Authors

Olga Andreevskikh¹;  ¹ Tampere University, Finland

Discussion

While in contemporary Russia LGBTQ people are often deprived of the right to be publicly open about their sexuality, they nevertheless have some opportunities to express their sexual and gender identity. For example, the fluid and elusive term 'kvir' borrowed from the English 'queer' tends to be used as a means of empowerment, a new way for non-heteronormative people to create narratives of their existence without attempting a risky act of coming-out and without labelling themselves in western categories of 'gay,' 'lesbian,' 'bisexual' or 'transgender'. However, the fluidity and elusiveness of the term sometimes results in the reinforcement of the 'westernised' and 'colonialist' approaches to gender and sexuality among Russian LGBTQ communities.
The proposed paper explores the construction of 'kvir', as queer and queerness, in contemporary Russian LGBT and queer online media: news and entertainment websites; podcasts; activist and non-activist channels on Instagram, Telegram, and YouTube. Applying an intersectionality approach, I investigate how the appropriation of the western categories of queer and queerness by Russian LGBTQ media producers and prosumers initiates and promotes discourses of decolonisation and self-colonisation. Through a critical discourse analysis of selected media texts, I demonstrate how Russian media discourses on 'kvir' serve as a space where categories of class, age, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity intersect.