Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
  • Publication
    Legal Wounds: The Meaning of Human Rights for Lesbians and Gay Men in Russia
    (Centre for Independent Social Research, 2012-12-17)
    (In Russian) This article discusses the production of lesbians and gay men as subjects of human rights discourse in Russia. Conclusions are drawn from discourse analysis of group discussions and life history interviews with St. Petersburg lesbians and gay men. I base my analysis on the methodological concept of the "legal wound" which makes it possible to show the legal situation of the subjects that personify human rights discourse in contemporary Russia.
      27
  • Publication
    The Censorship "Propaganda" Legislation in Russia
    (The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, 2019-03-08)
    In June 2013, Russian Parliament (the State Duma) adopted the bill 135-FZ meant to "protect children from information that promotes denial of traditional family values." This piece of legislation amended several federal laws and the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation with the final purpose to ban from public access something called "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations".
      229
  • Publication
    Non-Traditional Sexual Relationships: Law, Forgetting and the Conservative Political Discourse in Russia
    (Routledge, 2021-12-14)
    On the 6th of October 2013, a Moscow federal court heard a case about hate speech initiated by Tsentr ‘E’ (the Anti-Extremist Police Unit) against a pensioner. According to the materials in the case file, the pensioner (I will call her Maria for the purposes of a smooth narrative) was inspired by the ultraconservative movement Sut’ Vremeni (The Essence of Time) and went to the movement’s rally supported by and organised together with United Russia, the country’s ruling party. There, Maria disseminated her home-made leaflets that, as the judge on the case cited, shaped the general public’s ‘negative feelings and emotions about persons of Jewish ethnicity and about social group of homosexuals’. Knowing these facts and considering the conservative nature of Russia, it is puzzling why the woman was at all brought to the court. To begin with, Maria had many reasons to believe that her hateful materials would look appropriate at a state-sponsored manifestation, as they were. After all, 2013 was the year of official federal ban of so called ‘propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships’, the law that institutionalised discrimination and officially designated LGBT people as targets of hate.
      52
  • Publication
    Afterword: Guide to the Judith Butler's Universe
    (Ad Marginem, 2018-09-03)
    This book is an extraordinarily great success for the Russian intellectual community. It summarizes all the main ideas of Judith Butler's work, from her first book, Gender Trouble, treating fundamental social categories as performative, to the current project in which she proposes a new democracy based on alliances and coalitions instead of aging identity movements. At the same time, the author independently brings together her own ideas, which have always maintained interconnection, but have never been explicitly presented in such a consistent presentation. The relatively small number of translations of Butler's works into Russian largely determines the meager acquaintance with these ideas in the Russian academic environment. Another important obstacle is the confusing and overly specific language of translations, only partly dictated by the original. Although not all of these obstacles have been fully overcome in this edition, the structure of the book and the lecture style of presentation of the material in many respects make it possible to solve these problems and finally get to know the philosopher's theories in Russian quite fully.
      54
  • Publication
    Sex, Alcohol, and Soul: Violent Reactions to Coming Out after the "Gay Propaganda" Law in Russia
    This article is focused on a particular set of social relations in Russia: sexuality and violence in the context of consumption of alcohol. We look at how violence erupts after revelation of queer sexuality of one of the participants of collective drinking. Discussions of homosexuality in Russia became especially heated after the adoption of the bill against the "propaganda of non‐traditional family valuesW in 2013. This law primarily marks information about homosexuality as inappropriate and dangerous to minors. We review court decisions on violence against gay men before and after the introduction of this law. The court cases we analyze are not cases of the "propaganda" law enforcement, but routine violent felonies. As we selected only those cases that involve alcohol consumption from a larger sample, we analyze the stories told in these court files focusing on interaction rituals during the practice of collective heavy drinking. We demonstrate how this ritual is centered around confirmation of masculinity, ceremonies of sharing, and exchange of respect. We also show that these ritualized practices are interrupted and confused by introduction of information about one of the participants' queer sexuality. This interruption evolves into violent reactions, including murder. Nevertheless, the ritual of drinking supports both a "conversationof souls" (sharing intimate secrets) and violent reactions to the information that challenges masculinity of the ritual's participants.
      49Scopus© Citations 11
  • Publication
    International Discussions of Homosexuality: Boomeranging effects in power currents
    (The Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, 2018-03)
    Homosexuality has recently become a matter of international politics. UNO General Secretary announced LGBT rights a global agenda and called for rejection of discriminatory laws in national legislatures. Former president of the USA supported widening of sexual citizenship by inclusion of samesex couples. Similar tendencies have been demonstrated by the European Union countries. Yet, simultaneously, there are attempts to criminalize homosexuality in a somewhat concurrent camp of the global debate: new round of criminalization in India, prison terms for gay men in Uganda, or capital punishment in Zimbabwe. Ban of so called 'propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations' stands in this row. It was enacted in Russia in 2013 to protect children from becoming gay by learning information on LGBT issues. This initiative has been interesting for members of parliament in other post-Soviet republics. It seems like the world is divided in two parts by the question of homosexuality. But this perception is an oversimplification. Both inclusive and exclusive approaches use the same power technics and come from the same source. I use ideas of Michel Foucault and queer theory to show the ways how a complex analysis of the situation might be brought about. In this sense, power does not come from only one source, but is always embedded in relations between forces. Hence, there are intersecting currents of power that make the international discussion of homosexuality possible.
      106
  • Publication
    "State Regimes of Gender: Legal Aspects of Gender Identity Registration, Trans-Relevant Policies and Quality of LGBTIQ Lives": A Roundtable Discussion
    This roundtable took place at the European Conference on Politics and Gender (ECPG) in July 2019. It aims to investigate how gender, as a social process and regime, produces gender identities, often in non-deterministic and unpredictable ways. The right to not be discriminated against regardless of gender identity may, however, clash with practices of sex/gender categorization and gender- relevant policies of nation-states. Indeed, the attribution and registration of sex impacts the human rights of transgender, non-binary, queer and intersex persons. In bringing together expertise from political science, law, political sociology and gender studies, this roundtable: (1) asks how gender operates as a relation of power, particularly the value and possibilities of a more utopian politics of post-gender beyond existing identifications; (2) cultivates a discussion of the consequences of the systematic registration of legal sex and of sex/gender-related policies as they impact quality of life for queer and trans individuals, and (3) discusses theoretical and practical alternatives to such policies and practices. In examining relationships between gender as a relation of power, gender identity attribution and global justice, we also want to ask how non-binary genders are operationalized in policies and practices of nation-states and to think critically about whether undoing formal legal categorization would impact the gendering of social subjects.
      54
  • Publication
    Active citizenship: Negotiation of private/public and activism/compliancy by public officials in Russia and Germany
    (Centre for German and European Studies, 2017-12-12) ; ;
    In professions of public officials, the LGBTIQ identity might serve as a permanently negotiated border between the private and the public. The forced negotiations of one’s identity within the authority bring about specific forms of activism, performed by state officials. The working paper demonstrates results from the empirical research on public officials in Germany and Russia, focusing on the intersection of LGBTIQ identity and belonging to public offices. By doing so, the working paper detects a special meaning of the private/public divide as essential aspect of LGBTIQ-identity articulation and discusses its relevancy for the activism.
      51
  • Publication
    Hate Crime against LGBT in Russia
    (Centre for Independent Social Report, 2017-05-30) ;
    This book is a report on research of law courts' open data about hate crime against LGBT in Russia. Firstly, hate crime is defined and its general characteristic is given, as well as the nature of court data used for statistics further. Secondly, statistical analysis of court files is offered for 2010-2015. Lastly, a short comparative analysis of hate crime against LGBT people in various countries is given in the book. All results are preliminary. Nonetheless, the calculations show that there is a tendency on increase of hate crime against LGBT populations in Russia after 2013.
      112