By Randall Rowe, PhD Student, Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Culture, The Ohio State University.
A migrant’s journey often starts due to reasons outside of his or her control. The catalyst for uprooting one’s life can be economic, political, cultural, or indeed all three of these combined. For Queer[1] migrants from Russia and the former USSR, the journey from their homeland to another country often began due to the violent and ubiquitous nationalism propagated by Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. The Russian President’s administration advocates for Russian moral superiority, which promotes homophobia in an effort to differentiate Russian society from ‘Western’ societies.[2] The sentiment of his administration’s policies with regard to LGBT[3] Russian citizens are fairly summed up in the so-called ‘Gay Propaganda’ law of 2013, which prohibits talking positively about “non-traditional” lifestyles.
“Rainbow Flag Sticker on Door.” Photo taken by researcher on 5/6/2018 in St. Petersburg, Russia. A Russian colleague delivered a warning to avoid this bar because those with “non-traditional” sexual orientations go there.
Thanks to a grant from the Global Mobility Project, I was able to speak with a number of Russian-speaking immigrants from the Russian Federation and the former Soviet Union whose experiences have been shaped by major forces such as queerness, migration, and nationalism. In these interviews, I found themes that contrasted with the more conventional narratives surrounding LGBT migrants.
In the past, I have analyzed media coverage of these migrants and their experience; by contrasting this coverage with the interviews, I have observed a dialogic relationship of Queer identity formation through migration experiences and news media representations in Russian and America/Western European outlets. Moreover, within this dialogic relationship, contradictions that obscure actual lived realities arise. For example, some of the Russian speaking immigrants, with whom I spoke, noted a tension in having to adopt a victim narrative as an LGBT immigrant from the former Soviet Union due to expectations fostered by media coverage. Additionally, concepts of self are challenged when they are taken out of their original cultural context and renegotiated in an American context with American English lexicon. Research examining cultural productions and political utilization of the “Other,” or those who are perceived to exist outside the constructed societal norms, in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation has been carried out by scholars such as Stephen Hutchings, Barbara Heldt, Nancy Condee, Stephen Norris, Judith Mayne and others. Though scholarship has addressed the “Other” to the Russian “I,” specifically how the “I” is foregrounded against the “Other” in a variety of ways, little has been done to specifically illuminate the circular relationship of media representation and lived experiences of LGBT migrants from Russia and the former Soviet Union. Going forward, I am seeking to uncover the extent to which this dialogic relationship shapes personal expectations, identities and, in turn, media representations. When compared with media representations of the experience of LGBT migrants, my interviews have managed to offer a more nuanced perspective of Queer migration from the former Soviet Union.
This is an article from a popular travel blog that was published on 7/2/2018. This question is valid, however it relies heavily on the narrative that says LGBT people are in danger when they go to (or live in) Russia. This narrative is carried in much of the media coverage and it often gets attached to LGBT immigrants from Russia and the former Soviet Union regardless of their actual, lived experience. Screen shot taken on 7/3/2018.
Many LGBT individuals whose lives are complicated or interrupted by the effects of nationalism and its harmful exclusivity have decided to sacrifice their prior lives in order to move to another country. Migration is difficult enough without considering the particularities of identifying as LGBT. By taking one’s sense of self out of its original cultural context, and bringing into contact with another cultural context, the migration experience shows how identities are negotiated. This negotiation may undermine official narratives found in mass media or government rhetoric, because these narratives emerge, in part, due to foreign policy goals. Thus, these narratives tend to ignore reality in favor of generalizations and assumptions. The instability of categories like Queer, migrant, nationalism, LGBT, etc. exposes problematic aspects of government policies, cultural productions and, most pertinent to this project, media representations; namely the conflict between essentialized categories used in the policies, productions, representations and the fluidity of identity. In order to better understand the situation, and perhaps, to better aid these LGBT migrants in their journeys and goals, further research into the real, lived, migration experience of LGBT Russians should be done so to cut through bias or false depictions.
Works Cited
Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ 1 May 1997; 3 (4): 437–465.
Healey, Dan. Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
[1] I use the term ‘Queer’ in the way that Cathy Cohen has defined it in her seminal essay, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” She defines Queer as a category that encompasses all groups or individuals who reject dominant narratives and negotiate their positions within these narratives similarly according to their shared, marginal relationship to power.
[2] Healey, Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi, Preface.
[3] I use this acronym literally. The experiences of the people, with whom I spoke, are that of individuals who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender. I acknowledge that the language used in this acronym and throughout this post is from a distinctly U.S. or “Western” epistemology, but it is a helpful lexicon insofar as I am analyzing objects and experiences that were produced within a U.S. or Canadian cultural-political context.