairs] (LAGESO): (accessed May 15, 2019). Lesben- und Schwulen Verband Deutschland [German gay and lesbian union] (LSVD): (accessed May 15, 2019). Lesbenberatung [lesbian counseling]: (accessed May 15, 2019). LesMigraS: (accessed May 15, 2019). Maneo, das schwule anti-gewalt Projekt Berlin: (accessed May 15, 2019). Migrationsrat Berlin Brandenburg [migration counsel Berlin Brandenburg] (MRBB): (accessed May 15, 2019). Miles, Zentrum für Migranten, Lesben und Schwule: (accessed May 15, 2019). Quarteera: (accessed May 15, 2019). Schulwenberatung [gay counseling]: (accessed May 15, 2019). Sonntagsclub [Sunday club]: (accessed May 15, 2019). TrIQ (Trans, Inter, Queer): (accessed May 15, 2019). Голубая свечка: (accessed May 15, 2019).

Part IV

Art-based Research, Artivism, and Other Forms of Resistance

Alexandra Yaseneva and Ekaterina Davydova

12 Boston Marriages in Contemporary Russia and Beyond

Dominant Russian-speaking political discourses portray contemporary Russia as a fortress of traditional family values and intolerance against any alternative kinds of human cohabitation. However, the facade created by the official discourse conceals a rich diversity of gender contracts within Russian society, which still survives amidst unprecedented assaults on sexual freedom and a patriarchal renaissance inspired by the authorities. In this essay, we focus on Boston marriages in contemporary Russia and beyond1 as a unique phenomenon demonstrating Russian society’s resilience and adaptability in the face of the challenges posed by recent sexual and family policies. We introduce our online project Живи с подругой/ Živi s podrugoj [Live With Your Female Friend] (), which we created in 2014 to promote and create awareness about female cohabitation, Boston marriage, and romantic friendship, and to provide a space for women who seek these kinds of relationships to connect via a social media platform. The project focuses primarily on financial, psychological, and social support that women provide for each other rather than on sexual relations between them. Though the concept of Живи с подругой is quite new, it refers to a variety of phenomena that have a long history, predating the emergence of ‘Boston marriages.’ The term ‘Boston marriage’ emerged in nineteenth-century New England to designate relationships between unmarried women who lived together, shared their expenses, and took care of each other. Similar partner­ ships exist in contemporary Russia, however, they are mostly invisible and 1

Russia and the Russian-speaking online space. The latter, despite its apparent heteroge­ neity, is a largely integrated infosphere. With Russia as the regional imperialist center, this infosphere is still affected by its information and cultural policy.

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unrecognized since the phenomenon has no name in Russian language. At the beginning of our online project, we wanted to shed light on this cultural phenomenon by appropriating and translating the American concept for the Russian context and demonstrating that these kind of women’s unions are a form of a shared human household that is worthy of recognition in the modern world. This essay is a continuation of our activist endeavor to propagandize female cohabitation in general, and especially ‘Boston mar­ riages,’ among various other forms.

The History: What Is a Boston Marriage? As a type of women’s cohabitation, the ‘Boston marriage’ emerged in the late nineteenth century when many newly educated women were searching for an opportunity to become independent. It is characterized by a profound friendship that is not limited to mere flat-sharing but also encompasses mutual social, material, and psychological support. The term ‘Boston mar­ riage’ derives from the novel The Bostonians by Henry James, which depicted a relationship between two young women ( James 1886). It was called ‘mar­ riage’ due to the resemblance to a conventional marriage – women take care of each other, share the budget, and live their lives together as millions of married people do. It is widely believed that the novel was inspired by Henry James’ sister Alice James and her Boston marriage to Katharine Loring. It is noteworthy that the term ‘Boston marriage’ was included in the Oxford dictionary in 2017 (Martin 2017). Although the term originated in the U.S.A., the phenomenon has a long history in Europe and probably beyond. Romantic love, sex, and marriage were not considered to be parts of a whole as recently as two or three centuries ago. No one demanded from spouses to passionately love each other, and men were not supposed to be faithful to women. As for romantic love, it was something that could occur between close friends. A number of historians, such as Carol Smith-Rosenberg and Lillian Faderman, argue that until the late nineteenth and early twenti­ eth centuries, close, exclusive, and even erotic relationships between white middle- and upper-class women in English and Anglo-American culture

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were deemed normal and quite compatible with a heterosexual marriage (Smith-Rosenberg 1975: 27–29; Faderman 1981: 195). It is not entirely clear whether these partnerships involved a sexual component but some writers assume that they did (Rothblum and Brehony 1993: 5; Theophano 2004: 1–2). Nevertheless, the emotional intensity and commitment in such rela­ tionships were unprecedented. The Irish Eleanor Butler of Kilkenny and Sarah Ponsonby, the English Mary Wollstonecraft and Fanny Blood, the Americans Emily Dickinson and Susan Gilbert, Alice James and Katharine Loring as well as Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Fields are among the most famous of such female unions. Modern authors and researchers usually refer to such past relation­ ships as ‘romantic friendships’ (Mavor 1973: 85–87; Smith-Rosenberg 1975: 1–29; Faderman 1981: 74–84; Furneaux 2009: 25–37). Smith-Rosenberg (1975: 27) suggests that the romantic friendship was a response to rigorous norms that regulated gender relations, which resulted in homosocial areas becoming safe spaces for relationships between women. Faderman argues that tremendous transformations in the social attitudes towards same-sex relationships occurred towards the end of nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, when sexologists and psychoanalysts stigmatized these liaisons as ‘lesbian’ and ‘perverted’ (Faderman 1981: 239–253; Faderman 1993: 33–35). Until then, these ‘romantic friendships’ had not been decried in English and Anglo-American culture. When Boston marriages emerged at the end of nineteenth century in the U.S.A., they were quite a new phe­ nomenon in comparison to romantic friendships of the past, because the women who entered them were mostly well educated, career-oriented, and financially independent, they had finished colleges and held feminist views. They broke cultural restrictions and social norms to obtain more opportu­ nities and freedom. These traits distinguish Boston couples from previous romantic female friends (Theophano 2004: 1). There is a controversy about the nature of romantic friendships between women and Boston marriages, whether they were lesbian relationships in disguise or some other form of intimacy between women. The answer to this question differs according to the used definition of lesbianism – whether it is considered in broad or narrow terms. We will elaborate on this below. By the end of the twentieth century, the interest in Boston marriage was revived, as part of the interest in lesbian history and experience as well

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as the pioneering research in the history of asexuality. However, this time, Boston marriages were defined as ‘romantic but asexual relationships among contemporary lesbians’ (Rothblum and Brehony 1993: 5–7).

The Premise of a Women’s Cohabitation Movement in Russia So why do we think that the American concept of a Boston marriage is rel­ evant for Russian women today? There are many reasons for its relevance: young women’s harsh life conditions, a demand for safe and comfortable male-free living spaces, and the temptation of escaping loneliness through finding a roommate. In fact, long before this topic attracted feminists’ interest, multiple women in Russia, especially undergraduates and, to a lesser extent, retirees had been living together for various reasons. When we started our online project, we received many responses from people who had already been Boston-married but often had not known how to define their relationship. Keeping in mind all historical complexities of the term, we found it impor­ tant to give this phenomenon a name in the Russian language, to make it more robust and easier for people who are looking for such kind of relation­ ship to articulate their desires and find others who share it. From our personal communications and the informal interviews we conducted with the users of our website, we learned that many women consider adopting this lifestyle, especially young women who live or plan to live together because of the above-mentioned reasons. However, as follows from our survey, many of them give it up later because it is socially viewed as ‘not common’ (see e.g. Любавина 2017). This normative view contradicts widespread knowledge that there are many different forms of non-sexual female unions in Russian society, and that the nuclear family is actually not as common as assumed and propagated. Configurations like mother, grandmother, and child as well as unions of undergraduate students sharing a flat are among them. Although not all of them fall under our definition of the Boston marriage, we believe that the introduction of the term Boston marriage and cultural representation of Boston couples may empower these

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partnerships and help people appreciate these unions’ significance, value, and stability.

The Живи с подругой Project When the idea of our project first emerged in 2014, there was only fragmen­ tary information on this topic on the Russian-speaking Internet. Indeed, only one article that described a contemporary Boston marriage based on a particular couple’s personal experience had been translated from English (Kennedy 2001). At the same time, it was clear that the ideas of female cohabi­ tation, Boston marriage, and romantic friendship had great potential, both in terms of Russian women’s needs and in the context of a feminist agenda. We therefore decided to promote the idea of Boston marriage in Russian society and help others to find partners by starting the Живи с подругой project. Since then, we have been driven by the desire to establish a cultural background for such partnerships so that those willing to find a Boston partner know that they are not alone in their search, that there were people who did it before and who manage to do it now, that it is achievable and real. On the technical side, the Живи с подругой project is a public page on VK () – the largest and the most popular social media site in Russia, according to the 2018 Brand Analytics report (BA 2018). Those looking for a partner can fill out a form with their personal parameters, needs, interests, and expectations that are relevant in this context. After that, if we approve the content, it appears on the main page of the project, and other women may contact people looking for a partner. We do not provide any housing nor do we identify as a platform for rent-seekers. The other type of content we put on our page is different texts about Boston marriages and other types of female relationships, articles in media that highlight these phenomena, interviews with Boston couples, and so on. However, there is a certain discrepancy between our feminist intentions and the response from the general female public to our initiative. There is a great variety in types and motivations among the women who benefit from the project: prospective students eager to move to a big city, undergraduate

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students looking for an alternative to dormitories, low-income young women seeking to share house rent expenses, women with children searching for a co-parent, apartment-centered seekers, and, indeed, those looking for a Boston partner. Nevertheless, on our platform we welcome not only those seeking a Boston marriage but also those looking for other types of female cohabi­ tation. The underlying motivation does not play a decisive role since we believe that if a woman is looking for a female partner to live with, it will be beneficial to her no matter what their union’s organizing terms and condi­ tions are, as long as there is no exploitation between these women. Since we received several inquiries from people who were looking for a maid in exchange for housing, we decided to explicitly exclude this reason. Apart from them, the only other people who were prevented from participating in our project were apartment-centered seekers who prioritized flat prop­ erties over the potential partner’s human merits. We believe that there are enough rent-centered platforms, so we decided to dedicate our project to interpersonal relations where the house is only a space for such partnerships to be implemented rather than an end in itself.

The Boston Marriage within the General Feminist Agenda Our project has a clear feminist agenda. Many young women in Russian society are economically vulnerable and, accordingly, might feel the need to marry at a young age. Women’s cohabitation can empower women eco­ nomically and in their everyday lives, granting them a certain degree of independence. Joining efforts lowers the costs of an ‘adult’ life and allows women to escape patriarchal structures such as marriage and adopt alter­ native lifestyles that allow for more freedom. It can also help to create safe spaces and provide a way to escape or prevent different forms of domestic violence, for instance abuse by men towards heterosexual women. It can be a kind of safe space where women can claim their own territory and men have to follow the rules set by them. Moreover, having their own space grants women more control over the conditions under which sex occurs. Without

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a gender hierarchy between the cohabiting women, it is easier to ensure an equal division of domestic labor and often childcare. Other types of hierar­ chies, such as class and ethnicity, are mostly irrelevant because women tend to choose peers for cohabitation (as we see from their posts in our group) and thereby exclude those who are more vulnerable or powerful. The Живи с подругой project also intersects with the interests of les­ bian communities in Russia in many aspects: lesbophobia and the under­ representation of female couples in the culture affects not only lesbians but also Boston-married women. Moreover, lesbian invisibility is a much larger problem than it might seem at first glance. It concerns all kinds of women’s relationships and results in their devaluation and the denial of their significance – not only by society but also by the women involved in them. A positive representation of female couples can be beneficiary both for lesbians as well as for Boston-married women, as it has the potential to create a friendlier and more accepting social climate.

The Women’s Intimacy Spectrum and Boston Marriage as a Practice of Gyn/Affection We believe that women’s intimacy is a spectrum that encompasses many different forms of close relationships between women, from roommates, to friendships, to Boston marriages, to romantic and sexual relationships. Moreover, these types of relations are closely interconnected. They can trans­ form from one into another and intertwine to form a dense network of women’s social interactions. The spectrum of women’s intimacy allows us to transcend the dichotomies of lesbian vs. straight, friendship vs. romance. This concept is very close to Adrienne Rich’s idea of the lesbian continuum that was proposed to ‘include a range – through each woman’s life and throughout history – of women-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman’ (Rich 1980: 27). The lesbian continuum tries to embrace various ‘forms of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving

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and receiving of practical and political support’ (Rich 1980: 27). Accordingly, lesbianism is not only one form of relationship between women but also encompasses a broad spectrum of woman’s experience in itself. Thus, Boston marriages definitely relate to lesbianism. We also believe that close horizontal relationships between women provide a foundation for female bonding and thus contribute to developing a social basis for a feminist movement. We relate our ideas to the concept of Gyn/affection, as elaborated by Janice Raymond in her book A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection (2002). She defines ‘Gyn/affection […] as woman-to-woman attraction, influence, and move­ ment’ (Raymond 2002: 7). ‘Gyn/affection is not only a loving relationship between two or more women; it is also a freely chosen bond which, when chosen, involves certain reciprocal assurances based on honor, loyalty, and affection’ (9). According to Raymond, ‘[t]he imperative of female friendship is that women be equal to our vital “womanist” Selves, equal to the task of creating a woman-centered existence’ (13). ‘Gyn/affection assures,’ writes the author further, ‘that feminism will be less and less mediated by men and male definitions of equality’ (14). Thus, we recognize the profound gyn/ affective aspect of contemporary Boston marriages.

Our Experience and Results After four years of our project’s existence, we have achieved some success. We have found our niche as an online roommate search service and have more than 8,600 subscribers with a steady flow of new applicants. One of our major successes is that we have gathered all the information concerning Boston marriages and romantic friendships between women that is available in Russian; many of these texts were translated from English by our project’s volunteers. Moreover, Boston marriage as a topic has become visible in the media due to our activity, and a number of similar groups have emerged (Бостонский брак 2016; Домик подруг 2016; Fem Home 2017). Despite the growing number of articles and columns in conven­ tional women’s magazines and popular mass media on Boston marriages

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(Мищишина 2017, Блинова 2016, Кленова 2015, Егорченко 2015, Любавина 2017), there are a number of challenges we face: uneven geo­ graphical coverage, lack of information on the topic in Russian as well as in English, lack of motivated volunteers, difficulties in gathering feedback and reaching the community. Large cities dominate in terms of requests for female partnership – especially Moscow and Saint Petersburg. It is much easier to find a partner there. At the start of every academic year, new stu­ dents who move to the big cities to study at prominent universities make up a distinct category in our target audience. Our project thus contributes to young women’s interregional mobility. We do not have exact data on how many people managed to find a partner through our platform since there is no way we can track their feedback. Sometimes it is only after months or even years that we learn that a certain person once used our platform.

Subscribers’ Motivations On our platform, we conducted a survey among our subscribers to find out who they are looking for. We started an online poll in February 2017 that 304 people participated in. According to the results of our survey (Живи с подругой 2017a), material and economic factors are a prevalent motiva­ tion (44.08 percent look for a companion to rent housing together for vari­ ous reasons). 29.61 percent were looking for a life partner and a soul mate, ultimately aiming for a Boston marriage, while 19.74 percent were looking for a female friend. 6.58 percent picked the ‘other’ option. These are people looking for an elderly companion, a romantic partner with a flat, and help with child-rearing. We were also interested in the primary motivation leading women to a housing partnership with other women. So, we conducted another similar survey (Живи с подругой 2017b) focusing on their motivations in July 2017. 486 people participated in the poll and the majority of women explained their choice to live with a female friend with the physical, psychological, and emotional safety associated with women’s cohabitation (30.25 percent). The second most important reason is financial (19.14 percent) and the third is the

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deliberate search for a female partnership (16.05 percent). Students who want to find cohabitation with another woman as an alternative to a dormitory constitute another essential cohort (9.88 percent). Other women responded that they do not want to live alone (8.23 percent), think that it is easier to share the domestic duties with another woman (3.7 percent), seek sexual or emo­ tional autonomy from men (3.29 percent), do not want to get married (3.09 percent), or seek support (2.26 percent). 4.12 percent chose the ‘other’ option. Our polls show the following trend: the need for safety and financial issues are top priorities and living with another woman provides the means to meet these needs. The surveys’ results correspond to our initial hypoth­ esis, namely that Boston marriage could possibly be a working strategy in the Russian context. Moreover, we see that tangible, material factors play a significant role and its appeal can’t be explained merely by ideological pre­ dispositions. Unfortunately, we were not able to get sufficient information about the participants of the polls and hope that a more detailed sociological portrait of women pursuing Boston marriages will be created in the future.

Society’s Reaction In addition to our polls, we conducted four interviews with Boston couples (Живи с подругой 2014a, 2014b, 2014c, 2015) and several others interviews were carried out by mass media (Егорченко 2015; Кленова 2015; CityDog. by 2015; Любавина 2017). In most of the interviews, Boston-married women reported that their relatives and friends generally look at their partnership in a positive or neutral way. However, the Boston marriage has not yet been widely recognized as a viable alternative lifestyle. Boston-married women stated that people tend to regard their union as a temporary one; they ask the women about their plans for a traditional marriage, assuming that it is more valuable than their actual partnership and that the Boston marriage will fall apart as soon as one of the women meets someone to marry. It is difficult for people to take this relationship seriously, as they usually believe that there are only two options: a lesbian relationship or that of roommates who have no close emotional ties to each other.

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Surprisingly, in our activism, we have almost never faced negative reac­ tions or aggression. We experience relative peace in comparison with many lesbian, typically lesbian separatist, groups that are forced to become private and defend themselves against violent (online) attacks. Since we do identify neither as a lesbian nor as a separatist project (though we have a friendly attitude towards lesbian separatists), we do not attract the same amount of male aggression as they do. We aim to keep our target group as broad as possible. For example, we do not require our participants to identify as feminists. Moreover, the project’s feminist effect is not necessarily apparent for external onlookers. In a way, it is always a double-edged sword: we try to keep our target audience broad while also making sure that the content stays in line with the project’s mission. It’s not as easy a task as it might seem, since the ideas underlying our project are constantly misconstrued and rendered innocuous by people who see us through the lens of their interest, for example as a mere rent-related platform.

Conclusion In the context of the recent assaults on women’s rights and sexual freedom in contemporary Russia, women’s cohabitation becomes not only a means of gaining financial and household independence but also a way to radically trans­ form everyday life that provides responses to the challenges faced by Russian women. The feedback from our subscribers and the interest of media shows that our Живи с подругой project is extremely relevant in this context. We see that tangible, material factors play a significant role in choosing a female friend as a cohabitation partner because the need for safety and financial issues are at the forefront and living with another woman provides the means to meet these needs. Moreover, these issues are especially urgent for young women who experience economical vulnerability, which often rails them into traditional marriage. Thus, Boston marriage can be an escape from patriarchal structures and, in the case of students, an opportunity for young women to live affordably and independently. Unfortunately, the majority of Russian society still does not recognize Boston marriage as a serious strategy for a woman’s life and it is viewed

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mostly as an exotic choice. However, we believe that things will change as more and more women adopt the philosophy of Boston marriage for their benefit. We have articulated the feminist foundation of our work from the very beginning of the project and put considerable effort into it, and we are happy to see that a number of other Russian feminist projects have included this issue in their agenda. Boston marriage and other types of relationships within the spectrum of women’s intimacy bridge the gap between two radical poles of the relationship spectrum – traditional straight marriage, dictated by mainstream society, and rigorous lesbian separatism, which exists on the margins and aims to create and maintain separate spaces only for women, both on a socio-political and a personal level. Our project aims to cover the full spectrum of relationships between the two poles without necessarily excluding them. It is aimed not only at women who identify as lesbians, but also at bisexual, asexual, heterosexual, etc., women, regardless of their sexual orientation. For this very reason, we don’t mark our project as an LBTQ project, but primarily as a feminist one. We open a bridge with a wide range of opportunities for every woman to choose from, depending on her indi­ vidual needs. We find it very important to speak openly and directly about the women’s intimacy spectrum and alternative life scenarios. We believe it may open opportunities for as many women as possible, regardless of their belonging to certain groups, whether traditional or radical. We strongly believe that changes that will follow, namely, more inde­ pendence for women, more financial, psychological, emotional, and house­ hold autonomy from men, more strong horizontal bonds between women, as friends and sisters, thus establishing a foundation for women’s liberation and ultimately for the liberation of all of humankind.

Bibliography Блинова, Даша. 2016. Что такое «бостонский брак»?, available online at: (accessed March 23, 2019). Бостонский брак. 2016. Бостонский брак | Boston marriage, available online at: (accessed March 23, 2019).

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Домик подруг. 2016. Домик подруг, available online at: (accessed March 23, 2019). Живи с подругой. 2014a. Интервью с Эночкой и Дикарём, available online at: (accessed March 23, 2019). Живи с подругой. 2014b. Интервью с Василисой и Алисой, available online at: (accessed March 23, 2019). Живи с подругой. 2014c. Интервью с Лилией Иванец и Татьяной Винокур, avail­ able online at: (accessed March 23, 2019). Живи с подругой. 2015. Интервью с Аней и Таней, available online at: (accessed March 23, 2019). Живи с подругой. 2017a. Кого вы хотите найти в нашем паблике?, available online at: (accessed March 23, 2019). Живи с подругой. 2017b. Основной причиной, по которой я хочу жить с подругой, является, available online at: (accessed March 23, 2019). Кленова, Татьяна. 2015. Бостонский брак: почему девушки решают жить вместе, available online at: (accessed March 23, 2019). Егорченко, Дарья. 2015. Новая городская семья: однополое сожительство без секса available online at: (accessed March 23, 2019). Любавина, Елизавета. 2017. Бостонский брак: Почему женщины решают жить вместе, available online at: (accessed March 23, 2019). Мищишина, Кристина. 2017. Бостонский брак. Женская прихоть или отношения будущего?, available online at: (accessed March 23, 2019). BA. 2018. Социальные сети в России: Цифры и тренды, осень 2018, available online at: (accessed March 23, 2019). CityDog.by. 2015. ‘Вместе с Галей мы делим даже постель,’ Почему минчанки живут в бостонском браке, available online at: (accessed March 23, 2019). Fem Home. 2017. Жильё для женщин Fem Home, available online at: (accessed March 23, 2019). Faderman, Lillian. 1981. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: William Morrow & Co. Faderman, Lillian. 1993. ‘Nineteenth-century Boston marriage as a possible lesson for today,’ in: Rothblum, Esther D., and Brehony, Kathleen A. (eds.). Boston marriages:

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Romantic but asexual relationships among contemporary lesbians. Amherst: Uni­ versity of Massachusetts Press, pp. 29–42. Furneaux, Holly. 2010. ‘Emotional Intertexts: Female Romantic Friendship and the Anguish of Marriage,’ Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 14(2), pp. 25–37. James, Henry. 1886. The Bostonians. Reprint. New York: Modern Library, 2003. Kennedy, Pagan. 2001. ‘So… Are You Two Together?’ Ms. magazine, June 2001, trans. radlesbian, available online at radlesbian.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/так-что…вы-двое-вместе> (accessed March 23, 2019). Original article is available online at web.archive.org/web/20120114144934/https://msmagazine.com/june01/ marriage.html> (accessed March 23, 2019). Martin, Katherine C. 2017. ‘Is post-truth even a thing? An OED update,’ available online at: (accessed March 17, 2019). Mavor, Elizabeth. 1973. The Ladies of Llangollen: A Study in Romantic Friendship. Reprint. Ludlow: Moonrise Press, 2011. Raymond, Janice G. 2002. A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press. Rich, Adrienne C. 2003. ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1980),’ Journal of Women’s History 15(3), pp. 11–48. Rothblum, Esther D., and Brehony, Kathleen A. 1993. Boston Marriages: Romantic but Asexual Relationships Among Contemporary Lesbians. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. 1975. ‘The female world of love and ritual,’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1(1), pp. 1–29. Theophano, Teresa. 2004. Boston Marriages, available online at: (accessed March 17, 2019).

the queer-feminist affinity art group ‘unwanted organisation’ 1

13 Queer Kinship or Queering Kinship: Starting Points, Methodological Speculations, Overcoming, Searching for Art Practices and Language – a Lecture-performance

Epigraph Nr. 1 polina When earthworms dug through, air appeared in the earth masha the modern world provides us with a lot of opportunities the modern world swiftly reduces our opportunities the modern world is in perpetual reconfiguration: providing opportunities for some, dispossessing others. the ‘moribund’ capitalism mutates into a technogenic neoliberalism the monogamous family the nuclearity are still persistently here but… kostya You met someone not quite human polina a world of another non-human 1 Masha Godovannaya, Dasha Vorujubivaeva, Kostya Shavlovsky, Polina Zaslavskaya. In short – qfaag ‘UO’.

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masha The search for new forms of cohabitation, solidarities, connections gave the hope that melancholy would be overcome, that other worlds with other forms of life were possible. That the human / the subject / the self would be freer. anxiety fatigue intimacy tornness dasha This is a complex form of subjectivity that one needs to befriend, to accept. An underundressed, empathically sensual, semi-constructed wimp. On the other hand, there is the guilt, the feeling of changed relationships among the people who have stayed in that other system. Every communication is checking and double-checking whether the intentions are true. kostya We made love for 16 hours I can tell no story CUT Epigraph Nr. 2 …let fungi be worthy of consideration as the most interesting bodies of the plant kingdom, from them you shall behold benefit and much enjoyment…

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The Play scrappiness as reconfiguration Cast of characters Subject 1 ‘drifting’ Subject 2 ‘at a rupture’ Subject 3 ‘paralysis of will’ Subject 4 ‘zap zap’ Subject 5 ‘in the borderzone’ The Rainbow Mushroomer Part 1 subject 5 (introduction) In the foreground: bodies defying clear gender assignment. They are caught by the camera in an ecstatic performative act, a gesture. One body is spread-eagled nonchalantly on something throne-like. The others are grouped around it. As though they were servants. But this is staged obedience, performative submission. They are looking over the camera. Their costumes that leave them half-naked, their makeup, the performativity of their postures are challenging some­ one or something beyond the frame. They look with curiosity, coquettish playfulness, with an intensity of challenge. In the background, red curtains embroidered with gold conceal the backstage. CUT subject 1 (scowling) The topic of our contribution is very urgent and stirs up a lot of interest for many. This is why doing something in one sweep, in half an hour or in a night is hard and dangerous, as we need to think and talk through everything. You have been keeping silent and are out of touch.

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this project demands every one no there is no time right opinion on kinship work relationships queer queer kinship queer work queer relationships queer queer

subject 2 (joining in)

No one to replace with your own unique experience. Working by touch, like blind moles, to make sense of one’s own and the other’s the creative and the therapeutical interaction and language in the past and the present from several points and at a distance Like a machine’s work As reality perceives us or as it rejects us On the other hand, I don’t want to force the circumstances I’m not ready to sink, everything has changed but it’ll be interesting together maybe. we talked a lot about all kinds of things.

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the rainbow mushroomer (appears from nowhere) The world of fungi is rich and diverse. Experts count up to 100,000 fungi species on our planet. This number includes fungi that develop as mould on walls, on stale bread, cheese, fungi that attack plants and cause diseases in humans. Out of 10,000 types of mushrooms and related fungi with large fruit bodies (macromycetes) that grow on the planet Earth, around 2,000 mushrooms occur in our habitat. This number includes edible and poisonous mushrooms, the destroyers of trees and the forest floor, sources of biologically active and healing elements, mycorrhyza builders, and wood parasites. But only around 60 end up on our table. This is because we know too little about some mushrooms, others are considered ‘toadstools,’ and still others demand special processing and stay in the forest for this reason. Part 2 subject 4 (begins) The performance’s idea is that every group member has their own stories about attempting to break free from gender, family, and other boundaries, stories that are documented in personal letters. If we select letters written by us as well as to us and compose a scenario out of them, this will be a metatext on how it all really happens. This path is not only thorny, it looks eerily similar to a dead end (or a system of dead ends). subject 3 ( follows enthusiastically) WE are offered an ISRAEL of = monogamous, heteronormative, patriarchal = relationships but we CHOOSE THE HELL of polygamy, polyamory, homosexuality, queerness, etc. a hell of hope and struggle HELL AS FREEDOM or Love’s Sheer Challenges Our evidence collides with the affirmative, representative speech of the theoretician host (queer kinship as a liberatory notion), thus picking at the

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scabbed crust of the festering wound of collective existence and action. ‘The impossibility of existence is law’ ©, the impossibility to co-exist is our col­ lective experience and our shared and personal trauma that we live in a way that is different from the power of defense (suggested by Euroleftists and feminists, for instance), so the only thing that remains is affirming/speaking our experience (power, not defense). ‘We’ need ‘us,’ although there is no ‘us,’ there is only you and I and the never-ending borders between us, where we convulsively search for or desperately create breaches, ruptures, rips, tunnels. subject 4 The story with letters. An epistolary story. Is there a story here and whose is it really? Yours, mine, his, hers. Ours? Questioning letters as a relationship residue in the twenty-first century. You’re sitting in front of your laptop in Siverskaya, in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, in Vienna, imagining the others. But is there anyone else in this story besides yourself ? Who will follow your tracks, who will breathe on them with their wet nose? How are you breathing while you gather the words in the night? A voice out of the loudspeaker (kostya) A flock of penguins walks towards the waterfront in one direction. Suddenly, one of them strays off and runs in another direction. It will run until it is completely exhausted, deep into the continent, into the everfrost. Lone penguins are seen hundreds of kilometers from their habitat. Nobody must touch them or try to stop them, because even if you take the disoriented penguin back to where it was, it will still take the same route again. The only thing you can do is let it walk.

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subject 4 (goes on) Can correspondence replace writing? The inevitably precise choice of words (how can we make them dance, trans­ form, stop being themselves) forms a dot line of relationships that shows (and sometimes conceals) reality. Queering words But what is reality if not a trace? Queering traces what remains when nothing remains? subject 2 (enters the dialogue) They’ve turned my lights off – I’m going into the woods. subject 4 Gather some penny buns for me! And some red-capped scaber stalks! subject 2 Well, it got dark while I was walking. subject 1 thanks for your letters and ideas there’s much to think about CUT Part 3 the rainbow mushroomer People have been fascinated and confused by how mushrooms could appear suddenly, as if out of nowhere. This was associated with the effects of dew, lightning strokes, with the fumes of decaying organic matter, simply considered nature’s play or whim, etc.

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subject 1, subject 2, subject 3, subject 4 and subject 5 (simultaneously but with different voices, tones, and accents) modern forms of kinship moving beyond nuclearity monogamy heterosexuality homonormativity challenging again for the normative, conservatively tolerant society, the foundation is a triad the cell: two adults and a child (possibly children) the firstborn’s parents are 20 to 30 years old all family members are straight, middle class, earning well, well-behaved, nice-mannered, with no chronic illnesses (especially no psychiatric devia­ tions), happy, lucky, successful, and obviously white most regimes’ foundation is heterosexual monogamy all else is deviance the state needs bodies reproducing ‘whiteness’ and all that comes with it all else is deviance the states need bodies that comply with the law and the call of blood blood and law are fundamental to the state all else is deviance (the voices come into unison and stop abruptly)

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Part 4 subject 3 (alone, with an echoing voice) Reflection on queer kinship is, for each of us, an attempt to resignify real­ ity, searching for and developing a new language. We have been drawn into a real fight. Collectivity, practices of solidarity, collaborative work, friend­ ship: all these words come from an old vocabulary, they have grown into the language of violence and become part of it. New relationships can only be defined by a new language, but the search for it can sometimes prove a failure of these relationships, of this reality of friendship and solidarity we’d started from, following our path of creative efforts, theoretical explorations, existential fermentation, and collective bodily practices. Our collective experience was suffused with a wish to become kin, to step into the unexplored ground of the kind of kinship that accepts our differ­ ences without asking for ‘legal grounds.’ Crossing our own social and gender boundaries, moving to a new territory and claiming it, we inevitably bring us in and with us, our luggage concealing family traumas, relationships, normativities, metamorphoses of sexuality and of the ‘old world’ social and political ideas. Out of the layers of this personal and collective experience, a conflict and rhetoric of estrangement bursts. Unscheduled, performativity has infiltrated the work correspondence, not only blurring the boundaries between life and art, but also drawing new ones: between the collective’s members. How can we break the logic of this conflict and master it in a commu­ nity of fluid, unestablished identities, a community that consciously eludes (self )description? Is the ‘Other’ in the community performative as ‘One’s close one’? the rainbow mushroomer (appears out of nowhere) What is the structure of mushrooms? Which parts is it made up of ? The answer should be quite simple and clear, or so it seems: a mushroom has a stipe and a

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cap. But as it happens, this is not all. Some mushrooms have gills under their caps, others tubes, still others teeth. The stipe can have a ruffle-like annulus on it, and it can end with a volva. subject 3 What is the mushrooms’ aspiration? subject 1 (invocatorily) an attempt to create a political project an attempt to undermine the system once more an attempt to reinvent oneself by bending the line ‘the queer is to destabilize the norm’? to turn identity, gender, sexuality, family, community, society your own whiteness into one’s moving targets. to challenge what stays off the frame to challenge with curiosity, roguish playfulness, with intensity to challenge for oneself with others with children in the family without a family in the community without a community to escape to mutate to disguise oneself and to search out possibilities to speak about it to (re)invent language and voice

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the rainbow mushroomer The mycelium penetrates the nutrient ground. It consists of a dense entanglement of branching, thin threads called hyphae. It exercises all the organism’s life functions: feeding, growing, breeding. subject 3 Queer as a refuge Refuge-and-possibility Letters dancing on paper Not pixels taking their form, marching from left to right. Leaving no traces. The qfaag ‘UO’ was and remains the only place where I don’t feel the pres­ sure of my ‘gendered sociality.’ a refuge that is everywhere and nowhere. a refuge without borders. Feed me!

furby

CUT A long silence Out of black Part 5 subject 5 (with regret) The qfaag ‘UO’ was established through people being close to one another: frequent meetings, discussions that were important for me and the possi­ bility to talk and share the personal, which somehow always turned out to be interesting to these people. I wasn’t looking for emotional support or understanding, this was no hobby club. This was an area of interests. The other’s, the neighbor’s curiosity and their responding comments could lead

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to the realization that I’m not articulate enough or that the other’s experi­ ence/thoughts delineates some zone of mine. This is how I would like to start talking about our qfaag. But it was not all like this. (the voices of other lives resound from the loudspeakers) the torn person (kostya) the box smelled like dog piss the celluloid mass with bits of people within it the beauty with a crawling mouth and a holed man on the oars the rest in bars on the streets on the avenues sucking at the living food my place from right to left at the sixth minute B.C. in the upper row right here (shows) zap-zap

the scissors (masha)

the little snails (polina) to change your life to change your movements to change your pets to change situations to change your washing machine to change clothes to change jobs to change parents to change habits to change your name the torn person (kostya) this was a celebration of the ‘burgeoning of the flesh’ like a harvest festival

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or Constitution Day in the Transgender Jesus club at the entrance stood colorless machines they were selecting shadows at the shadow detection arch i saw that there was a thread or some kind of bug running between myself and my shadow breast cancer (dasha) there are two kinds of violence violence out of fear and violence out of fearlessness if power is situated on both sides of fear then freedom is the interval somewhere inside fear itself like a ray of light falling between the breasts of Agatha the adulteress the torn person (kostya) freedom is glue the little snails (polina) to glue girls to glue boys to glue transsexuals to glue animals to glue paper to glue stars to glue earth to glue sun to glue a torn person to glue pussy to glue dick to glue mouth lisa-maria (masha) daddy are you going away to cut out a little person? the sewn person (kostya) a universal religion is hormone therapy

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our christianity a new buddhism a new islam a pronoun born in a throat with no Adam’s apple breast cancer (dasha) when they cut off her balls he cried with excitement the little snails (polina) we’ve known it for a long time we’ve blown it for a long time we’ve loved it for a long time we’ve laughed it for a long time zap-zap

the scissors (masha)

the torn person (kostya) and then i was bitten by the scissors of power the sewn person (kostya)

the doubt before the surgery this is what love is CUT Pause. A long silence Out of black

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subject 2 (hoping for a conversation) You are writing through a situation of unfulfilled expectations. But for me, the event is over as soon as memories appear. The collapse that has happened within the group is rather a manifestation of processes that are going on in everyone’s individual lives. The powerlessness and the lack of ease only testifies to an irrepressible overcoming, not immaturity or thoughtlessness. Apparently, one can’t hide within the group. One can refrain from taking part, but it’s impossible to use it for anything personal. It’s like with a rela­ tionship, when people know they’re hiding from one relationship in another. Sometimes, one person hides in it while for the other, it’s no cover-up but the real thing. And then there are misunderstandings, communication failures, ‘thwarted’ expectations… the rainbow mushroomer (interrupting, appearing out of nowhere) Can we grow mushrooms? People started looking for an answer to this question a long time ago. This is understandable. It would be wonderful to grow mushrooms in backyards, like cabbages or turnips. Or in the forest, that wouldn’t be bad either. subject 2 (goes on, reassured) Yes, this is probably about disunity, about a complex form of subjectivity that we should befriend, accept. But at the same time, this is accompanied by the anxiety that nothing changes, that the old forms are not overcome, there is a tendency to see reiterations and regress everywhere. And it remains unclear whether this is actually true or if the crooked optics are produced by fragmentation. subject 1 (changing the tone for a more humane one for the first time) Do you think of it as something negative? Or maybe as something that constitutes you as a subject? Maybe as something that, being a part of you, also makes you?

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Or is it like with a text – a desire to break it down to phrases and ask questions but this will be talking to a shadow, a ghost of a person who left their – written – trace which we’re dealing with right now we’ll leave a trace, too maybe a wave will erase it: our presence won’t be fixed for more than just a moment – the moment of our bare feet walking on the sand and the flowing wave that will first change the imprint and then level it completely to the surface we were we did something there’s nothing left from us accept it the rainbow mushroomer (conspiratorially, whispering sleekly) The results were varied and inconsistent: sometimes the mushrooms grew and other times they did not. subject 2 (quietly but insistently) I’m not saying something has failed or, even less, that we shouldn’t try, I’m just suggesting that we begin with something. I hope we’ll go on with our discussion on how to talk, about what and with what means. Hugs, love to all, yours, P.

the failure and the start of a conversation

subject 3 (summarizing)

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the rainbow mushroomer (believes the last word must be theirs) In the forest, the mushrooms started to grow in a circle in the middle of which there were not only no mushrooms but also no grass. People thought that witches would gather at night in this circle to dance and then mount their personal vehicles in the shape of mortars with brooms and fly all over the world to do their sorcery. CUT THE END Flash Frame Black Out of black…

14 The Fucking Solidarity Manifesto

The following piece was produced as a result of various discussions among an activist-academic-artistic group of people who came together in 2016 to discuss the possibility of organizing a ‘Queering Paradigms’ conference in Vienna with a focus on solidarity and the post-Soviet space. Some of the following was already presented at the ‘Fucking Solidarity’ conference in September 2017 at the University of Vienna as an activist intervention in the academic format of a conference and as framing of this international event, which was intended to be a space for international exchange and solidarity. Some of it emerged in later discussions and the collective work on the conference, various other projects as well as the present anthology. The editors of the latter made a collective decision to publish this piece, calling it sometimes tentatively a working ‘manifesto,’ to reflect the exten­ sive and challenging work-in-progress character of whatever it is that lies at the heart of transnational solidarity and community organizing across the East/West divide.

352

The Fucking Solidarity Manifesto

Why and how we fuck (with) solidarity? And what’s so queer-feminist about it? What is queer solidarity? What kind of solidarity is needed and is useful to our friends and comrades within the post-Soviet and/or postcolonial context? And how does what we, the white privileged western academics and activists as well as the migrants and refugees coming from post-Soviet and other spheres do now and did in the past, to meet these needs? Fucking Solidarity wants to get some answers to these open questions, without assuming or attempting to find any final or undisputable answers. We acknowledge and reflect on the critique of women of color, who have long uncovered the feminist proclamation of international sister­ hood and solidarity as a lie. bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Mikki Kendall, the Combahee River Collective have worked extensively on the tricky question of solidarity and white supremacy. Many women of the global South such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003) or Breny Mendoza (2002) have written about the coloniality of global solidarity. Queer solidarity is equally guilty of white colonial hegemony, as the activist and performance group Dark Matter analyzed in their blog article ‘White Supremacy in (Queer) Palestine Solidarity Work.’ Fucking Solidarity wants to open a dialogue that faces the hegemonies of trans-national solidarity while holding on to its promises. This endeavor is consciously hopeful as it is (self-)critical and (self )reflexive. We believe in solidarity as a basis for support in the fight against oppression. We acknowledge the erotics of solidarity, the kick the act of solidarity can produce. Solidarity can be sexy. We want to fuck with solidarity, maybe fuck in solidarity, or simply fuck solidarity. However, we also acknowledge that much solidarity within the political left has established a colonial power dynamic – also full of erotic, sexual desires and power – where white North/Western privilege headed out to ‘save’ women (Abu-Lughod 2013) and queers in the global South and East. Solidarity must never be the cover for colonial oppression, white superiority or (sexual) exploitation. Solidarity cannot end where white privilege stops benefitting from offering solidarity. To end the colonial white power dynamics, the colonizer must disappear, as the French

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philosopher of Tunisian-Jewish origin, Albert Memmi pointed out already in 1974. To put it differently, if our solidarity would really work, white North/Western privilege would end and North/Western solidarity towards the global South and East would no longer be needed. Many of us, then, would have to look for a different job (no development agencies needed, no international NGOs needed, no academic research of homophobia in the global East/South needed anymore, ….) or a differ­ ent passion.

Notes on Contributors

masha beketova, M.A., studied Gender Studies/Slavonic Studies and contemporary Russian literature in Berlin and Moscow. Masha is currently working on a Ph.D. thesis in Slavonic Cultural Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Masha’s research focuses on queer migration and asylum, migrant literature, queer readings of modern Ukrainian and Russian litera­ ture, and intersectionality. aleksander berezkin is currently pursuing an M.S. degree in Nonprofits Management at The New School in New York. He holds an M.A. in Sociology of Internet Communications from the Far Eastern State University and a B.A. in Sociology from the Kemerovo State University. His research fields are Intersex Studies, Narrative Storytelling and Fairytale Therapy, Bioethics, and Human Rights. He is a volunteer/consultant at the UN Program ‘Free and Equal,’ a community development consultant at the community organization ‘Russian Speaking Women in Immigration’ () in Stamford, and the founder of the ‘Association of Russian Speaking Intersex People’ () in Moscow and Astana. joanna chojnicka holds a Ph.D. in Latvian linguistics and an M.A. in Latvian philology, both from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty 10: Linguistics and Literary Studies of the University of Bremen. She also acts as the Managing Director of the Institute for Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies. Previously, she was a fellow at the Herder Institute in Marburg and a Marie-Curie Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz. Her research interests include language, gender and sexuality, the language of argumentation, manipulation and resistance, and ecolinguistics. nadiya chushak holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology (University of Melbourne) and an M.A. in Cultural Studies (Ivan Franko National University, Lviv). Lives and works in Kyiv.

356

Notes on Contributors

ekaterina davydova has been engaging in local and online feminist activism since 2014. She is currently a member of the Novosibirsk Feminist Group and the Russian feminist association ONA. Ekaterina is the cofounder and administrator of the ‘Live With Your Female Friend’ project, founder and administrator of ‘Travel With Your Female Friend’ project, and co-host of the feminist podcast ‘The Third Chair.’ masha godovannaya is a visual artist, queer-feminist researcher, curator, and educator. She holds an M.F.A. degree in Film/Video from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, New York and an M.A. in Sociology from the European University in Saint Petersburg, Russia. She is currently enrolled in the Ph.D.-in-practice program at the Institute of Fine Arts, Art Theory, and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Approaching art/academic production as a collective action, her artistic and scholarly practices are closely connected to artistic research and draw on intersections of moving image theory, social science, queer theory, decolonial methodologies, and contemporary art. At the end of 2015, together with a group of artists, activists, and social researchers from Saint Petersburg, she co-founded the queer-feminist affinity art group ‘Unwanted Organisation’ (). pauliina lukinmaa holds an M.S.S. degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Tampere. She also studied at the European University in Saint Petersburg, Russia. She is currently a Ph.D. student at the doctoral program in Social and Cultural Encounters and associated with the VERA Centre for Russian and Border Studies at the University of Eastern Finland. Her research interests are Gender Studies, anthropology of locations and borders, as well as postsocialist and civil society studies. Aside from her research interests, she takes part in LGBTIQ+ activities in Saint Petersburg as well as in Helsinki, where she is currently also a member of a committee of international affairs at the organization ‘Seta – LGBTI Rights in Finland.’ nick mayhew holds a Ph.D. in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge and is currently a post-doctoral Mellon fellow and a lecturer in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. His work explores questions of gender and sexuality in Kyivan Rus, Muscovy, and Russia, with

Notes on Contributors

357

an emphasis on queerness. His current book project explores queer texts and practices in early modern Russia. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses covering the cultural, literary, and queer history of Russia from the medieval period to the present day. masha neufeld holds a diploma degree in Psychology and is currently working on her Ph.D. in the interdisciplinary field of Global Health Studies at the Dresden University of Technology and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. As an activist, she is interested in international queer community-building, queer migration and belonging as well as queer/ feminist theory, activism, and art from the post-Soviet space, especially in today’s Russia. She is involved in various international collectives and projects dealing with post-Soviet subjectivity, migration, and the limits of queer solidarity. lesia pagulich is a feminist and queer activist and independent researcher. She holds Master’s Degrees in Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies and in International Economics, and is currently a Ph.D. student at the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Ohio State University. She worked at the ‘Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’ and the ‘All-Ukrainian Network of People Living with HIV/ AIDS.’ In 2011–2014, she was a participant of the International Higher Education Support Program ‘Gender, Sexuality, and Power.’ Her research interests lie in the fields of post-Soviet, postsocialist, critical race, queer, and decolonial studies. veda popovici works as a political artist, engaged theorist, and local activ­ ist. Her interests permeate these fields of action, focusing on decolonial and feminist practices and the material possibilities of creating the com­ mons. Her political work focuses on housing struggles and communitarian organizing, she is a part of the Macaz cooperative, the Common Front for Housing Rights, and the Gazette of Political Art. Since finishing her Ph.D. on nationalism in Romanian art in the 1980s, she has taught classes on deco­ lonial thought, nationalism, and feminist theory at the National University of Arts in Bucharest and at the University of California Santa Cruz. She is based in Bucharest.

358

Notes on Contributors

yulia serdyukova is a documentary film producer and queer-feminist activist based in Kyiv. saltanat shoshanova is currently pursuing her master’s degree in Art History at the Free University Berlin. Her research interests include art in connection to queer and feminist theory, queer migration, decoloniality, and the post-Soviet space. She is an activist and coorganized several queer feminist conferences in Vienna and Berlin. elena smirnova is currently conducting Ph.D. research in History at the Paris Diderot University as a member of the ICT (Identities, Cultures, Territories) research laboratory. Her research fields are Soviet History, Cultural Transfers, Translation Studies, and Contemporary Russian and French Philosophy. In addition to her research projects, She is an author, translator, and interpreter from French to Russian. She was engaged in soli­ darity work with migrants from Eastern Europe with the NGOs ‘Urgence Tchétchénie/Urgence Homophobie’ and ARDHIS, and coordinated the AIDES and ARDHIS report on discrimination of LGBTI and HIVpositive migrants in this regard (). vanya mark solovey studied linguistics at the Russian State University for Humanities and was a feminist and lesbian activist in Moscow for several years before he started doing research on activism as well. He is currently a doctoral student at the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Besides feminist movements, his research interests also include intersectional, post- and decolonial approaches, the production of gender, queer, and trans*gender. iryna tantsiura holds an M.A. in Philosophy from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and is a queer-feminist activist. Lives in Kyiv. raili uibo is a Ph.D. student in Gender Studies at Södertörn University. She holds an M.A. in Gender Studies from Lund University and a B.A. in Sociology from Tallinn University. Her Ph.D. project is part of an inter­ national research project ‘Queer(y)ing Kinship in the Baltic Region’ and it

Notes on Contributors

359

explores how LGBTIQ+ people in Estonia negotiate close relationships, care, and intimacy. Her research interests are queer and feminist theory and activism, Postsocialist and Decolonial Studies. unwanted organisation () is a queer-feminist affinity art group founded at the end of 2015 by a group of artists, activists, and social researchers from Saint Petersburg in response to the political situation developing in Russia. The groups’ main goal is to promote a queer-feminist agenda and support Russian artists and activists who share the group’s views and approaches through developing, organizing, and leading art projects and educational programs. Regardless of Russian conservative internal politics and the dismantling of social solidarity, qfaag UO would like to demonstrate the possibility for self-organization, self-sustainability, and the horizontal organization of cultural and artistic productions. The group’s members are in search of artistic language, methods, and forms, critically conjuring the past, the present, and possible futures. Their main principles as a group are trust, respect, non-discriminatory and inclusive approaches, and horizontal, decentralized organization. They work on the edge of for­ mats (lectures-performances, playwriting and untheatre, video), explor­ ing their scope and their eligibility. Members and participants in different years: Masha Godovannaya (co-founder), Polina Zaslavskaya (co-founder), Nat(asha) Schastnev(a) (co-founder), Evgeniy Shtorn (co-founder), Daria Vorujubivaeva, Konstantin Shavlovsky, Olia Shamina, Marusya Baturina, Nodari Fedorov, and more. katharina wiedlack holds a Ph.D. in English and American Studies, an M.A. in German Literature and Gender Studies, and is currently FWF post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Vienna. Her research fields are queer and feminist theory, Popular Culture, Postsocialist, Decolonial and Disability Studies. She has taught Gender, Disability, American Cultural, and German Studies at the University of Vienna, Saint Petersburg State University, and Moscow State University, among others. In addition to her research and teaching, she has worked as a queer-feminist community organizer in Vienna, Oakland, and other cities.

360

Notes on Contributors

alexandra yaseneva is a local and online feminist community organizer from Novosibirsk. She is currently a member of the ‘Novosibirsk Feminist Group’ and the Russian feminist association ‘ONA.’ She is the co-founder and administrator of the ‘Live With Your Female Friend’ project, author of the blog Beyond gender apology, and the co-host of the feminist podcast The Third Chair.

Index

academia 11, 34, 155, 156, 158, 165, 268, 269 ‘Western’ 158, 265 activism 8, 22, 28, 38, 52, 57, 72, 100, 102, 112, 144, 167, 177, 180–181, 186, 189, 204, 245, 264–265, 269, 272–277, 279–281, 284–285, 302, 304, 329, 354, 355, 356, 357 solidarity 4, 5, 43, 45 transnational 22, 265, 271–273, 284 affective dimensions 6 agency 11, 25, 28, 65, 116, 139, 170, 171, 176, 207, 221, 223 agency-deprived 68 androcentrism 162, 169 anti-capitalism 55, 66 see also capitalism anti-gay propaganda laws 3, 22, 26, 36, 80, 110, 269 gay propaganda law 81, 100, 109, 276 law against homosexuality 177 LGBT+ propaganda law 106 anti-racist agenda 305, 307 anti-racist movements 30 anti-racist perspectives 6, 32, 38 anti-racist work 31, 32 anti-Russian 126 anti-Western 3 Armenia 3, 35, 39 Asia 41 assimilation 129, 13 asylum 3, 13, 38, 232–238, 241–255, 273, 275, 278, 281, 291–293, 295, 297–311, 353 Austria 22, 28, 35, 38 backwardness 26, 28, 54, 65, 126, 141, 178 behavior 80

Belarus 3, 35 belonging 6, 10, 44, 45, 71, 101, 103, 107, 119, 136, 176, 190, 195, 283, 285, 296, 298, 304, 330, 355 sense of/feeling of, 13, 39, 266, 270–271, 273, 279, 281, 282–285 Bible, the 77, 83 binary 78, 80, 93, 134, 144, 145, 219, 220, 270, 301, 371 binary oppositions 11, see also non-binary bisexuals 2, 98, 111, 250, 251, 252, 306, 330 Brazil 104, 207, 219, 224 Butler, Judith 266, 267, 281 capitalism 27, 31, 54, 56, 63, 64, 66, 73, 141, 333 pink 106 see also anti-capitalism; consumerism; neoliberalism categories 4, 9, 30, 32, 51, 52, 63, 72, 79, 131, 138, 146, 170, 203, 215, 236, 239, 244, 270, 285, 295, 327 Central Asia 41, 240, 242 Central Europe 1, 34, 65, 128, 142, 160, 201 Chechnya 3, 42, 231, 233, 236, 238–245, 247, 249, 250, 252–255 cis-gender 41, 107, 116, 119, 232, 244, 245, 255, 301, 305 citizen(ship) 2, 10, 42, 59, 62, 63, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 102, 114, 115, 125, 127 , 128, 131, 132, 134–136, 138, 140–146, 178, 193, 203, 231, 274, 282, 296, 298, 311 -based 53, 67 -oriented 68

362 Index civilization 10, 101, 104, 108, 135, 140, 241 class, classism 2, 24, 35, 57, 61, 100, 128, 138, 139, 145, 156, 166, 167, 266, 282, 285, 295, 302, 320, 325, 340 close reading 92, 161, 208, 220 cohabitation 319, 325, 328, 329, 334 female/women’s 14, 319, 320, 323, 324, 327, 329 Cold War 1–3, 18, 48, 147, 164, 287 post-Cold War 64, 73, 136 colonialism 116, 137 colonial 38, 39, 41, 55, 66, 131, 163, 164, 224, 293 neocolonial (pedagogy) 65, 66 postcolonial 5, 201, 205 coloniality 64, 72, 163, 164, 352 internalized 162, 163 colonization 137, 201, 202 discursive 12, 205, 207, 215, 222, 224 coming out 26, 68, 143, 144, 158, 301, 307 community 14, 15, 33, 38, 56, 57, 111, 115, 117, 118, 144, 159, 162, 176, 180, 183–185, 193–195, 223, 234, 250, 251, 266–268, 271, 277–279, 292, 296, 301, 309, 327, 341, 342, 351, 353, 367, 358 community-building 11, 45, 181, 246, 274, 284, 355 see also LGBT, community; LGBT+, community; LGBTIQ+, com­ munity; queer, community; trans, community compassion 143, 203, 239, 254, 255 conservativeness conservative agenda 58, 102 conservative forces 127, 179 conservative groups 61, 81 conservative ideology 99 conservative lawmakers 80, 82 conservative politics 58, 102 conservatives 160

conservative society 11, 99, 119 neo-conservative organizations 51, 58, 60, 63 consumption 31, 107 criminalization 3, 53, 57, 71, 72, 142, 143, 177–179, 241 decriminalization 53, 67, 68, 70, 71, 243 critical race studies 30, 44, 355 politics 141 queer of color critics 5 culture 33, 42, 45, 64, 67, 70, 71, 73, 102, 108, 175, 180, 181, 183, 185, 190, 191, 192, 195, 203, 205, 222, 272, 278, 285, 320, 321, 325, 357 see also LGBTQ, culture; LGBTQ+, culture; queer, culture decolonial perspective 4, 25 decolonial field/positionality/project/ studies/scholars/thinkers/thought 22, 44, 63, 64, 66, 71, 73, 163, 232, 355, 356 deconstruction 4, 6, 7, 22, 40, 256 decriminalization see criminalization democracy 66, 100, 137, 138, 145 liberal 131, 136 diagnosis 113, 214, 216, 219, 222 diaspora 249, 285 see also queer, diaspora digital 97, 308 disability 24, 32, 44, 357 disease see illness displacement 100, 142, 267, 280, 281, 285, 286 diversity 52–57, 67, 73, 111, 157, 247, 296, 319 drag 99, 100, 105 DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) 12, 201 Durkheim, Émile 6

Index East, the 1, 4, 41, 52, 65, 108, 109, 160, 175, 176, 181, 352 East/West 6, 7, 9, 22, 26, 28, 29, 30, 38 see also global North, the Eastern Europe 33–36, 42, 51, 58, 61, 63–66, 71–73, 100–103, 107–110, 116, 119, 128, 140–142, 160, 201, 240, 270, 256 East/West divide, the x, 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 15, 25–27, 32, 34, 42, 351 education 58, 142, 154, 156, 183, 205, 249, 271, 301, 307, 357, 361 emancipation 137, 160 embodiment 55, 57, 125, 130, 133 empowerment 274, 293, 305, 307, 308, 312 English (language) 8, 60, 70, 83, 88, 132, 154, 165, 183, 208, 272, 274, 296–298, 320, 323, 326, 327 equality 60, 102, 106, 111, 131, 132, 137–140, 145, 186, 193, 326 see also inequality essentialism 38, 219, 294, 361 Estonia 11, 35, 104, 175–196, 357 Estonian (language) 8, 183, 190, 192–193 ethics 269, 291, 312 see also morality ethnicity 138, 141, 156, 193, 248, 266, 298, 325 see also people of color; race; whiteness Europe (Western) 10, 27, 42, 53, 55, 58, 77, 101, 105, 108–111, 116, 126, 135–141, 160, 176, 177, 182, 186, 195, 240–242, 255, 298, 304, 320 European (people) 72, 103, 119, 139, 140, 141, 144, 251, 281 European Court of Human Rights, the 27 European Union, the 178, 190, 235 see also global North, the; West, the everyday, the 22, 69 everyday life 4, 6, 28, 32, 44, 171, 189, 267, 329

363 excess 112 existence 2, 37, 67, 125, 130, 162, 176, 210, 297, 306, 326, 337 failures 6, 23, 24, 32, 45, 203, 347 family 14, 58, 60, 80–81, 92–94, 113, 141, 169, 184, 212–213, 235, 244, 248, 252–253, 273–282, 308, 322, 333–342 values 80, 319 see also values see also kinship fantasy 178, 191 fascism 60, 42 see also neo-Nazism; ultra-right feelings 7–9, 60, 117, 163, 213, 219, 239, 267, 276, 280, 284–286, 301 bad 44–45 unpleasant 44–45 femininity 12, 221, 224 see also gender, identity; masculinity feminism 11, 25, 55, 153–171, 274, 326 theory 29, 156, 355, 356, 357 framework 22, 26, 68, 69, 94, 98, 107, 125, 127–128, 134, 142–143, 145, 175, 187, 195, 201, 205, 219, 251, 255, 295 France 12, 119, 232–255 freedom 10, 100, 131–146, 203, 204, 218, 319, 321, 324, 329, 337, 345 friendship 320, 326 romantic 319–325 future 52, 56, 65, 69, 72, 73, 99, 100, 108, 110, 111, 126, 135, 143, 160, 161, 190, 191, 196, 210, 223, 239, 281–284, 303 gay 2, 3, 10, 12, 26, 27, 57, 67, 70–73, 77, 98, 99, 112, 113, 119, 126–129, 135, 136, 141, 143, 204, 231, 248–253, 281, 301–310 identity 181

364 Index men 80, 111, 179, 245, 296, 300 pride 188 ‘propaganda’ 81, 100–110, 276 мужеложство 9, 77–94 rights 42, 45, 145 see also LGBTIQ, rights women see lesbian see also homosexuality; LGBTIQ; queer Gaycation 10, 97–120 Gayropa 27 gaze 9, 45, 201, 218 imperial 10, 97, 103–108, 115–119 queer imperial 10, 97, 107, 108, 115, 118, 119 western 10, 35, 37, 65, 98, 110, 176 genealogy 71 gender 14, 24, 26, 35, 37, 53, 54, 58, 60, 78, 81, 86, 100, 113, 128, 131, 139, 145, 155, 160, 178, 232, 239, 245, 266, 270, 276, 295–297, 298, 301, 319, 321, 325, 335, 337, 341, 342 identity 10, 70, 98, 129, 132, 134–138, 201, 235, 242, 248–255, 271, 292, 300, 302, 310 non-binary 274–275 non-conformity 26, 80 non-normative 2, 39, 41, 299 norms 39, 88, 202 recognition law 12, 204 roles 12, 87 transition 206–225 see also cisgender, trans German (language) 8, 86, 276 Germany 13, 35, 171, 240, 271, 276, 280, 291–312 globalization 207, 224 global North, the 5, 41, 140, 206 global South, the 5, 15, 21, 207, 352 government 5, 15, 81, 113, 114, 182, 193, 219, 237, 243, 275, 281

hate 60 crimes 278 healing 214, 337 health 212–224, 239, 277, 301 hegemony 11, 27, 28, 40–43, 63, 65, 155, 158, 161–170, 295 heterosexuality 80, 92, 94, 222, 340 homogeneity 6 homonationalism 2, 10, 27, 35, 71, 102, 114, 125–145 homonormativity 10, 102, 113, 294, 340 homophobia 1–3, 10, 33, 35, 36, 77, 86, 101, 109, 110, 119, 241, 247, 255, 270 see also trans, transgender, -phobia homosexuality 3, 9, 25, 300, 337 in Chechnya 232–253 in Estonia 177 in Poland 203 rights see LGBTIQ, rights in Russia 77–94 see also gay; lesbian; LGBTIQ; queer; sodomy homo-tolerance 35 human rights 3, 26, 27, 53, 65–67, 100–114, 128, 135, 136, 142, 145, 178, 189, 236–243, 264–286 see also LGBTIQ, r\ights; LGBTIQ+, rights; transgender, rights identity 26, 37–39, 63, 70–73, 111, 119, 127–145, 180–188, 201–221, 232–283, 292–310, 342 ideology 11, 42, 53, 55, 60, 61, 67, 72, 102, 114, 119, 140, 171 socialist 203 illegality 9, 51, 69–72 illness 62, 92, 204, 239, 336 immigration 131, 236, 248 indigenous 5, 15, 59 see also colonialism

Index inequality 36, 40, 97, 119, 138, 157, 266, 267, 312 see also equality injustice 36, 37, 116 intersectionality 256, 266, 279, 295 intervention(s) 36, 57–60, 68, 70, 77, 136, 218, 243, 351 intimacy 30, 133, 321, 325–330, 334, 357 invisibility 244, 253, 255, 325 see also visibility Islam 42, 243, 346 justice 61, 62, 68, 138, 146, 244 see also injustice Kazakhstan 3, 35 kinship 6, 113, 141 queer kinship 14, 333–349 see also family knowledge production 22, 39, 44, 140, 291 artistic 8 collective 15 queer 14 Kyrgyzstan 3 labor 5–8, 15, 24, 25, 28–32, 41, 44–45, 52–54, 62, 68, 73, 118, 299, 325 language 8, 43, 168, 169, 203, 205, 209, 215, 222, 224, 232, 240, 246, 248, 251, 253, 275, 276, 278, 281–286, 293–397, 303, 305, 307, 312, 320 academic 8 law 9, 53, 61–63, 70–73, 82–86, 89–94, 178, 182, 184, 194, 243, 340 anti-gay propaganda 3, 22, 26, 36, 80, 81, 100, 109, 137, 177, 269, 276 foreign agent 3, 27 gender recognition 12 legality 9, 51, 63, 71, 73

365 lesbian 13, 98, 99, 107, 111, 112, 126, 127, 128, 141, 145, 162, 179, 181, 245, 274, 275, 276, 296, 301, 305, 321, 325–330 activism 204 identity 250, 308 women 244, 308 see also homosexuality lesbophobia 119, 325 LGBT 2, 53–73, 80, 82, 204, 231, 302, 305 activism 140 community 57, 135 rights 203 LGBT+ 97–120, 144, 160 activism 111, 160 community 97, 100, 106, 114–116 culture 107, 110, 112, 115, 116 rights 2, 99, 101, 102, 112, LGBTIQ+ 2–4, 9–13, 22–44, 51–71, 81, 125–146, 175–196, 241–255 activism 245, 264–285 community 26, 133, 176, 177, 180, 187, 193, 195, 231, 275, 299, 304, 307 culture 190 refugees 241–255, 291–312 rights 10, 183, 186, 195, 241–242, 254, 304 liberal democracy see democracy, liberal liberation 68, 72, 178, 179, 181, 244, 300 liveable life 190 Lorde, Audre 296 marginalization 69, 112, 138, 146, 156, 217, 222 marriage 58, 60, 88–94, 112, 113, 178, 191, 301 Boston 14, 319–330 masculinity 12, 208, 221, 224 materialism 6, 25, 41 media 3, 59, 61, 71, 81, 92, 97, 101, 103–105, 108, 115, 126, 130, 135, 154, 156, 165, 182, 188, 204, 209, 210, 219, 223,

366 Index 231–254, 265, 275, 281, 284, 298, 308, 319–329 analysis 292, discourses 12, 208, see also new media technologies, social media mental health 301 methodologies 7, 8, 64, 69 decolonial 354 migration 13, 235–255, 263–285, 291–312, 353, 355, 356 misogyny 2, 3, 162–164 modernity 2, 10, 26, 45, 94, 128, 139–145, 155, 195 monogamy 88, 339, 340 morality 78, 90, 94, 95 see also ethics nationalism 43, 105, 110, 114, 115, 125, 127, 128, 132, 134, 162–164, 177, 189, 192, 355 see also homonationalism neoliberalism 73, 128, 333 see also capitalism; consumerism neoliberal time 9, 51, 66 neo-Nazism 10 NGOs 3, 14, 22, 27, 51, 61, 111, 112, 153, 155, 232–255, 271, 291–315 non-binary 98, 274, 275 non-normativity 2, 41, 125, 128, 136, 141, 224, 299 normalcy 4 normalization 60, 62, 70, 72, 129, 138–146, 191, 251 normativity 80, 100, 105, 113–115, 132, 233, 251, 255, 322, 340, 341 see also heteronormativity; homonor­ mativity; non-normativity; norms norms 10, 12, 55, 88, 92–94, 134, 138, 162, 195, 202, 217–219, 223, 244, 267, 308, 321, 342 North, the see global North, the

North Caucasus region 12, 13, 321–255 nuclearity 14, 333, 339 oppression 3, 5, 26, 33–44, 100, 129, 138, 144, 156, 164, 264, 270, 286, 297 systemic 113, 119 organizations 3, 13, 27, 28, 51, 58, 61, 128, 136, 161, 170, 179, 185, 186, 195, 243, 246, 253, 264, 265, 272, 277, 284, 297, 304–310 see also community organizations; NGOs Orthodoxy (Christianity) 9, 77, 81, 86, 94 ‘Other’, the/‘Othered’ 30, 251, 263, 281 paternalism 107, 255 pathologization 215, 224 patriarchy 155, 160, 162 pedagogy 27, 65, leveraged 11–12, 101–102, 107, 175–187 pederasty 77–88 people of color 5, 139, 296, 297, 306 see also ethnicity; race; whiteness performance 14, 39, 40, 43, 209, 274, 283 performativity 335, 341 perspective 4, 5, 6, 9, 24, 25, 34, 36, 44, 56, 57, 62, 73, 78, 98, 129, 136, 141, 153, 155, 157, 164, 171, 201, 206, 207, 232, 239, 284, 292, 295 hegemonic 10 queer 4 photography 130 poetry 15, 154 Poland 12, 23, 201–224 Polish (language) 5, 8, 12, 160, 201–224 politics of respectability 9, 51, 70, 192 queer 9, 11, 51, 71, 127, 128–129, 138–146 positionalities 7, 138, 139, 146, 283 post-communist 54, 61

Index postsocialist 25, 28, 33, 37, 51, 53–54, 62–73, 128, 166, 177, 354–357 context 1–9, 126, 167 countries 202 space 21, 28, 33–45, 189 post-Soviet 9–12, 34, 98 prison 106, 243 imprisonment 178 privilege 24,35–37, 40–41, 107, 193, 245, 268, 279, 294, 297, 302 progress 30, 53–55, 63–66, 118, 128, 135, 136, 144, 160, 186, 195 progressiveness 128, 144 progressivist 64–66 protest 26–27, 43, 45, 61, 104, 109, 111, 114, 154 Puar, Jasbir 127 queer activism 33, 111, 160 community 26, 28, 33, 67, 99, 176, 183, 188 culture 67, 70 diaspora 30, 285 see also diaspora feminism see feminism, queer genderqueer 212 people 6, 23, 103, 107, 139, 240, 242, 244, 245, 251, 306 politics 9, 11, 51, 71, 127–129, 138, 139, 141, 146 sexuality 107 studies 7, 23, 37, 361 queering 22, 23, 34 kinship 333–349 sodomy 77–95 Queering Paradigms ix, 4, 5, 9, 34, 240, 351, 361–362 queer theory 21, 25, 34, 161, 192, 354, 361 race 24, 30, 44, 100, 128, 138–141, 145, 156, 232, 245, 266, 302, 355

367 see also ethnicity; people of color; whiteness racism 31, 43, 100, 116, 119, 142, 291, 294–297, 299, 304, 309, 311 radicalism 53 reading see close reading refugee, refugees 2, 12–14, 231–232, 235, 245–248, 252, 255, 270, 275–276, 281, 291–315 regulation, regulatory force 57, 82, 178, 204 religion 247, 274, 302, 345 religious 43, 58, 63, 136, 140, 243, 248, 251, 271, 273, 361 reproduction 31–32, 78, 130, 169, 191, 146, 255 reproductive fantasy 191 labor 25, 31, 44 organs 78, 218 research academic 34, 157, 268, 352 activist 14 community-engaged 266, 268, 270 critical 4 resilience 14, 42, 101, 319 resistance 14, 28, 42, 58, 63, 64, 71, 91, 111, 125, 163, 188–189, 190, 195, 292, 353 rights see human rights; lesbian, rights; LGBTIQ, rights; reproduction, rights; trans, transgender, rights Romania 51, 53, 55, 59–60, 66, 69, 72 Russia 3, 9, 11, 13, 14, 22, 26–28, 33–36, 40–41, 77–95, 108–110, 126, 135, 153–171, 231–232, 234, 236–237, 245–246, 264–265, 267–271, 273–285, 300, 319, 322–323, 325, 329, 354, 355 Russian (language) x, 8, 132, 165, 168, 251, 293, 304, 320, 322, 326–327, 356 Russian-speaking 13–14, 28, 165, 167–169, 192–193, 195, 245–246, 263,

368 Index 265–266, 269, 271–273, 277, 279, 281, 284–286, 291–312, 319, 323, 353 same-sex 84, 86, 177 desire 2, 38–39, 53 marriage 191 relations 80, 90 relationships 321 union 204 see also gay; homosexuality; intra-gen­ der; lesbian; LGBTIQ; queer sex (biology) 78, 82, 202–203, 212, 219 sex/gender 219 change 219 sex (sexual activities) anal 77 cross-cultural 30 gay 77 homosexual 9, 81, 84–87 sex education see education (sex) sexism 100, 158, 162–164, 295, 309, 311 see also heterosexism sexuality 24, 30, 32, 35, 37, 39, 54, 81, 86, 90, 94, 107, 128, 131–132, 134, 138, 141, 143–145, 160, 176, 178, 203, 206–208, 239, 266, 276, 295, 307, 341–342 sexual orientation 129, 139, 235, 241, 242, 244, 247–250, 252, 255, 271, 278, 283, 292, 297–298, 300, 302, 310, 330 sexual relations 9, 77–95, 319 non-traditional 243 sex worker, workers 52 shame/shaming 24, 36, 40, 43, 70, 83–84 sin 9, 77, 80, 84, 86, 88–90, 93 situated (knowledge, culturally, locally) 9, 51, 62, 64, 72, 195, 285, 295, 345 slavery 137 social group, groups 6, 130, 202, 247, 250, 253–254, 292–293, 295, 297, 300, 305

justice 62, 68, 146 see also justice media 71, 115, 208–210, 233, 275, 281, 284, 319, 323 see also media society 11, 31, 32, 51, 57, 60–62, 68, 72, 79, 80, 82, 99–100, 105, 110, 112, 114–115, 119, 135, 162, 183, 190, 203, 205, 210, 240, 244, 255, 274, 282–283, 285, 293, 296, 298–299, 319, 322–325, 329–330, 340, 342 civil 13, 58–59, 195, 231, 264, 276, 354 mainstream 27, 330 Western 42 sodomy 77–95, 243 see also homosexuality solidarity feminist 6, 32, 41 mechanical 6 organic 6 queer 6, 8–11, 21, 23–27, 29–32, 35, 39, 41–45, 97, 107, 241, 351–352, 355 South, the see global South, the Soviet Union, the 109, 126, 127, 136, 192, 205, 265, 293, 299–300, 308 see also U.S.S.R., the spatiality 266, 282 state 4, 27, 55, 57–58, 62, 68–73, 81–82, 92, 94, 100, 113–114, 119, 128, 136–137, 140, 142, 153–154, 160, 164–165, 176, 183–184, 192, 194–195, 205, 217, 235, 238, 241, 248, 298, 300, 303, 305, 310, 340 sterilization 113 stigma, stigmatization, stigmatizing, stigmatized 32, 41, 112, 129, 160, 277, 321 straightness see heterosexuality ‘subject’, the 10, 12, 45, 65 liberal 10, 125, 137, 143–144 postsocialist 64, 65–66, 69, 70, 72 privileged 38, 138, 156

Index subjectivation 9, 51, 59, 70–71 subjectivity 9, 44, 73, 102, 104, 114–115, 130, 137, 207, 221, 123, 343, 347 postsocialist 9, 51, 68 post-Soviet 355 subjugation 137 subversive, subversion 10, 92, 94, 192, 194, 195 tolerance 2, 128, 135, 145, 194, 281 tradition, traditional, traditionalism 2, 9, 10, 14, 42, 43, 77, 80–82, 86, 91–92, 94–95, 101, 108, 110, 127–128, 140, 154, 188, 202, 209, 219, 222, 243, 319, 328–230 trans, transgender 2, 12, 52, 98, 99–100, 111–113, 134, 179, 202, 204–205, 208, 210–211, 217, 220, 223, 244, 344 activism 113 see also LGBT, activism; LGBT+, activism; LGBTIQ+, activism community 52, 112, 202, 211, 213, 217, 220 see also community; LGBT, community; LGBT+, community; LGBTIQ+, community -men 211, 212 -phobia, -phobic 3, 4, 37, 112, 205, 221 rights 205, 206 see also LGBTIQ, rights; LGBTIQ+, activism studies 201, 205 -woman, transwomen 211–213, 220–221 see also cisgender; gender, gender identity; LGBTIQ; LGBTIQ+; transphobia transgender see trans, transgender transgress, transgression 30, 101, 282

369 transition post-Soviet/postsocialist 1, 69, 73, 106, 108–109, 112, 126 sex/gender 12, 201–225 translation 83–84, 88, 117, 240, 249, 252, 291, 302–304, 356 transmasculinity see trans, masculinity transnationalism, transnationalization 265, 284 transphobia see trans, transgender, -phobia 3, 112, 205, 221 trauma, traumas 15, 27, 29, 246, 192, 295, 303–305, 337, 341 see also vulnerability Ukraine 3, 10, 17, 35, 42–43, 97–114, 116, 118–121, 125–129, 133–137, 140–143, 145, 147–151, 241, 271, 273–274, 282–284, 292 Ukrainian (language) x, 8, 117, 132, 293 ultra-right 42, 106 universalism 140 ‘Urgence Tchetchenie’ [Emergency Chechnya] 231–232, 234, 237–238, 242, 245, 247, 249, 251–255, 257, 356 U.S.A., the 160, 162, 198 U.S.S.R., the 48 values 2, 16, 28, 42–43, 49, 61, 80, 92, 127, 135, 154, 168, 191, 202, 264, 267, 278, 319 violence 13, 16, 32, 34, 36, 38, 41, 46, 53, 57, 71–73, 100, 104, 113, 127, 133, 141–142, 147–149, 182, 231, 233–234, 236, 238–239, 241–242, 245, 247, 253–255, 259–260, 264–265, 270, 274, 278, 299–305, 310–311, 324, 341, 345 visibility 33, 36, 45, 52–53, 55–56, 59, 106, 111, 119, 134, 146, 154, 156, 183–184, 186, 195, 202, 205, 226, 244, 246, 253, 283

370 Index -oriented 26–27 see also opaqueness vulnerability, vulerabilities 44, 45, 235, 239, 244, 266, 280, 285, 287, 310, 329 war 39, 97, 100, 104–105, 110, 112, 115, 120, 126–129, 133, 135–136, 141, 168–169, 226, 236, 241, 243, 259, 260, 286 see also Cold War

West, the see anti-Western; global North Western gaze 9–10, 98, 110, 176 whiteness 10–11, 138, 140–141, 147, 149, 293, 340, 342 non-whiteness 141, 143 see also ethnicity; people of color; race working together 6–9, 21, 23–25, 29–30, 32, 40, 43–45, 288 working-class 57

Q UE E R I N G PAR AD I G M S Series Editor Bee Scherer, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK Queering Paradigms is a series of peer-reviewed edited volumes and monographs presenting challenging and innovative developments in Queer Theory and Queer Studies from across a variety of academic disciplines and political spheres. Queer in this context is understood as a critical disposition towards the predominantly binarist and essentialising social, intellectual, political, and cultural paradigms through which we understand gender, sexuality, and identity. Queering denotes challenging and transforming not just heteronormativity, but homonormativity as well, and pushing past the binary axes of homo- and hetero-sexuality. In line with the broad inter- and trans-disciplinary ethos of queer projects generally, the series welcomes contributions from both established and aspiring researchers in diverse fields of studies including political and social science, philosophy, history, religious studies, literary criticism, media studies, education, psychology, health studies, criminology, and legal studies. The series is committed to advancing perspectives from outside of the ‘Global North’. Further, it will publish research that explicitly links queer insights to specific and local political struggles, which might serve to encourage the uptake of queer insights in similar contexts. By cutting across disciplinary, geographic, and cultural boundaries in this way, the series provides a unique contribution to queer theory.

Published volumes Burkhard Scherer (ed.) Queering Paradigms 2010. isbn 978-3-03911-970-7 Burkhard Scherer and Matthew Ball (eds) Queering Paradigms II: Interrogating Agendas 2011. isbn 978-3-0343-0295-1 Kathleen O’Mara and Liz Morrish (eds) Queering Paradigms III: Queer Impact and Practices 2013. isbn 978-3-0343-0939-4

Elizabeth Sara Lewis, Rodrigo Borba, Branca Falabella Fabrício and Diana de Souza Pinto (eds) Queering Paradigms IV: South-North Dialogues on Queer Epistemologies, Embodiments and Activisms 2014. isbn 978-3-0343-1823-5 María Amelia Viteri and Manuela Lavinas Picq (eds) Queering Paradigms V: Queering Narratives of Modernity 2016. isbn 978-3-0343-1924-9 Bee Scherer (ed.) Queering Paradigms VI: Interventions, Ethics and Glocalities 2016. isbn 978-1-906165-87-1 Bee Scherer (ed.) Queering Paradigms VII: Contested Bodies and Spaces 2016. isbn 978-1-78874-529-1 Katharina Wiedlack, Saltanat Shoshanova and Masha Godovannaya (eds) Queering Paradigms VIII: Queer-Feminist Solidarity and the East/West Divide 2020. isbn 978-1-78874-679-3 •••••••••••••••••••••

QP: In Focus Chris Mounsey and Stan Booth (eds) The Variable Body in History (QP In Focus 1) 2016. isbn 978-1-906165-72-7 Jamilla Rosdahl Sculpting the Woman: Muscularity, Power and the Problem with Femininity (QP In Focus 2) 2017. isbn 978-1-906165-83-3 Alipio De Sousa Revoke Ideology (QP In Focus 3) 2019. isbn 978-1-78997-548-2

Queering Paradigms VIII brings together critical discourses on queer-feminist solidarity between Western, post-Soviet and post-socialist contexts. It highlights transnational solidarity efforts against homophobia, transphobia and misogyny. It engages grass-roots activists and community organizers in a conversation with scholars, and shows that the lines between these categories are blurry and that queer theorists and analysts are to be found in all spheres of queer-feminist culture. It highlights that queer paradigms and theories are born in street protests, in community spaces, in private spheres, through art and culture as well as in academia, and that the different contexts speak to each other. This anthology presents some of the radical approaches that emerge at the intersection of activism, community organizing, art and academia, through transnational exchange, migration and collaborations. It is a celebration of alliances and solidarities between activism, community building, art, culture and academic knowledge production. Yet, the collected work also brings forward the necessary critique of Western hegemonies involved in contemporary queer-feminist solidarity activism and theory between the ‘East’ and ‘West.’ It is an important thinking about, thinking through and thinking in solidarity and the East/West divide, setting new impulses to fight oppression in all its forms.

Katharina Wiedlack is a post-doctoral researcher in the fields of queer and feminist theory, Popular Culture, American, Postsocialist, Decolonial and Disability Studies. Saltanat Shoshanova is currently pursuing her Master's degree in History of Arts at the Free University Berlin. Her research interests include art in connection to queer and feminist theory, queer migration, decoloniality and post-Soviet space. Masha Godovannaya is a visual artist, queer-feminist researcher, curator, educator, and she co-founded a queer-feminist affinity art group “Unwanted Organisation”.

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