Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi

Description

Dan Healey's expert analysis of homophobia's history in Russia uses riveting case studies of lesbian and gay life and the law to paint a vivid picture of queerness and its persecution from the 1930s through to the Putin era. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the uphill battle for LGBTQ rights and recognition in contemporary Russia. Valerie Sperling, Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science, Clark University, USA In this meticulously researched and highly readable book, Healey draws on a lifetime of ground-breaking research on homosexuality in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia to trace the roots of Russia's antipathy towards sexual deviance from the anti-homosexual politics of Stalin to the politicisation of homophobia and 'gay propaganda' under Vladimir Putin. A fascinating insight into sexual politics in Russia. Richard Mole, Senior Lecturer in Political Sociology, University College London, UK List of Illustrations Preface Introduction: 2013 – Russia's Year of Political Homophobia Part I - Homophobia in Russia after 1945 1. Forging Gulag Sexualities: Penal Homosexuality and the Reform of the Gulag after Stalin 2. Comrades, Queers and 'Oddballs': Sodomy, Masculinity and Gendered Violence in the Leningrad Province of the 1950s 3. The Diary of Soviet Singer Vadim Kozin: Reading Queer Subjectivity in 1950s Russia Part II - Queer Visibility and 'Traditional Sexual Relations' 4. From Stalinist Pariahs to Subjects of 'Managed Democracy': Queers in Moscow 1945 to the Present 5. Active, Passive and Russian: The National Idea in Gay Men's Pornography 6. 'Let Them Move to France!': Public Homophobia and 'Traditional' Sexuality in the Early Putin Years Part III - Writing and Remembering Russia's Queer Past 7. Stalinist Homophobia and the 'Stunted Archive': Challenges to Writing the History of Gay Men's Persecution in the USSR 8. “Non-Traditional” Lives: The Dilemmas of Queering Russian Biography 9. On the Boulevards of Magadan: Historical Time, Geopolitics and Queer Memory in Homophobic Russia Selected Further Reading Index