"With a Shade of Disgust": Affective Politics of Sexuality and Class in Memoirs of the Stalinist Gulag

Abstract

This article addresses a topic seldom discussed in gulag studies: same-sex relations in the camps. In particular, it deals with affective politics of sexuality and class in gulag memoirs and the role of disgust in the formation of sexual and class boundaries. It approaches disgust as existing between the individual and the social, the subjective and the historical, the internal and the external, and traces the ways the gulag memoirs constitute the disgusting, the disgusted, and the boundary between them. At the center of the article are descriptions of same-sex relations in the Kolyma camps of the 1930s-1950s by Evgenia Ginzburg and Varlam Shalamov. Based on a critical reading of these and other memoirs, Adi Kuntsman reveals how same-sex relations among the common criminals are constructed by the memoirists as disgusting because they go against gender norms and against class perceptions of sexual morality. Kuntsman shows how these perceptions of the appropriate, embedded within the habitus of the intelligentsia, are transformed in the memoirs into the universal category of humanness, locating the common criminals, and, by association, anyone who engages in same-sex relations, beyond the bounds of humanity.

Violent Affections: Queer sexuality, techniques of power, and law in Russia

“…The criminal and legal dimensions of the sexual discourse were centred on a firm distinction between 'active' and 'passive' roles in same-sex activities, in which the active party was somehow exonerated from any wrongdoing, on the one hand, as performing a legitimate version of masculinity (Kuntsman 2009;Healey 2018, 35-6, 111;Vincent 2020, 83). On the other hand, however, criminal article 121 comprised two sections: voluntary (up to 5 years in prison) and forced (up to 8 years in prison) sex.…”

Lesbian Lives in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia

“…Both female and male same-sex desire were symbolically confined to the prison camp, an environment where they could find expression and be tolerated as a surrogate of heterosexual relations and justified by the need to satisfy one's sexual urges in an 'unnaturally' same-sex environment. This created a strong association between homosexuality, social deviance and criminality in the eyes of the Soviet population (Zhuk, 1998;Kuntsman, 2009).…”

“…1 Much of the literature draws on a Foucauldian framework, and seeks to understand how modes of biopower mediated through the law, medicine and education, and theorised by Foucault as a constituent feature of modern liberal capitalist societies (Foucault, 1978(Foucault, /1998, were articulated under state socialism in Soviet Russia (Engelstein, 1993(Engelstein, , 1995Healey, 2001). Existing research is mostly based on archival and documentary sources, such as police records, court documents, medical literature and memoirs of Gulag prisoners (Healey, 2001;Kuntsman, 2009;Zhuk, 1998). Thus, the literature has tended to privilege the perspective of professionals or witnesses, and to focus very heavily on the environments of the clinic and the prison camp, where homosexuality was symbolically confined by the Soviet state.…”

Norms and Survival in the Heat of War: Normative Versus Instrumental Rationalities and Survival Tactics in the Blockade of Leningrad1

“…Actors reflexively monitor and negotiate meanings, roles, and practices (Giddens, 1984), and conscience can support norms (on the Gulag, cf. Kuntsman, 2009). Deliberation, reflection, and transgression interact dialectically with norms and material contexts, shaping the balance of norms and calculation and how to code acts or objects.…”