Since the end of state socialism and the unifying efforts of the Soviet Union, questions about LGBT+ have gained increasing attention among scholars of various disciplines. In the region of Eastern Europe and Eurasia, LGBT+ individuals face repression by state forces, as well as by non-state actors attempting to reinforce their vision of traditional social values. Understanding this context, Decolonizing Queer Experience moves beyond discourses of oppression and repression to explore the resistance and resilience of LGBT+ communities that are remaking the post-socialist world in ways that refuse domination from their own, local heteronormative expectations as well as those imposed from global LGBT+ movements that also create and suggest limitations on possible LGBT+ futures. These chapters reflect a multiplicity of voices that fall into a broad community of LGBT+ people, suggesting that no single narrative of LGBT+ experience in post-socialism is more representative or informative than another. These chapters are evidence of a globally flexible, infinitely malleable notion of LGBT+ that counters Western hegemony in queer activism and communities.
Emily Channell-Justice is the director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University.
Preface: Vitaly Chernetsky Introduction: Of Constatives, Performatives, and Disidentifications: Decolonizing Queer Critique in Post-socialist Times (5606) Tamar Shirinian and Emily Channell-Justice Section 1: The Categories Themselves Chapter 1: Body Politics, Trans*Imaginary, and Decoloniality (6859) Tjasa Kancler Chapter 2: Queering Categories: Recognition, Misrecognition, and Identity Politics in Armenia (7753) Tamar Shirinian Chapter 3: Escaping the Dichotomies of 'Good' and 'Bad': Chronotopes of Queerness in Kyrgyzstan (6815) Syinat Sultanaieva Section 2: Queer in Public Chapter 4: LGBT+ Rights, European Values, and Radical Critique: Leftist Challenges to LGBT+ Mainstreaming in Ukraine (7922) Emily Channell-Justice Chapter 5: Queering the Soviet Pribaltika: Criminal Cases of Consensual Sodomy in Soviet Latvia (1960s-1980s) (7796) Feruza Aripova Chapter 6: Queer People and the Criminal Justice System in Ukraine: Negotiating Relationships, Historical Trauma and Contemporary Western Discourses (7655) Roman Leksikov Section 3: Decolonizing Queer Performance Chapter 7: Stifled Monstrosities: Gender-Transgressive Motifs in Kazakh Folklore (7553) Zhanar Sekerbayeva Chapter 8: "Pugacheva for the People": Two Portraits of Non-Urban Post-Soviet Queer Performers (7751) Karlis Verdins and Janis Ozolins Chapter 9: Religious Experiences in Life Stories of Homosexuals and Bisexuals in Russia (6577) Polina Kislitsyna Conclusion: Emily Channell-Justice (1820)
By combining a focus on Eastern Europe and Eurasia with an attention to experience, performance, and narrative, this groundbreaking book contributes to our understandings of queer selfhood, community, and belonging. These perspectives broaden our theoretical frameworks and demonstrate the importance of this crucial region that links Europe and Asia. This book is a true achievement that will be valuable across a range of scholarly debates.--Tom Boellstorff, University of California, Irvine and author of Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human The ethnographic and historical essays in this collection beautifully combine queer and decolonial theory to unearth and unpack a variety of forms of queerness in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. From "bad girl" lesbian activists in Kyrgyzstan to "consensual sodomy' in Soviet Latvia back to gender transgression in Kazakh folklore then forward to the contemporary queer pairing of religion and LGBTQ persons in Russia, these essays deepen our understanding of queer lives in a part of the world that is too often constructed as uniformly straight and homo and transphobic. In fact, queers have always managed to live and even thrive in Eastern Europe and Eurasia and will continue to do so. These essays make that clear even as they deepen our understanding of how queer manifests differently in rural versus urban, Soviet or Post-Soviet regimes, and, of course, East vs. West.--Laurie Essig, Middlebury College
