Abstracts
Russia on Edge: Reclaiming the Periphery in Contemporary Russian Culture
Interdisciplinary Workshop, 11-12 December 2009 (CRASSH, University of Cambridge)
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University of Swansea
Perverse Peripheries and Normal Centres: Situating the Queer in Gulag Memory
The past twenty years has seen an explosion in the available source material for scholars studying the Gulag Archipelago in the Soviet Union, a system of forced-labour camps operating from 1930 to roughly 1956. The opening of the Soviet states archives has presented researchers with a flood of documentary evidence about the camps from the viewpoint of those who planned and managed them. Meanwhile, an outpouring of reminiscences from camp survivors has produced a new genre in Russian letters, the camp-survivors memoir, which reflects life in the camps as it was experienced by Stalins victims. Interviews with survivors constitute a recent and growing extension of the memoir genre. In all these streams of material, questions of sexuality and perversion are addressed, despite both official prohibitions on open discussion of sexuality, and intellectual traditions that suppressed and evaded such discourse in literature and ego-documents.
Recent work on memory and Gulag sexuality by Adi Kuntsman discusses the distancing mechanisms that operate in these sources to keep the queer at the margins of Russian society. The traditional, jaundiced,view of same-sex relations in the camps tends to distance homosexuality from the educated, civilised observer. The same mechanisms leave the homosexual at the gate of the Gulag and pretend that homosexuality ceased to exist when the Gulag was broken up. Yet, at the same time, the explosion in speech about Gulag life multiplies the number of times that homosexuality is referenced, and ties speakers and their audiences to proliferating contemporary ways of speaking about same-sex relations.
This paper examines the proliferation of speech about the Gulag queer, and investigates how far this proliferation might be influenced by contemporary modes of thinking about homosexuality in Russia. The paper also investigates the degree to which contemporary speech about the Gulag queer continues to leave the homosexual at the gate of the Gulag and construct an imagined Russia that is heteronormative at the centre and perverse on the periphery.