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iCal calendarOn September 29 to October 2, a seminar "Intensive seminar: researching, reworking and representing Soviet and Socialist LGBT histories" takes place at Tallinn University and includes key note lectures by Dan Healey from Oxford University, Yevgeniy Fiks, a freelance artist from the New York City, and Kevin Moss from Middlebury College. The lectures are open for everyone.
The intensive seminar takes a decidedly inter-disciplinary approach by combining the discussions of artistic and scholarly practice, research and representation. As such, its focus will oscillate between the concerns of the past and the present, tackling, for example, the after-life of Soviet homosexuality in the contemporary arts and the reconstructions of the socialist queer life-worlds in the accounts of historians.
All lectures take place in room A-222.
Thursday, September 29
18.15 Dan Healey (University of Oxford, UK). Archives, histories, and insurgent projects of queer memory: The Chairman’s Tale as a Soviet story.
Recently, Anglo-American queer theorists have questioned the relevance of history and historical practices when communities look for “usable pasts” to nourish queer activism. Theorists have attacked the LGBT historian’s “stunted archive,” his reliance on “straight time,” and his sticky adherence to notions of “progress” through identity politics. Queer thinking in the Anglophone world has turned toward memory studies and trauma studies to reconsider how and what to remember, especially in a world still marked by homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and racism. In this talk, Healey discusses how these perspectives might appear in the former Soviet Union, where “remembering collectives” confront a volatile politics of memory, where queer memory work is just emerging, and where the work of the LGBT historian is, to put it mildly, rather difficult.
Dan Healey is Professor of Modern Russian History at the University of Oxford. He is the author of a forthcoming book of essays, Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). His numerous publications on sexuality and gender in the Russian world include the first full-length study of Russian and Soviet homosexuality, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), translated and revised as Gomoseksual’noe vlechenie v revoliutsionnoi Rossii: Regulirovanie seksual'no-gendernogo dissidentstva (Moscow: Ladomir, 2008).
Friday, September 30
14.15 Kevin Moss (Middlebury College, USA). Kharitonov’s “Listovka” and Soviet gay identity.
Early research on Soviet homosexualities portrayed sexuality in Russia as fluid and unconstrained by the Western homo/hetero binary. This talk will examine the works of the underground writer Evgeny Kharitonov (1941-1981) to find evidence of a kind of identity that would in fact be very familiar to scholars in the West, especially in his “gay manifesto,” “Listovka” (The Leaflet). Kharitonov writes openly about sex and deploys a camp sensibility that was incomprehensible to his straight writer friends. We will look at Kharitonov’s oeuvre through the lens of David Halperin’s How to be Gay to find a surprising number of parallels.
Kevin Moss, the Jean Thomson Fulton Professor of Modern Languages and Literature at Middlebury College (Vermont, USA) is Chair of the Russian Department and Director of Russian and East European Studies and holds a joint position in the Russian Department and the program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. Since 1990 he has studied gay and lesbian culture in Russia and Eastern Europe, and in 1997 he edited the first anthology of gay writing from Russia, Out of the Blue: Russia's Hidden Gay Literature (Gay Sunshine Press). Recently he has published on films from former Yugoslavia with gay protagonists and on pride parades.
16.30 Yevgeniy Fiks (freelance artist, New York). Ideological inversions: queering the Soviet project, ideology, and the Cold War.
Yevgeniy Fiks will discuss several of his projects, including “The Lenin Museum," which addresses the interconnections of Communist and LGBT histories; "Anatoly," an imagining of the story of the working-class boyfriend of the British communist and Soviet spy Guy Burgess in the 1950s Moscow; and "Homosexuality is Stalin's Atom Bomb to Destroy America" about the conflation of anti-communism/anti-Sovetism and homophobia in the US during the McCarthy era. Fiks will also preview his current project "Soviet Union, July 1991" about the first gay and lesbian conference that was held Moscow and Leningrad a few weeks before the collapse of USSR in August 1991.
The intensive seminar is hosted by Tallinn University School of Humanities and the Graduate School of Culture Studies and Arts (GSCSA).