Francesca Stella

The Language of Intersectionality: Researching ‘Lesbian’ Identity in Urban Russia

The relationship between identity, lived experience, sexual practices and the language through which these are conveyed has been widely debated in sexuality literature. For example, ‘coming out’ has famously been conceptualised as a ‘speech act’ (Sedgwick, 1990) and as a collective narrative (Plummer, 1995), while a growing concern for individuals’ diverse identifications in relation to their sexual and gender practices has produced interesting research focusing on linguistic practices among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT)-identified individuals (Leap, 1995; Farquhar, 2000; Kulick, 2000; Cameron and Kulick, 2006). While an explicit focus on language remains marginal to literature on sexualities (Kulick, 2000), issues of language use and translation are seldom explicitly addressed in the growing literature on intersectionality. Yet intersectional perspectives ‘reject the separability of analytical and identity categories’ (McCall, 2005: 1771) and therefore have an implicit stake in the ‘vernacular’ language of the researched, in the ‘scientific’ language of the researcher and in the relation-ship of continuity between the two.

The Right to be Different? Sexual Citizenship and its Politics in Post-Soviet Russia

Equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people have increasingly been flagged up as the ‘main story’ in current western debates about sexual citizenzhip.1 Gay marriage in particular has emerged as the central civil rights cause for western and international LGBT lobbying groups and organisations.2 Strategies based on claims to rights and visibility for gay people have assumed an international dimension, and their increasing deployment on a global scale has been seen as evidence of ‘queer globalisation’.3 This chapter interrogates notions of sexual citizenship politics from a non-western perspective by looking at debates over sexual citizenship rights and visibility in the Russian Federation.

Engaging with ‘Impact’ Agendas? Reflections on Storytelling as Knowledge Exchange

The article discusses debates around the new ‘impact’ agenda in the UK context as driven by Higher Education Funding bodies and Research Councils UK (RCUK), which are jointly responsible for allocating governmental funding to Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and individual research projects. The ‘impact agenda’ is defined here as the whole gamut of initiatives related to knowledge exchange and public engagement that have been articulated in recent years, particularly since the Research Excellence Framework (REF, 2008–2013) introduced new criteria of assessing the research conducted within UK HEIs. The REF has made an explicit engagement with this agenda virtually compulsory for research-active academics by introducing ‘impact’ as a new criterion on which the research performance of universities, departments and individual researchers is assessed. The new emphasis on impact, defined as the ‘demonstrable contribution’ that research makes ‘to society and the economy’1 beyond specialist academic audiences, has generated much discussion and controversy among academics.

Lesbian Lives and Real Existing Socialism in Late Soviet Russia

This chapter contributes to current debates about queer presences and absences by focusing on a notable absence in both queer and Russian studies, namely that of the lives of women involved in same-sex relations in Soviet Russia (1917-89). Until very recently, in existing accounts of Soviet society, queer lives, and lesbian lives even more so, have been notable by their absence and invisibility. Since the 1990s, a handful of pioneering studies has begun to uncover their hidden history; however, existing work has almost exclusively focused on state-enforced mechanisms of regulation of same-sex desire by exploring medical and legal discourses on homosexuality, or same-sex desire in Soviet prison camps (Engelstein, 1995; Zhuk, 1998; Healey, 2001; Kuntsman, 2009). While offering very valuable insights into the lives of Soviet queers, existing research has mostly been based on archival and documentary sources such as police records, court documents, medical studies and the memoirs of GULag prisoners. Thus, with few exceptions (Rotkirch, 2002), the literature has privileged the perspective of professionals or witnesses, rather than queers themselves, and focused very heavily on the environments of the clinic and the prison camp, where homosexuality was symbolically confined by the Soviet state.

Introduction to Special Section ‘Location, Agency and Change in Provincial Russia’

THIS SPECIAL SECTION IS THE PRODUCT OF A long-standing relationship between UKbased academics conducting research on Russia and colleagues based at the REGION research Centre in Ul’yanovsk, Russian Federation. The focus of the section is on a key question arising from the contributors’ individual research findings and in discussions between the contributors; namely, how does geographical location create different opportunity structures and impact on the ability to negotiate or resist social change in post-socialist Russia? This question has been much debated within postsocialist area studies, with a large body of existing research devoted to exploring the diversity of experience both within and between the former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Hann 2002; Verdery 2002; Twigg & Schecter 2003; Round 2008, Stenning & Hörschelman 2008), as well as contrasting experiences between towns and cities within a country (Round 2006) and showing the interaction of global changes with local spaces (Flynn et al. 2008). This literature points area studies scholars towards approaches to research that generate more nuanced understandings of the specificities of post-socialist transformations within and across locations, and also seek to avoid the danger of stereotyping Central and Eastern Europe as the ‘other’ (Stenning & Hörschelmann 2008). While our approach in this special section resonates with existing studies (Hann 2002; Mandel & Humphery 2002; Flynn et al. 2008; Kürti & Skalnik 2009), the original aspect of this collection lies in presenting a focused exploration of the multiple facets of and responses to social changes among different groups within the one geographical space, namely the Ul’yanovsk Oblast’. Indeed, the essays included in this section are linked by a shared research location, the city of Ul’yanovsk and the surrounding Oblast’, and the contributions are based on findings from research projects conducted in the area. Thus, this special section also contributes to a growing body of literature on the Russian regions, which has explored a range of issues such as regional government, the changing urban landscape, economic development and social change (Ruble et al. 2001; Herd & Aldis 2003; Axenov et al. 2006; Hahn 2001; Ioffe & Nefedova 1997, 2000; Gdaniec 2010; White 2004). While some of this work focuses on a single region or geographic location (Axenov et al. 2006; Hahn 2001; Ioffe & Nefedova 1997, 2000), other studies outline general trends by presenting case studies (Ruble et al. 2001; Herd & Aldis 2003; Gdaniec 2010; White 2004), thus highlighting EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES Vol. 64, No. 10, December 2012, 1811–1821

Family Matters: Negotiating ‘Home’

This chapter shifts the focus of analysis from time (the intersection between generation and sexuality) to space (the way in which women negotiated their sexuality across different places and locations), a theme which also runs through the following two chapters.1 Chapter 4 focuses on the private space of ‘home’, while chapters 5 and 6 deal with women’s negotiations of public or semi-private spaces (the workplace, the street and places where ‘lesbian’ or ‘queer’ tusovki socialise).

Lesbian Relationships in Late Soviet Russia

This chapter contributes to debates about queer existence under real existing socialism, and particularly about the space for individual and collective agency under a political and economic system which was arguably able to exercise particularly strong forms of coercive and disciplinary power over the private lives of its citizens. It has been persuasively argued that the constraining effect of homonor-mative ideals was stronger in communist regimes than in western societies, where similar medical and legal discourses aimed at regulating ‘deviant’ sexualities also existed (Kon, 1997; Healey, 2001; Liśkova, 2013). Nonetheless, a question that remains largely unanswered is the extent to which ‘disciplinary drives’ controlled by the Party-state and inspired by collectivist ideology shaped lived experiences under state socialism, and the extent to which they allowed ‘for agency, reflexivity and change’ (Liśkova, 2013, pp. 14–15). Drawing on an analysis of original interview material, this chapter explores the lived experiences and subjectivities of Russian women involved in same-sex relations, or experiencing same-sex attraction, in the late Soviet period.

Carving Out Queer Space: In/visibility, Belonging and Resistance

There has been a growing interest within sexualities studies in the construction of queer space, understood a space collectively appropriated by non-heterosexuals as an alternative to heteronormative urban space (Oswin, 2008). Existing research generally focuses on metropolitan, ter-ritorialised forms of queer space, such as the gay ‘scene’ (understood as a territorially concentrated cluster of commercial venues and community organisations), or on inner city neighbourhoods known to have a high concentration of LGBT residents (Binnie and Skeggs, 2004; Moran and Skeggs, 2004; Valentine and Skelton, 2003). As Binnie (2004, p. 4) notes, however, this literature locates queer space in the metropolitan west and ‘within major urban centres of gay consumer culture’, thus neglecting both the existence of spaces precariously and less overtly claimed as queer, and the experiences of queers who live in locales which lack institutionalised and visible gay scenes.

Same-Sex Sexualities and the Soviet/Post-Soviet Gender Orders

The chapter offers a contextual socio-historical background to the empirical chapters that follow, by charting shifting discourses on sex and sexualities across Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. More specifically, I consider the normativities they produced and their implications for non-heterosexual citizens.

Conclusions: From Russian to (Post)Socialist Sexualities

In this final chapter, I summarise the key empirical and conceptual contributions of this research monograph, while also engaging with current debates in queer and sexuality studies about theoretical ethno-centrism, the value of situated knowledge and queer geotemporalities. These debates have been particularly prominent in work on non-western sexualities and ‘global queering’, and reflect pressing conceptual, epis-temological and methodological issues that are widely struggled with. A key strand of these debates has focused on critical approaches to regions, understood both as subnational and supranational territorial units (Binnie, 2013). For example, work on South Asian sexualities has pointed out that essentialism, the reproduction of western-centric, hegemonic queer temporalities, and the perpetuation of symbolic violence against the non-western ‘Other’ are potential pitfalls often found in regional approaches to territorially bounded areas (Johnson, Jackson and Herdt, 2000; Boelstorff, 2005; Wilson, 2006; Jackson, 2009a, 2009b). Nonetheless, a critical, post-Orientalist and transnational regionalism has also been invoked as a potentially productive counterweight to hegemonic western-centric theorising, and the widespread assumption that ‘legible queer sexualities derive from US-inflicted Western modes of sexuality or from Western-based systems of modernity, such as capitalism’ (Wilson, 2006).