CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2011
| Author | Cicelis, Augustas |
|---|---|
| Title | READING BETWEEN THE LINES: SPATIAL COMMUNITIES OF MEN WITH SAME-SEX ATTRACTIONS IN LATE 20TH CENTURY LITHUANIA |
| Summary | This qualitative research which can be situated in the fields of queer geography and historiography is based on fifteen individual in-depth interviews with gay men (40 to 60 years old) from Lithuania. By looking at these fifteen oral histories focussed on experiences of men with same-sex attractions in late Soviet and early post-Soviet Lithuania, I analyse how back then these men saw themselves and others, how they searched for and made sense of scarcely available public information about same-sex attractions, how they created and transformed spaces and through that built communities and constructed their social identities. I argue that men with same-sex attractions were not plain victims of Soviet heteronormative discourses but they were subverting these discourses from inside. They were shapers of counter-discourses which were in turn followed by new (in-group) hierarchies between men with same-sex attractions. I argue that male same-sex desires, even though opposed and marginalised by the Soviet state, did not necessarily exist on the social margins. Rather, men with same-sex attractions were shaping spaces of tactics which allowed them to live and perform their sexual identities on the central Soviet stage. |
| Supervisor | Hadley Z. Renkin |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2011/cicelis_augustas.pdf |
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