Description
Book SynopsisSince 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.
Table of ContentsPreface: 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)
Tjaša 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)
Kārlis Vērdiņš and Jānis Ozoliņš
Chapter 9: Religious Experiences in Life Stories of Homosexuals and Bisexuals in Russia (6577)
Polina Kislitsyna
Conclusion: Emily Channell-Justice (1820)
