Representation and Performativity in Uzbek Cinema of the 1920s

• In Event: Dear, Queer, and Slow: Soviet Cinema Remembered

Abstract

This paper examines questions of representation and performativity in early Soviet films made in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, particularly with respect to intersections and complexities related to gender, sexuality, religion, and Soviet ideology. As scholars such as Nigora Karimova have argued, these films - like Soviet films from many republics - rely upon a binary in which almost all that is seen as traditional is depicted as bad while all that is good principally is Soviet and new. Queerness is fascinatingly part of this dichotomy, and, as this paper proposes using the example of The Second Wife (Mikhail Doronin, 1927), offers a contrasting lens.

Author

• Vincent Morrison Bohlinger, Rhode Island College