Event overview
Dan Healey, Professor of Modern Russian History at the University of Oxford, will deliver the 2018 Goldsmiths Queer History Lecture.
A Homophobic Present and the Queer Past: Do Post-Soviet Queers Need History?
LGBTQ movements in the countries of the former Soviet Union confront sharp challenges and frightening prospects. ‘Official’ homophobia has become embedded in the politics of populist ruling parties. Russia’s 2013 ‘gay propaganda’ law set the tone for the region, with pro-Russian political forces making copy-cat proposals to legislatures in Ukraine and elsewhere. The Kremlin is leading a cultural war on queer knowledge that is unlike anything ever before seen in the region’s history. At the same time, this cultural war in old media and online stimulates actual violence against LGBTQ people, as the recent round-up of gay men in Chechnya with their illegal confinement, torture, and murder demonstrated. In such circumstances, do LGBTQ movements in Eurasia ‘need’ History? Should LGBTQ groups bother trying to excavate the queer past of their national homelands? Is History ‘too straight’ to matter? In this talk I will ask what knowledge of the queer past can contribute to the fight against homophobia in post-socialist Eurasia, and examine some recent queer projects of history-making.
Professor Dan Healey
Dan Healey is Professor of Modern Russian History at the University of Oxford. His latest publication is Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). He is the author of Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); translated as: Gomoseksual’noe vlechenie v revoliutsionnoi Rossii: Regulirovanie seksual’nogo-gendernogo dissidentstva, (?oscow: Ladomir, 2008); and is co-editor of volumes on Russian masculinities and on Soviet medicine.
This event is free and open to the public but registration is necessary
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Nov 2018 | 6:00pm - 8:00pm |
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