Between Gulags and pride parades: Sexuality, nation, and haunted speech acts

GLQ

Volumn 14, Issue 2-3, 2008, Pages 263-287

  Kuntsman, Adi ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 43949090182     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-2007-033     Document Type: Review

References (78)

1. Boris Kamyanov, "Shadows Demand Rights" ("Teni kachajut prava"), Russian Israeli (Russkij Izrailtianin), September 15, 2002. The quotation marks are in the original and will be referred to later in the text. All translations from the Russian are mine.
2. For a more detailed account of Soviet criminal subculture, please see Igor Guberman, Walks around the Barracks (Progulki vokrug baraka) (Moscow: Eksmo, 2003);
3. and Igor Kon, Moonlight at Sunrise: Faces and Masks of Same-Sex Love (Lunnyj svet na zare: Liki i maski odnopoloj ljubvi) (Moscow: Olimp, 1998).
4. Here I use the term queer to signal a multiplicity of sexualities and sexual identities. While many participants of my study identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans, many others did not take on a particular sexual identity: some defined themselves as "interested" or "exploring," others used the term "queer," and still others refused naming completely. And while the letter to Vesti, written by a group of my informants, used the terms "gay, lesbian and bisexual," these words coexisted with other forms of self-definition as well as with other names - shadows, monsters, and sodomites, for example-employed by Kamyanov.
5. Their ambivalent position as racialized whites is complex and lies beyond the scope of this article. For more discussion, see Adi Kuntsman, "Written in Blood: Contested Borders and the Politics of On-line Passing," Feminist Media Studies 8, no. 3 (forthcoming).
6. For an analysis of immigrants' perception of the Israeli society, see Olga Gershenson, "Postcolonial Discourse Analysis and Intercultural Communication: Building the New Model," Intercultural and International Communication Annual 28 (2005): 124-45;
7. Dmitry Shumsky, "Post-Zionist Orientalism? Orientalist Discourse and Islamophobia among the Russian-Speaking Intelligentsia in Israel," Social Identities 10, no. 1 (2004): 83-99. For studies of gender and sexuality and the ways they condition and shape immigrants' belonging,
8. see Delila Amir and Orly Benjamin, "Defining Encounters: Who Are Women Entitled to Join the Israeli Collective?" Women's Studies International Forum 20, no. 5/6 (1997): 639-50;
9. Deborah Golden, "A National Cautionary Tale: Russian Women to Israel Portrayed," Nations and Nationalism 9, no. 9 (2003): 34-51;
10. Edna Lomsky-Feder and Tamar Rapoport, "Juggling Models of Masculinity: Russian-Jewish Immigrants in the Israeli Army," Sociological Inquiry 73, no. 1 (2003): 114-37. On immigrants' homecoming as performative,
11. see Tamar Rapoport and Edna Lomsky-Feder, "The Producing of Homecoming in Everyday Life" (keynote address presented at the "Russians" in Israel and Beyond conference, Jerusalem, June 8-9, 2005).
12. See, for example, Jacqui M. Alexander, "Not Just (Any)Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality, and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas," Feminist Review, no. 48 (1994): 5-23.
13. Eithne Luibhéid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002);
14. and Gayatri Gopinath, "Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora: South Asian Sexualities in Motion," in Theorizing Diaspora, ed. Jana E. Braziel and Anita Mannur (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 264.
15. Charles R. Lawrence III, Mari J. Matsuda, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlè Williams Crenshaw, introduction to Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment, ed. Mari J. Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlè Williams Crenshaw (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993), 5.
16. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech (London: Routledge, 1997), 1.
17. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990);
18. and Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (London: Routledge, 1993).
19. Butler, Excitable Speech, 2.
20. Butler, Excitable Speech, 18.
21. For example, she suggests that there is a need to loosen the link between act and injury to "open up a possibility for a counter-speech" (Butler, Excitable Speech, 15).
22. Butler, Excitable Speech, 36.
23. Article 121, commonly known as the Anti-sodomy Law, refers to same-sex acts between men, punishable by five to eight years' imprisonment. Female homosexuality was not criminalized in the Soviet Union but was defined as a medical pathology and subjected lesbians to compulsory treatment. For more details on the history of de- and recriminalization and the pathologization of same-sex relations in czarist and Soviet Russia, see Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
24. Kon, Moonlight at Sunrise.
25. Butler, Excitable Speech, 36.
26. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 195. Studies of the Soviet gulags almost completely ignore the topic of same-sex relations; this article is the first contribution to the much-needed analysis of the ways these relations are (not) remembered. On homosexuality in Soviet prisons and camps,
27. see Healey, Homosexual Desire. On lesbian relations in the gulags,
28. see Olga Zhuk, The Russian Amazons: History of Lesbian Subculture in Russia, Twentieth Century (Russkie amazonki. Istorija lesbijskoj subkultury v Rossii. XX vek) (Moscow: Glagol, 1998). On the Soviet gulags as forced movement and labor migration,
29. see Kate Brown, "Out of Solitary Confinement: The History of the Gulag," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8 (2007): 67-103.
30. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 131-32.
31. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8.
32. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8.
33. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8.
34. Translation from Russian is mine.
35. Boris Kamyanov, " 'The March of Love' in Jerusalem" ("Marsh ljubvi v Ierusalime"), Vesti, June 20, 2002.
36. Notably, the debates around the parade were concentrated around the notion of, on the one hand, liberal gay rights, and, on the other, religious opposition. The other-much more central and urgent-controversy of Jerusalem itself, as a divided city and as a politically contested space, was barely mentioned.
37. Vered Lee, "Geny, How Did You Turn up a Lesbian?" Haaretz, August 2, 2002;
38. Guy Gomel, "Hating in Russian" ("Nenavidet' po-russki"), www.gogay.ru/community/rus.php (accessed October 2002).
39. On similarities and differences between those and the American categories of "butch" and "femme," see Zhuk, Russian Amazons, 101.
40. The Russian word muzhelozhestvo refers to male sodomy only.
41. Kamyanov, "Shadows."
42. Elspeth Probyn, Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities (London: Routledge, 2000), 131.
43. This dream is of course Kamyanov's vision as constituted in his texts. It is in no way representative of all Russian-speaking Israelis, or even of all readers of Vesti.
44. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 97.
45. According to the cultural historian Svetlana Boym, belonging to the intelligentsia is defined "not by blood or by class but by their allegiance to Russian literature" ("From the Russian Soul to Post-Communist Nostalgia," in "Identifying Histories: Eastern Europe before and after 1989," ed. Stephen Greenblatt, István Rév, and Randolph Starn, special issue, Representations 49 [1995]: 139).
46. Lee, "Geny."
47. The term repressions was used in the Soviet Union to describe the persecution of people who were perceived to be enemies of the state. The legal base of the repressions was Article 58 of the criminal code; its subsections referred to actions such as antirevolutionary activities, treason, anti-Soviet propaganda, and so forth.
48. Anton Olejnik, "Marginal or Mainstream: How Does a Subculture Become Part of Culture" ("Marginaly ili mazhory: Kak subkultura stanovitsja elementom kultury"), NZ: Debates on Politics and Culture (NZ: Neprikosnovennyj Zapas) 36, no. 4 (2004), www.nz-online.ru/print.phtml?aid= 25011101.
49. Zhuk, Russian Amazons.
50. Zhuk, Russian Amazons, 99, 103.
51. Variam Shalamov, "Swindler's Blood" ("Zhulnicheskaja krov"), in Stories of the Criminal World (Ocherki prestupnogo mira) (Moscow: Pravda, 1989), www.tyurem .net/books/shalamov/ocherki/002.htm.
52. Healey, Homosexual Desire.
53. Eugenia Ginsburg, Treacherous Journey: Prison, Camp, Exile, vol. 2 (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1979), 42, 113.
54. Varlam Shalamov, "Snake Charmer" ("Zaklinatel Zmej"), in Kolyma Stories (Kolymskie rasskazy) (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1931), www.serann.ru/t/ t780_18_0.html.
55. Kamyanov most probably refers to the Israeli war against the Palestinians - a bloody conflict that in Israeli nationalism is frequently framed as a "war of survival" in which Israel is the victim.
56. The speaker's position as the "prophet of rage" who warns against loss and destruction is a common trope in Israeli political rhetoric.
57. Gopinath, "Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora," 264.
58. My discussion here is limited to antihomophobic responses; I analyze other practices of queer immigrants' claiming the nation and, in particular, their patriotism and antiPalestinian stance, in Kuntsman, "Written in Blood."
59. Michail Laskov, "The Russian Lynch, Deliberate and Merciless" ("Russkij linch, osmyslennyj i besposchadnyj"), Vesti, September 5, 2002.
60. Unfortunately, the framework of this article allows only a brief description of this comparison. I discuss it in more detail in Adi Kuntsman, "Figurations of Violence and Belonging: Sexuality, Immigration, and Nationalism in Israel/Palestine and in Cyberspace" (PhD diss., Lancaster University, 2007).
61. Aguda.org/n.php?mode=lenta&news=109 (accessed March 2004). The term "blood libel" refers to the accusation of Jews in ritual killings of non-Jews that often led to anti-Semitic violence.
62. Aguda.org/community/rus/phpc (accessed April 2004).
63. To protect the participants, I do not provide links to the discussions on the forum.
64. Dov Kontorer, "The Blue Censorship," Vesti, August 20, 2002.
65. I am grateful to Anna Talisman for allowing me to use the RFAHD's archives.
66. Indeed, going to synagogue and openly celebrating Jewish holidays at the time of the Soviet regime was seen as an anti-Soviet activity for which one could be imprisoned.
67. I rely here on Freud's notion of the double as uncanny. See Kuntsman, "Figurations of Violence and Belonging."
68. Tellingly, the article prepared by RFAHD for Vesti mentions famous poets known for their same-sex relations. But it does not mention those well-known Soviet artists and intellectuals who were imprisoned in the gulags because of their homosexuality.
69. At the same time, Israel successfully perpetrates new oppression and killing of Palestinians, justified by that same "never again" concern for Jewish survival. See, for example, Juliana Ochs, "The Politics of Victimhood and Its Internal Exegetes: Terror Victims in Israel," History and Anthropology 17 (2006): 355-68.
70. Ochs, "Politics of Victimhood."
71. The extensive commemoration of the Holocaust does not contradict the ghostly status of the Jewish victims themselves. For more discussion of the haunting nature of Holocaust memory, see Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999);
72. and Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Summit Books, 1988).
73. On the impact of the criminal culture on contemporary perceptions of same-sex relations in Russia, see Kon, Moonlight at Sunrise.
74. Sneja Gunew, Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms (London: Routledge, 2004).
75. Gunew, Haunted Nations, 107.
76. Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society (Annandale, NSW: Pluto, 2003).
77. Lev Samojlov, "Journey to an Upside-Down World" ("Puteshestvie v perevernutyj mir"), Neva, no. 4 (1989): 150-64.
78. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 201.