Queerness — What Would the Queers Do? Analytical Concepts, Fluidity, and the Potential of Queer Semantic Fields for Global History

From Firenze University Press Journal: CROMOHS

Sébastien Tremblay, Europa-Universität Flensburg

In 2017, queer activists in Russia began to alert the international community about new forms of concentration camps in the North Caucasus, releasing information on the in carceration and torture of queer individuals following top-down queerphobic policies by the authoritarian regime of Ramzan Kadyrov. As the issue attracted international attention, journalists started questioning the Chechen leader. Kadyrov denied reports of human rights violations, retorting that such abuse could not take place in the south Russian republic because: ‘we don’t have those kinds of people here. We don’t have any gays. If there are any, take them to Canada.’ For Kadyrov, the use of ‘gays’ seemsto be synonymouswithall other forms of non-heteronormative desires and sexualities. This typeof discourse is obviously not unique to the Russian Federation but historians specialised in Russian history have highlighted how queer politics has become an important tenet of culture wars beyond the Euro-American world, where populist or authoritarian leaders, such as Vladimir Putin, contrasta fundamentalist Christian vision of the world with a so-called ‘decadent western civilisation.’ Dan Healey examine show so-called ‘anti-propaganda laws’that muzzlequeer activists in Russia are parts of an anti-Western and would-be anti-imperialist rhetoric, a counter-modelto homonationalist discourses in the Global North. Leaving aside the bad faith argumentsof populist leaders, what does that mean for historians writing a global history of queerness?Is queer history an imperialist project? Is using concepts such as gay and lesbian to describe experiences in the Global South a new form of cultural universalism? How can we write the story of gay Chechen men if they do not necessarily define themselves as gay?

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/cromohs-14502

Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/cromohs/article/view/14502