The Racialized Exilic Body in Slava Mogutin: A Queer Case Study

• In Event: Liberation or Racialization?: Intersectional Perspectives on Central, Eastern, Southeastern European, and Eurasian Queer Migrations

Abstract

Slava Mogutin emigrated to the United States in the 1990s, becoming the first Russian to receive asylum on the basis of his sexuality. But, while Mogutin quickly became emblematic of a new queer Russian sense of the body, his image was crafted carefully in conversation both with the former USSR and the United States — and with the advent of a reunited Germany, whose complex relationship with Russia became of focal point of Mogutin’s early work. With respect to the US, Mogutin consciously emulated the fault lines first carved by Eduard Limonov in the 1970s, in terms of race and class. With respect to the former USSR, and especially Russia, his bodily self-creation has shifted over time from exilic queer finding his place in the aftermath of the Cold War to the victorious male specimen who fights the casual acceptance of the sanitized gay man. This talk will examine both the early Mogutin, where ghosts of the USSR reign and WWII is the stuff of sexual fantasy, to the post Black Lives Matter and full scale invasion of Ukraine Mogutin, where the validity of queer men is grounded in the strength of their physical and sexual self-representation, to ask us to question the decisions we have made as a hegemonic neoliberal society. It is a place where sexuality, class, and race seemingly overcome national and citizenship status, but only in that they intersect and amplify them.

Author

• Luc Jean Beaudoin, U of Denver