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Book Reviews 11 Book Revws (jk/d) 2/7/01 1:29 pm Page 405 Book Reviews QUEER DESIRE IN RUSSIA Laurie Essig Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999, 244 pp., ISBN 0-8223- 2346-X With Queer in Russia, Laurie Essig has written an interesting, challenging and very complex book that deserves attention from both queer theorists and researchers on contemporary Russia. Depicted on the cover wearing men’s clothing in front of Moscow’s famous Bolshoi Theatre (which is, significantly enough, under renova- tion), author Essig seeks, in her own ‘inappropriate’ way, to make clear the literal ambiguity embedded in the book’s title and to flesh out the seriousness with which its subtitle should be taken. ‘Sex’ here is a fluid and dubious category, and so are ‘self’ and ‘the other’. For when you turn the book over and look at its back cover, you learn that the specific Queer in Russia to whom the title seems to refer is none other than the author posing as the other – that is, as a Russian ‘trans- sexual’. Though it may take quite a while to fully realize the book cover’s function as a kind of puzzle picture where you can never be sure of exactly what or who is rep- resented, this entertaining and provoking opening is symptomatic of Essig’s writing style in more ways than one. First, it discloses the author’s deep resistance to epistemological clichés and easy interpretations: while reading the book, you are constantly forced to reconsider the concept of identity and, as the Russian queers of the 1990s surface as subjectivities instead of fixed identities, re-evaluate the identity politics of queerness, which are usually taken for granted by the political movements of lesbians and gay men in the so-called western world. Second, Essig calls into question the very genre of sociological fieldwork research itself, i.e. the book’s own identity, as she eventually draws in her own dreams and fictional writings in order to make visible the endless criss-crossings of gender in her own cultural imaginaries. All this she does in a compressed American intel- lectual style that shuns the elaborate explanations and richness of detail of, for instance, German, or for that matter Russian, Wissenschaft. I must confess that at times I wished for the latter. It might have erased the feeling I sometimes had of not having the loose ends fully picked up and tied nicely together. Essig’s background for writing the story of the Russian queer is a sociological fieldwork project that she undertook in Moscow a year after President Yeltsin, in 1993, signed a bill that repealed the law against consensual sex between adult men (lesbians were never subject to legislation). Having been travelling to Russia since the mid-1980s, Essig is moreover in a perfect position to observe the transition period, as this phase is known, and eventually see the door to the ‘iron closet’ The European Journal of Women’s Studies Copyright © 2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 8(3): 405–412 [1350-5068(200108)8:3;405–412;018265] 11 Book Revws (jk/d) 2/7/01 1:29 pm Page 406 406 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 8(3) slowly opening. The main bulk of her book thus explores the process of the Russian queer’s coming into public being in the 1990s. The author is more than professionally well qualified for this task. Besides mastering the Russian language and fieldwork techniques (including interviews and analyses of popular culture), she also competently juggles with a whole range of theoretical classics (such as Foucault, Habermas, Butler, Haraway and many others); however, as a lesbian and an American Jew, she has some very specific qualifications in relation to her subject. In a country such as Russia, where the social or political preconditions for setting value on tolerance and difference are non-existent, homosexuality is generally viewed as an offence against ‘nature’ (essential femininity and essential masculinity) and Jewishness as a threat to essential ‘Russianness’. Add to this the outspoken anti-American feeling that, around the time Essig did most of her research, was beginning to replace the enthusiastic ovations given to anything western in previous years. Nonetheless, the author remains extremely loyal, perhaps at times too loyal, to the Russian queers, even when they openly air their chauvinistic views. The point, however, is not so much that, in this way, she avoids the pitfalls of colonial condescension, which she obviously does; rather, the impressive aspect is that this partly Rus- sianized situatedness enables her to take a critical look at western/American identity politics with its ‘multicultural imperative: everyone must have a fixed and stable identity or, better yet, identities’ (p. 55). The belief that we are a race, a gender, a sexuality, Essig notes, has blindfolded us to the ‘possibility of maintain- ing “mobile subjectivities”, of paying attention to the way in which we inhabit identities with our practices’ (p. 55). Thus, the absence in Russian society of a similar faith in identity never becomes the sign of ‘lack’ or ‘backwardness’ that is so frequently encountered elsewhere. The reader is hereby spared the naive pre- sumption that, in due course, Russian queers will be just like American ones. ‘They’ are not collapsed into ‘the Americans’ (though the book sometimes identi- fies the USA with the ‘West’ or the ‘western world’). Composed of four parts, titled ‘The Other’, ‘Self’, ‘Intersection’ and ‘Sex’, the book opens with a Foucauldian-inspired account of the expert gaze on the sexual other. The first gaze is that of the law. Stating that the homosexual male was con- structed as a criminal only in Stalin’s time, Essig explores the Soviet view of homoerotic desire as a facet of fascist ideology. This politicizing approach was publicly propagated in 1934 by the writer Maxim Gorky, whose hysterical obses- sion with sexual perversions from the beginning of his career made him well suited for his role as the founding father of socialist realism, with its cult of the straight proletarian. Considering the fact that these two regulations – one regulat- ing men’s erotic desire, the other their literary desire – were enforced almost simultaneously, it seems strange that she does not point to this configuration. After all, the construction of the ‘normal’ is as much a part of the construction of the ‘perverted’ as vice versa. No less scary than this version of crime and punishment for the male homo- sexual is the medico-psychiatric gaze, which Essig names ‘the Cure’ because it allegedly aimed at treating the ‘diseases of desire’. Most of the ‘patients’ who were ‘cured’ during the Soviet regime were women, and Essig tells a horrible story of the medical interventions that were (and still are) made in order to correct the ‘sluggishly manifesting schizophrenia’, as lesbianism was euphemistically called. As Essig acutely observes, this diagnosis ‘made sure that love between women dare not speak its name, because lesboerotic attraction literally had no name of its own’ (p. 28). Elements of the ‘Cure’ could consist of anything from drug therapies to sex change operations. Included in this chapter are a few very illuminating stories of the identity choices made by three persons (since two of them identify 11 Book Revws (jk/d) 2/7/01 1:29 pm Page 407 Book Reviews 407 as men and the third as a woman, though not as a ‘lesbian’, I cannot think of a more appropriate term). By combining these autobiographies with her descrip- tions of the ‘Cure’, Essig provides the reader with a wealth of insight into Russian discourses on gender, sex and desire. The same is true of the book’s second part, which zooms in on queer self-representations and the rise and fall of western-style activism which makes up the pivot of the author’s reflections. Instead of a pro- longed commitment to a political movement founded on sexual identity (e.g. a movement for lesbians and gay men), Essig notes that many Russian queers have eventually joined nationalist parties marked by clear fascist overtones (Zhiri- novsky’s party, for instance). Envisioning a possible parallel to Nazi Germany in the third part, she briefly outlines the history of the Nazi gays whose political illusions cost them their lives. However, this is where I lose sympathy. I do not find her evidence for such a prophesy convincing, and I cannot help feeling that she is taking only a fraction of Russian queerness and blowing it up to dramatic proportions. Moreover, I find it puzzling that she unreflectingly ends up with what seems to be a confirmation of the old Soviet view on homosexuality: queers were fascists, fascists were queer. Nonetheless, I strongly recommend this book. Because of its complexity and writing style, it may not be what publishers consider a textbook, but it certainly deserves to be widely used in postgraduate women’s, lesbian and queer studies. Mette Bryld University of Southern Denmark INVENTIONS OF THE SELF IN LESBIAN GOTHIC Pauline Palmer Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions London and New York: Cassell, 1999, 168 pp. In literature and in popular culture, a so-called Gothic revival is going on. Various cultural genres manifest a play on Gothic paraphernalia and the classic Gothic plot. Present-day youth culture, indeed, includes a subculture which calls itself Gothic, organizes Gothic parties, plays Gothic music and honours narrowly defined Gothic dress codes. The result of this play with the genre and conventions of Gothic is called neo-Gothic by Susanne Becker (1999).
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