The fate of the queer community in the Russian Empire, in the USSR and in modern day Russia has been characterized by constant twists and turns between decriminalization and “re-criminalization” (1917, 1934, 1994) with the final blow being the 2013 “propaganda law” (expanded in 2022) forbidding the “promotion of nontraditional sexual relations to minors” – that is, restricting and potentially criminalizing any open discussion of queer topics. Homophobic Russian rhetoric emphasizes the supposedly recent and foreign nature of LGBTQ identity and ideas and embraces the popular view that homosexuality is essentially un-Russian. On the other hand, Western discourse often orientalizes Russia as ‘traditional’,‘premodern’ or ‘underdeveloped’ and positions it as the West’s ‘Other’ in its homophobia. This course, which considers queer Russian literature from modernist to contemporary authors, pushes back against both of these restrictive points of view.
