Sex, Surveillance, and Survival

Julie A. Cassiday has taught Russian language, literature, and culture, as well as Comparative Literature, at Williams College (Massachusetts, USA) for over thirty years. Her research focuses on performance, in the broadest sense of this word, in Russian and Soviet culture, and she has published articles on topics ranging from early nineteenth-century Russian drama to Stalinist film, the so-called cult of personality surrounding Vladimir Putin, and the Eurovision Song Contest. She has published two monographs, the first titled The Enemy on Trial: Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen (Northern Illinois University Press, 2000) and the second, Russian Style: Performing Gender, Power, and Putinism (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2023). She also helped to edit the award-winning volume of essays, Russian Performances: Word, Object, Action (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2018). The latter two reflect her long-term interest in and research on gender and sexuality in post-Soviet popular culture, which has led to her current research on a genre of popular romance called “boys love” in Russophone space.Alexander Sasha Kondakov is an Assistant Professor at the School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Ireland. His truly international experience includes holding positions at the University of Helsinki (Finland), the European University at St. Petersburg (Russia), the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA). Kondakov’s work is primarily focused on law and sexuality studies, more specifically on queer sexualities. His latest research on violence against LGBT people in Russia has gotten attention in the international media. It concluded with an open-access book, Violent Affections: Queer Sexuality, Techniques of Power, and Law in Russia (UCL Press, 2022).

• Chapter 1:Introduction: Scholarship in Troubled Times.- Part 1: Methodologies for Reading Eastern Europe Queerly.- Chapter 2: A Duty to Tell Histories: Cruising the Archipelago of Dan Healey’s Research.- Chapter 3: The Birth of Queer History in East-Central Europe, or the Missionary Antics of Sister Appassionata della Bawdy House.- Chapter 4: Reading Gay History Queerly: Literary Works as Historical Documents.- Chapter 5: Queering the Russian Archive.- Part 2: Literature and the Queer Voice.- Chapter 6: I loved you like a father’: The Sidelong Glance from Russophone Boys Love.- Chapter 7: Queering the Fairytale: Bathhouse Sex and the Little Devil of Money in the Periphery of the Russian Empire.- Chapter 8: Bi Eyes in the Archives: Reading Bisexuality in Gennady Trifonov’s Prison Camp Novella Setka (1994).- Chapter 9: Silenced Voices of the Soviet Periphery: Georgian Female Writers and Stalin’s Cult of Personality.- Part 3: New Perspectives on and from the Archives.- Chapter 10: The Surveillance of Homosexuals in the Wartime Sudetenland, 1938-1945.- Chapter 11: Soviet medical internationalism in Cuba as a history of emotion, 1960s-1970s.- Chapter 12: Islands of Humanity, or Born of the Devil’s Blood? New Debates on Gulag Medicine.- Chapter 13: The Gulag Letters: The Russian History of Gay Love.- Chapter 14: The Securitization of Sexuality in Putin’s Russia: A Media Analysis.- Chapter 15: Afterword: My Russias.