Sexuality and Gender in Postcommunist Eastern Europe and Russia (review)

Once upon a time, I was a Sovietologist. This academic point of view made sense at the time, since in many ways the world really was broken up into East and West. When the Soviet Empire (which was really just the Russian Empire all along) fell apart, one would expect that the field of Soviet studies would have gone the way of eugenics and equally antiquated fields of knowledge. It did not. This fact may explain why a new anthology, Sexuality and Gender in Postcommunist Eastern Europe and Russia, edited by Aleksandar Stulhofer and Theo Sandfort, is such a tenuously held together collection of essays. I admit that all anthologies are mixed bags, but this mixed quality enters into this Frankensteinish book.

First there is the title, which not only is far too long and lacking in oomph but contains some of the problems of the book. The “sexuality and gender” part of the title points not to the intersection thereof but rather just to the fact that there are articles having to do with sexual identities and practices and other articles having to do with women. This is too bad, given the large amount of research on “intersectionality” or how the categories rely on one another to make sense. Next there is the “Postcommunist Eastern Europe and Russia” part of the title. It is increasingly clear that Romania and Russia and the Czech Republic, besides their relationship to the former Soviet bloc and their general proximity to one another, are hard to analyze as “similar” countries. Given the linguistic, religious, cultural, and economic differences between the countries considered, the reader is left wondering why we should consider these countries together at all. Add to this mix the fact that some of the pieces are highly quantitative without any theory, while others are all theory with little research, in other words, that literary criticism types are writing beside statisticians, and you get some idea of what a mixed-up mixed bag this book is. Yet I’m glad I read it. Despite its attempt to cover so much in so many different ways, Sexuality and Gender in Postcommunist Eastern Europe and Russia has a plethora of information on sex and gender practices in the former Soviet bloc.

For instance, the debate over the decriminalization of homosexuality in Romania, as Voichita Nachescu points out, played itself out within the larger debate about Romania’s cultural integrity versus its desire to join the European Union. Thus, Romania could simultaneously decriminalize homosexual acts, even though 86 percent of the population would not be willing to live next to homosexuals. The Romanian debate over the meaning of sexual practices occurred at the intersection of rising religiosity, nationalism, economic crisis, and the simultaneous possibility of becoming part of the larger (Western) European community. Similar debates played themselves out in many if not most of the other countries under consideration. Igor Kon points out that a powerful coalition between the Communist Party and the Russian Orthodox Church has made sex education in Russia a hotly contested debate that relies on a nationalist understanding of sexual knowledge as a danger to Russia’s youth and therefore to the very survival of Russia itself. Brian Baer, in his essay on contemporary representations of sexual minorities in Russia, suggests that the figure of the homosexual does not merely represent a threat within Russian culture but is a productive figure that allows Russian culture to work out the line between public and private, masculine and not masculine, innate and cultural. In this way, queer representations are not categories in crisis but rather a way in which categories can be worked out in the public sphere. Kevin Moss’s essay on representations of transvestite figures in Yugoslav cinema is an extremely interesting mediation on how a category in crisis (for example, in a male-to-female transvestite prostitute) can destabilize not just categories of gender, sex, and...