Sexuality and Decoloniality

Publication date 09.01.2025

The course aims to engage students in a dialogue with different disciplinary frameworks that explore the concepts of sexuality and decoloniality, and their intersection with other epistemic categories. These frameworks, that include anthropology, sociology, gender, queer and trans* studies, are introduced with attention to and focus on the “decolonial option” as a method and source of knowledge. Taking Ukraine as a starting point of “knowing from” and unraveling perspectives from Central and Eastern Europe and beyond, the course will cover a range of topics, which include but are not limited to:

understanding disability, gender, sexuality, and race as analytical categories;
interconnections between modernity and the production of ‘indecent’;
the relationship between coloniality and construction of sexual and gender regimes;
the constructs of “human” and “non-human,” and their connection to reproduction and sexuality;
racialization, ethnicization, and the ideas of “progress” and “transformation”;
geopolitics of sexual citizenship;
decolonial thinking, feeling, and acting as a political practice

Disciplinary frameworks of the course: sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, gender/queer studies.

Learning outcomes:

The course offers an intensive learning experience, placing questions relevant to Ukraine into a transnational and transdisciplinary perspective. At the end of the course, students will have expanded their knowledge of critical concepts of social theory, political theory, international relations, political philosophy, and cultural studies. The course also develops the participants’ critical thinking and skills in academic discussion in English.

Course directors: nadiya chushak, Olena S. Dmytryk

Course coordinator: Tamara Khurtsydze

Mentors: Anna Bochorishvili, Daria Hetmanova, Tamara Khurtsydze, Anastasiia Morozova, Svitlana Shymko, Iryna Tantsiura.

Introductory class

Sexuality and Decoloniality. An Introduction to the Epistemologies of Sexuality

Mariya Mayerchyk (Ukraine-Germany)

Meeting the course team and commenting on the syllabus.

Readings: two chapters from the unpublished monograph by Mariya Mayerchyk

Gendering Global Entanglements - Decolonizing Inequalities

Imaginaries of Sexual Citizenship on European Peripheries

Asexual Intersections

Feminist Investigations of the Sexual Revolution in Socialist East Central Europe

Decentering Queer Zoo Politics

Marianna Szczygielska (Germany)

This lecture draws from my current book project that explores how, through capture and display, the zoo functions as a catalyst for negotiations over gender, sexuality, and race across species boundaries. In my talk, I propose to decenter the narratives on captive sexualities by exploring how the naturalization of homosexuality functions in a non-Western context. By focusing on the single case of an African elephant from the Poznań Zoo (Poland) labeled “homosexual” by one of the city councilors in 2009, I investigate the overlaps between the colonial legacy of the institution of the zoo in Eastern Europe and the post-socialist context of sexual and gender politics in the region. The elephant, first imagined as an agent of imperial pride, turns into both a symbol of shame for conservative politicians and a symbol of pride for local LGBTQ activists. Elephants embody colonial longings as animals that are both big game (hunted for ivory, taxidermy, meat) and megafauna (spectacular mammals on display). I show how the juncture between sexuality and animality is necessarily pre-structured by discrete references to race coded as tokenism, naturalization, and foreignness. Caught between the constructions of “modernity” and “traditionalism,” “Europe” and “the former East,” “progressive” and “conservative politics,” this case reveals complex negotiations of national and sexual identities that are taking shape around the notion of the naturalness of homosexuality.

Mandatory reading:

Szczygielska, Marianna. 2017. “Zoos”, in Juno Salazar Parreñas ed. Gender: Animals. Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks, 247-262. Farmington Hills: Macmillan.

Recommended reading:

Szczygielska, Marianna. 2022. “Animal Sex in Public: Warping Time and Sexuality in the Zoo.” Environmental Humanities 14 (3): 641–660.

Seymour, Nicole. 2013. Chapter 1 “Locating Queer Ecologies,” in Strange Natures. Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination. Chicago: University Ilinois Press.

Feminist Queer Crip Genealogies from the Post-Socialist “East“

Midterm Reflections + Student Colloquium

Orientalizing Desire: coloniality of queerness in Central Asia in late Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Periods

Feruza Aripova (USA)

In light of a few comparative studies that describe the impact of Soviet homophobic legislation on its former borderlands, the following paper traces the continuity of the Soviet colonial legacy of homophobia and homophobic othering in Central Asia during the early Soviet period. It investigates how the Russian imperialist views of same-sex practices in the region contributed to the Orientalist perception of the region which subsequently led to the criminalization of same-sex practices by the Bolsheviks; and further explores the notion of Russia’s gaze into the unfamiliar sexual realm of the East and its subsequent homoeroticizing of its own Orient.

By looking at the development of the early Bolshevik ideas of freedom in sexual affairs,

this project focuses on the advancement of Bolshevik gender and sexual politics in the metropole vs. periphery. What role did gender and sexual ideologies play in the transition between the old tsarist regime and the Bolshevik program of modernization? The repression of religious traditions prompted the reconstruction of gender laws and the permission of certain sexual freedom, including the decriminalization of homosexuality, in the new socialist state.

Construction of a new socialist modernity, however, contradicted a wide range of same-sex practices and behaviors in Russia’s former imperial borderlands like Central Asia. Coinciding with the women’s liberation campaign, the early criminalization of male same-sex practices in 1926 in the Uzbek Socialist Republic demonstrates a dual burden of Soviet modernity, whereby women’s emancipation came with the erasure of sexual ambivalence in the region and same-sex practices. Drawing on travelogues, memoirs, and diaries of European travelers and ethnographers, and Russian administrators and settlers, the lecture seeks to examine the origins of Soviet homophobia in the region that were deeply rooted in the Russian colonial project and subsequently resulted in the criminalization of homosexuality in the Uzbek Criminal Code in 1926.

Readings:

Aripova, Feruza. 2022. Tracing the Effects of Soviet Gender and Sexual Politics in Central Asia. Central Asian Affairs 9: 208–234.

Northrop, Douglas. 2016. “Introduction”, in Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia, 1-31. Cornell University Press.

Rethinking Sex, Violence, and War

Queering Ukrainian Literature Canon: to Academia and Back

Final class

Guidelines for students

An important note for course participation:

We have zero tolerance to

Homophobic, transphobic, and misogynist statements and comments;
Racist, ableist, and ageist statements and comments;
Hate speech of any kind;
Aggressive domination and disrespect to other students, mentors, and instructors;
Expressions of any support of Russian military aggression against Ukraine.

Learning process:

Lectures will be given by the course directors and/or invited external guests, who are usually experts in the topic of the week. Lectures will be interactive, involving roundtable conversations with the guests and discussions with students. The students, whose conditions make it impossible to listen to the classes synchronically, can use an asynchronous mode with video recordings of the lectures uploaded to Moodle. Students who cannot attend the class but wish to count as participants should write a brief “takeaway” after having watched the recording. More specifically, they should write down two main ideas discussed in the class and ask one question. The written takeaways should be uploaded to Moodle at the relevant session within two weeks after the seminar.

The seminars are intended to discuss the concepts, arguments, follow-up questions, etc.,

brought up in the lectures and critically reflect on the readings assigned for the week. Importantly, seminars will take place in small groups under the facilitation of 2-3 mentors – that’s why we also call them “mentoring sessions.” Mentoring assists students in mastering the course material and provides additional space for exchange, discussion, and peer-to-peer learning. Attending mentoring sessions is optional yet recommended: numerous IUFU students from previous cohorts assessed mentoring as the most valuable part of their learning experience. Furthermore, the students who participate in mentoring sessions in an active and meaningful way can be nominated by mentors to receive additional credits.

Authors

nadiya chushak

nadia chushak is a professor at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and is an activist, educator, and anthropologist with a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia. Their research centers around the culture of memory, nostalgia, and post-socialism, with a particular focus on identity politics, memory, feminism, and queer theory and practice.

Olena S. Dmytryk

Dr Olenka Syaivo Dmytryk received their PhD in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge. Their work focuses on Ukraine and is located at the crossing of social movements studies, the histories and theories of sexuality and gender, and visual culture studies. Their current research aims to better understand the role of the Internet in sustaining or limiting sexual and gender dissent in Ukraine.

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