Authors

Olga Andreevskikh¹; Bella Rapoport ¹ Tampere University, Finland;  ² Independent Scholar, UK

Discussion

In contemporary post-Soviet spaces, where anti-LGBTQ policies and attitudes inherited from the Soviet colonial past co-exist with prolific or emerging media discourses on LGBTQ themes, identity-based categories belonging to the western discourses of ‘coming-out’ tend to be problematic. LGBTQ people who find themselves deprived of the opportunity to be publicly open about their sexuality seek and create alternative ways of challenging heteronormative norms. One such way is the appropriation of the fluid and elusive term ‘kivr’ (queer), in particular – for the purposes of implementing LGBTQ-rights activism performed on digital media platforms. Looking back at the introduction of the concept of ‘kvir’ into Russophone LGBTQ-rights discourses and tracing its growing significance for LGBTQ communities in the context of neoliberal societal trends and transformations of neo-conservative discourses, we reflect on the evolution of digital media strategies applied by queer female activists throughout the 2010-2020s and after Russia’s invasion in Ukraine in February 2022.Approaching queer media discourses from the decoloniality and intersectionality perspectives, we focus on media strategies applied by LGBTQ-rights activists who identify as women. Although largely relying on Russian media data for our discourse analysis, we briefly outline similarities and differences among activists representing various post-Soviet spaces (e.g., Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan