Join Bridget Keown, Jackie Gronau, James Robinson, Matt Bowser, and Thanasis Kinias as we join PhD Candidate Feruza Aripova to discuss her research into the suppression of same sex desire in the Soviet Union, either through punishment in the Stalinist era to later pathologizing same sex desire as a disease to be treated. The 1930s saw the rolling back of both legalization of homosexuality and abortion that had been gained by the Revolution. Feruza guides us through what happened, how same sex desire continued in prisons and underground communities, and how her background growing up in Soviet Central Asia shaped her experience. How did same sex desire come to be defined as a threat to the Soviet state and Communist Party? Feruza guides us through her research in the archives in the Baltics, and private archives in Moscow. We round it up with talking about the Women’s Section of the Communist Party in exploring Soviet Feminism, specifically on Alexandra Kollontai.
Books Discussed:
What Is an Apparatus?: And Other Essays by Giorgio Agamben
Gay Life and Culture : A World History by Robert Aldrich
Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia : The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent by Dan Healy
The Keys to Happiness : Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia, by Laura Engelstein
“Of Other Spaces“, by Michel Foucault, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (April 1, 1986): 22–27. (doi:10.2307/464648)
Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai by A. Kollonati, trans. Alix. Holt
The Sexual Revolution in Russia : From the Age of the Czars to Today, by I.S. Kon
Forced Underground: Homosexuals in Soviet Latvia, by Rita Ruduša, trans. Daina Ruduša
Credits:
Brought to you by the Northeastern Graduate History Association
Sound editing: Matt Bowser
Produdcer: Dan Squizzero
Music by Kieran Legg
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