Queer and Loathing: Literature, Homophob

Over the past decade, official Russian rhetoric has posed queerness as the product of cultural and moral degradation in Western countries, framing Russia’s domestic legal homophobia and revanchist foreign policy as heroic resistance to a deformed and despotic Western sociopolitical order. According to this narrative, queer identity is a recent and unwelcome Western import to Russia, something fundamentally alien to Russianness. Our course draws together a wide array of cultural artifacts, accrued from the 19th-century up to now, which tell a starkly different story. A story of lives that defied expectation—and of the pains and pleasures that such defiance entailed. There is heroism in this story, but its ‘heroes’ often don’t fit the moniker, flouting our expectations much as they did those of their contemporaries. Spanning three centuries, and media of every kind, we will work to uncover the history of gender and sexual difference that the present Russian regime seeks to obscure and erase. What were these lives, and who were these people? How did they understand themselves, and how can we understand them today? What did they endure, what were their joys, and what did they create? In attempting to answer these questions, we will trace the cultural roots of Russia’s present-day anti-queer ideology, and consider the structures of power that have shaped its national identity. Existing scholarship will provide us with context for our readings, while critical tools drawn from feminist philosophy and queer theory help us to deepen our reflections.

There are no prerequisites for this course. No knowledge of Russian is required.