Subtext or Text?: Queer Temporalities and Popular Culture

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel examines the ambiguous role and subversive potential of queerness from the late Soviet era to the present day. Breaking down binaries, upending social codes, and disrupting seemingly "stable" binaries, queerness presents a particularly dangerous stance in both the Soviet Union and in contemporary Russia. In his paper, “Who Is Straight on Planet Pluk?,” Pavel Savgira analyzes the 1986 film Kin-Dza-Dza!, the only example of overt queerness in popular Soviet cinema, as a critique of political binaries of the era and an anticipation of their dissolution. In her talk, “Jolly Fellows (2009) - Russia, Drag, and The Question of Acceptance,” Helen Marhoul discusses the unique portrayal of queerness in the 1990s drag scene in the film Jolly Fellows. Her work centers on the interplay of acceptance and rejection of queerness in Russia. Ekaterina Tutatina frames her paper “Why Do People Queer the Russian Literary Canon with Fan Fiction?” around the corpus of queer fan fiction based on classical novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The paper examines how the homosocial subtext of their novels becomes an explicitly homosexual text in fanfiction, and the reasons that such a practice has become so commonplace and popular among Russophone readers.

Sub Unit

• Gender/LGBTQ Studies

Chair

• Pavel Savgira, UCLA

Papers

• Who Is Straight on Planet Pluk? - Pavel Savgira, UCLA

• Jolly Fellows (2009): Russia, Drag, and the Question of Acceptance - Helen Liběna Jade Marhoul, McGill U (Canada)

• Why Do People Queer the Russian Literary Canon with Fanfiction? - Ekaterina Tutatina, McGill U (Canada)

Discussant

• Kevin Moss, Middlebury College