Remembering Queer Futures: Reflections on Queer-Worldmaking in Russia and Central Asia in the 2000-2020

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Ethnographers and activists come together to share reflections on recent and past advocacy, organizing, and world-making among diverse queer communities in Russia and Central Asia in the first two decades of the 2000s. Marked by a period of openness, followed by a shift to repression, the stories from these time periods for the “elder millennial”/"first post-Soviet" generation are marked by a nostalgia for queer futures imagined and foreclosed. Papers on this panel discuss shifting terrain of Russian transgender organizing, the patronymic name as a site of political struggle for queer and feminist resistance to heteropatriarchy and the state in Russia and Central Asia, a reflection on the activism undertaken by one of the leading LGBTQ organizations in Bishkek (understood as a space of possibility for queer organizing in Central Asia in the 2000s-2010s), and an ethnographic study of technologies and narratives of trans embodiment in Bishkek. Taken together these accounts map complex strategies for survival and queer solidarity and joy in even as the legal terrain and cultural ground continue to change, and, the work of doing ethnography and advocacy in these times.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Alexa L Kurmanov, UC Berkeley

Papers

• Bois and 'Toys': The Stuff of Transmasculine Identity in 2010s Bishkek - Erica Pelta Feldman, U of Michigan

• 20 Years Later: Revisiting Organizing Aspirations of Labrys from the Realities of 2025 - Anna Kirey, RFSL (Sweden)

• Whose Name is it Anyway?: Feminists and Queers Fighting the State over Patronymic Policy - Cassandra Hartblay, U of Toronto Scarborough (Canada)

Discussant

• Georgy Mamedov, U of Melbourne (Australia)

Session Manager

• Nana Gulic, U of Toronto (Canada)