Post-Soviet LGBTQ+ Immigrants’ Responses to Racialized Hierarchies in the US: Negotiating Immigrant Marginalization and White Privilege

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

Abstract

How do post-Soviet LGBTQ immigrants in the U.S. respond to existing racialized hierarchies in the U.S. and navigate their own place within such hierarchies? I analyze opinions around race and racism expressed by post-Soviet LGBTQ immigrants online in 2017–2020, focusing on the “flame wars” generated in response to the Trump Administration anti-asylum policies and racial justice protests which followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd. I argue that racism and racialization are two-sided processes where the racialized subject can exercise agency in negotiating their place in a racialized hierarchy thus making the racializing power flow both ways. For example, post-Soviet LGBTQ immigrants may take the following positions regarding race and racialization in the U.S.: 1) identification with power (white supremacy); 2) willful refusal, or inability to accept the reality of structural racisms in the U.S.; and 3) queer anti-racist solidarity borne out of a recognition of shared vulnerability the post-Soviet asylum-seekers share with all other immigrants and racialized people in America. The presentation contributes to the existing scholarship on post-Soviet diasporas, juxtaposing this new research with previous representations of Russian-speaking immigrants – queer and straight alike – as always conservative, right-leaning, nationalist, and racist. Specifically, the experience of homophobic police brutality some LGBTQ asylum-seekers had in their countries of origin, compounded by their precarious status as asylum-seekers and a strong political identification with the radical queer activism in the U.S. allows for a production of new forms of political subjectivities and new forms of imagined immigrant belongings.

Author

• Alexandra Novitskaya, U of Maryland, Baltimore County