Between the Labor Camp and the Clinic: Tema or the Shared Forms of Late Soviet Homosexual Subjectivities

• Published in: Slavic review Vol. 77; no. 1; pp. 6 - 29
• Main Author: Clech, Arthur
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, USA Cambridge University Press 2018
• Subjects: Conflict; Criminality; CRITICAL FORUM: SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET SEXUALITIES; Discourse; Gays & lesbians; Homosexuality; Illnesses; Interviews; LGBTQ studies; Medicine; Men; Sexuality; Social identity; Stigma; Subjectivity; Topics; Women; New York; United States > US; Union of Soviet Socialist Republics > USSR; Russia
• ISSN: 0037-6779; 2325-7784
• DOI: 10.1017/slr.2018.8

Based on interviews with twenty-one women and fifteen men who expressed homosexual desires during the late Soviet period, this article seeks to shed light upon Soviet homosexual subjectivities in the Russian SFSR. As a result of the drive to “close off the entire topic of gay subjectivity to respectable inquiry, so as to prevent gayness from ever again being understood as a sickness,” queer studies has for a long time been “silent” on this topic (David Halperin). My objective here is to take into account both the effects produced by Soviet medical and penal discourse on the subjectification of individuals who experience homosexual desire and the room to maneuver open to individuals for constructing the subject of their sexuality from their experience. I suggest that men and women were able to construct homosexual subjectivities that cannot be reduced to binary stigmatization as either sickness or criminality. In reality, men and women rendered themselves the subjects of their homosexuality in confrontation simultaneously and non-exclusively with both the pathologizing and criminalizing definitions of homosexuality.