Queer Intimacies: Rethinking Audre Lorde’s Trip to the Soviet Union in 1976

• In Event: Queer Encounters: Defying Imperial and Racial Violence

Abstract

This paper delves into Audre Lorde’s journey to Soviet Eurasia in 1976. Focused on her writings, I specifically examine the connections Lorde formed with Soviet Chukchee writer Antonina Kymytval' to shed light on moments of transnational feminist solidarity and togetherness across the East/West divide, aspects often overlooked or forgotten today. Lorde’s notes on her trip to Soviet Eurasia have received minimal attention in scholarly publications or reviews, both in the U.S. and former Soviet Eurasia. In this paper, I challenge the void that places Lorde’s account of Soviet Eurasia at the periphery of transnational feminist thinking. Consequently, I propose that Lorde’s interaction with Kymytval' disrupted Cold War geopolitics and provided an anti-colonial pathway for the East and the West to unite against entangled imperialisms, along with their accompanying Eurocentrism and Russocentrism. Moreover, the encounter between Lorde and Kymytval' gave rise to transgressive forms of sociality and eroticism, unexpected under Soviet and Western political economies of intimacy and settler colonial logics.

Author

• Tatsiana Shchurko, U of South Florida