Homophobia in the contemporary Russia: a queer postcolonial approach

Abstract

This thesis aims to investigate the phenomenon of contemporary homophobia in Russia as mutually inseparable foreign and domestic constitutive phenomenon as part of the complex interplay of Russian-West international relations. For this task, the thesis analyses homophobia through the lens of postcolonial framework and the queer critiques on notions of sovereignty as construction of sovereign knowable subject. The advantage of the postcolonial framework of analysis is precisely the possibility of a broad intersystem understanding of the phenomenon aligning domestic and systemic levels. The postcolonial is also particularly fruitful framework for case studies which deals inherently with the challenge to allow sufficient degree of generalisation that allows further comparisons and pays enough attention to the specific contextual location, postcolonial framework has enough degree of generalisation due to emphasis on the structure combined to sensitivity to the local context due to valorisation of local subject. In this context Russia should be seen as part of the postcolonial space, despite of fact Russia has never been formally occupied by any Western nation-state, Russia colonised itself on behalf of Europe in a self-orientalist process, since the Tsarist times Russia has an ambiguous relation with the West of being mutually othering and being othered by Europe. The analysis of public Russian discourses on LGBT issues in the last 15 years, surveys legal texts and NGO reports about the situation of mass persecution of LGBT people in Chechnya suggest that the foundations of contemporary homophobia are constituted in this complex dialectical interplay between subaltern and imperial aspects of Russian international relations. This situation of Russia as a former superpower in the recent past and then a state rendered as subaltern in the present in a Western hegemonic order leads to a perception of threat on its sovereignty, one key manifestation of this anxious with sovereignty is homophobia which represents to Russia not only a powerful symbol of negation of Western liberal normative order but also an attempt to subvert the chrononormative narrative of evolutionary development in which the West sits as the last point of evolution by setting the West as decadent and degenerated because of acceptance of homosexuality and Russia as the real guardian of the real European values, now lost in the real Europe.