CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Efimova, Anna |
|---|---|
| Title | The Nexus of Sexuality, Power-Knowledge, and Nation-building in fin de siecle Russian Caucasus (1906-1915) |
| Summary | This thesis aims to understand how sexual categories and norms constituted a system of power-knowledge through the means of bodies. It investigates medical discourses around male same-sex relations and law enforcement of male sodomy and public moral statutes in the post-1905 Caucasus (1906-1915). In doing so, it engages with Michel Foucault’s concepts of care of the self and the other, power-knowledge, and “the art of living”. Theoretical framework also incorporates Ann Laura Stoler’s critique of Foucault's Europe-centric perspective on the history of sexuality in Western Europe, Susan Layton’s understanding of Russian Orientalism, and Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry of colonial discourse. This thesis works with a range of previously unpublished and published primary sources from Georgia and Russia, such as criminal cases, medical articles, and imperial criminal codes. I argue that sexual management was implicitly incorporated into assimilationist nation-building efforts through the discourses on the Russian civilizational mission in the Caucasus, which included sexual disciplining of the natives through legal means, as my analysis of the medical writings suggested. The gradation of otherness constituted the knowledge used in the process of nation-building. Within this gradation, sexuality emerged as a cultural and moral category that defined the civic status of Caucasian nationalities within the Empire. Simultaneously, discourses that constituted the gradation of otherness deployed mimicry as a strategy of power-knowledge. Also, I will argue that higher branches of the imperial Georgian judiciary tended to rely on moral grounds found in imperial criminal codes to prosecute crimes associated with male sodomy rather than invoking sexuality as a cultural category. This was a result of two complementary factors: the autocratic and inflexible legal system and the destabilised authority of the medical discourse. |
| Supervisor | Hadley Z. Renkin |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/efimova_anna.pdf |
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