Introduction: Locating Russian Sexualities

Abstract

In spite of a burgeoning social sciences literature in sexualities and gay and lesbian/queer studies, most of the existing empirical and theoretical work has focused on English-speaking or Western European countries (Binnie, 2004; Puar, 2007; Rahman, 2010). Research on postcolonial sexualities has highlighted how current theoretical work remains deeply ethnocentric, and is therefore inadequate to account for the lived experiences of queers from the global South (Murray, 1995; Manalansan, 2002, 2003; Boellstorff, 2005; Jackson, 2009a, 2009b). However, comparatively little has been written about sexualities in postsocialist Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union; yet similar Orientalist (Said, 1978) discourses constructing the region as ‘traditional’, ‘premodern’ or ‘underdeveloped’ have positioned it as the west’s ‘Other’, both during the Cold War and since the demise of communist rule and the onset of the process of European integration (Bonnett, 2004; Stychin, 2003; Kulpa and Mizielińska, 2011).