American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages The Slavic and East European Journal

American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages
Review
Author(s): Kevin Moss
Review by: Kevin Moss
Source: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Spring, 2001), pp. 160-161
Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages
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160 Slavic and East European Journal
people and ideas that were just as integral a part of Russia culture as those bearing the stamp
of apparent normality.
Brian Horowitz, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Laurie Essig. Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1999. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. 244 pp., $49.95 (cloth), $19.95
(paper).
Laurie Essig's Queer in Russia is the first academic study of queer sexualities in contemporary
Russia by a Slavist. There are no doubt numerous reasons for this: on the one hand, queer
activities themselves have become fully visible in Russian culture only since the breakup of the
Soviet Union, and on the other, Slavists have been slower than scholars in other fields to adopt
the methodologies of feminism, gender studies, and queer theory. Essig has been trained as a
sociologist and is conversant with queer theory. She provides a fascinating survey of the
discourses around queer sexualities in Russia and addresses questions of interest to queer
theorists and cultural historians as well.
Based primarily on research conducted in 1994, Queer in Russia is an expanded version of

Essig's Columbia PhD. dissertation. It focuses primarily on Moscow and Petersburg, combin-
ing interviews with analyses of public texts such as newspapers, books, songs, and theatrical
performances. Her theoretical influences include Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Jtirgen
Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, combining sociology, cultural history, ethnography, and gender
theory.
In Part I: The Other, Essig, following Foucault, describes third-person discourses, the
expert gaze of the law and psychology. Homosexual acts between men were criminalized,
while lesbians, invisible in the law, were subject to "the cure." Part II: The Self covers identity
politics and the politics of identity, and how the kind of gay identity assumed by most Ameri-
cans was not adopted by Russians once it became possible to do so. Instead of identity politics,
writes Essig, Russians base their actions on "a fluid and ill-defined subjectivity, which de-
mands public space for interaction but not for political action" (80). Russian queers, in other
words, demand gay bars and cruising areas, but do not come out or march for gay pride. In
queer literature and queer theater in Russia she also finds that "queer male sexuality . . . is
neither bounded nor fixed. It is not an identity but a practice" (95).
Part III: Intersections is perhaps the most interesting part of the book, since it describes not
how identities are unfixed and ill-defined, but instead how they are in fact constructed through
their relations with the categories of gender and nationality. Gender transgression is found to
be a sign of public queerness, through performance, including the use of gendered language,
and dress. When nationality and nationalism are thrown into the mix, the danger of conflating
Western constructions of gay identity with Western cultural imperialism becomes apparent.
Westernizers, including many gay political activists who have benefited from assistance from
the West, tend to be more receptive to American-style gay identity. Nationalist/Slavophiles,
on the other hand, reject it; curiously though, there appear to be a number of what we would
call queer people in the Nationalist camp: Limonov, Debrianskaia, Zhirinovsky, Mogutin.
Essig's book nicely complements David Tuller's Cracks in the Iron Closet (Boston: Faber &
Faber, 1996). They cover much the same territory, dating from the same period, and the
journalist and the academic sometimes even do their research in tandem. Essig provides
the theoretical analysis to organize Tuller's entertaining popular account. Both describe some
quirky personal encounters with individual Russians, but on the whole the picture they draw
rings true.
Reviews 161
Essig's main thesis, that there is no stable gay or lesbian identity in Russia, is certainly right.
Attempts by naive American activists to force American-style coming out on Russians have
proven misguided. Essig's argument that "post-identity politics" captures "some of what is
going on with queer activists in Russia" (81), however, is less convincing. Why should the lack
of a stable identity be necessarily "post-" anything? Yes, there may be parallels to post-gay
politics (parts of Tuller's book were included in the collection Pomosexuals), but pre-gay
identities in the US were in fact much the same. Material in both Essig and Tuller on the
construction of queer identity in terms of gender would surely be comparable to the fairy/
normal (trade) constructions based on gender inversion that Chauncey describes in Gay New
York (NY: Harper Collins, 1994) in the first part of this century. How would that be post-?
Furthermore, Essig's subjectivities really boil down to people acting the way they want to
act -to participate in social events (80). If these are activities rather than identities, what do
we make of terms like "nash chelovek" [one of us] and "takoi" [like that] (115) used to identify
gay people? Surely there is at least an implied contrast to "ne nash" and "ne takoi" that has
something of the feel of svoilchuzhoi?
Essig is also a bit out of her element in her discussion of queer culture, especially her
readings of Kharitonov and Viktiuk. To claim that Kharitonov's sexuality is "not an identity,
but a practice" (95) would require ignoring his "Listovka," in which he compares gay people
to Jews; surely Jewishness in Russia is an identity, not a practice. And to say that Viktiuk's
plays are about "love and art, not identity and politics" (101) ignores both Viktiuk's aesthetic,
which is markedly gay, and the profound connections between art and politics that is always at
the heart of Russian culture.
Queer in Russia has some curious quirks as well. The cover indicates one problem: it shows
a presumed queer in Russia who turns out to be not a Russian, but the author herself in
cruising drag at the Bolshoi. Perhaps Essig overdoes the subjective projection of her own
methodology and fantasy onto her material? The fictional conclusion, in which the first-
person narrator (Essig?) meets an Uzbek woman she takes for a man, seems equally gratu-
itous and jarring. Still, these are minor quibbles given that the book is the first stab at
grappling with queer identities in Russia.
Kevin Moss, Middlebury College
Zvi Gitelman, ed. Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997. Index. iv + 332 pp., $35.00 (cloth).
This wide-ranging volume elucidates one of the lesser-known aspects of Holocaust studies:
how the genocide of the Jews of Europe "was perpetuated in the USSR and how it was treated
after the war in Soviet scholarly publications and popular literature" (vii). As Daniel Roma-
novsky rightly notes in the chapter "Soviet Jews under Nazi Occupation in Northeastern
Belarus and Western Russia," ". . . the Holocaust in the occupied territories of the USSR is
probably the most obscure and least examined aspect of the history of the Jewish catastrophe"
(230). Western popular conceptions of the Holocaust often posit the locus of terror in Ger-
many proper or in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. Through this same prism, the image of the
Soviet Union at war (when the effort and sacrifice of Soviet fighters and civilians are acknowl-
edged at all) is dominated by the two symbols of the Blockade of Leningrad in Russia's north,
and the Battle of Stalingrad in the south. In the Soviet Union, themes of sacrifice, heroism and
Russian nationalism dominated portrayals of the war, overshadowing the Nazi genocide of the
Jews. "For several decades there was a virtual cult of World War II in the Soviet Union in

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American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages is collaborating

Brian Horowitz, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Based primarily on research conducted in 1994, Queer in Russia is an expanded version of

Kevin Moss, Middlebury College

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