CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Seleznova, Eugenia |
|---|---|
| Title | Sense Of Belonging In LGBTQIA+ Ukrainians Amidst The Full-Scale War With Russia |
| Summary | My thesis explores how LGBTQIA+ Ukrainians negotiate and navigate their sexual and national belonging amidst the full-scale Russian war against Ukraine, being intersecitonally minoritized through Ukrainian heteronormative biopolitics, Russian aggression, and Western European racialization. The necessity of the research is dictated by existing gaps in the literature on Ukrainian nationalism and sexuality interconnections; my research aims to add a decolonial perspective to existing debates, with respect to Russian colonialism. The research is based on 17 qualitative interviews conducted with LGBTQIA+ Ukrainians of various backgrounds, including various histories of (non)displacement due to the war, and an anonymous poll including 38 responses from a diverse group of Ukrainians. The thesis covers the topics of LGBTQIA+ Ukrainians’ experiences of growing up queer and Ukrainian within Russian coloniality; minoritization of those who fled to Europe due to their nationality; occurring “cleavage” in Ukrainian society between “those who stayed” and “those who left” due to the war, and of spatiotemporal aspects of belonging, manifesting themselves in placing a locus of agential investment. The research engages with the frameworks of disidentification and queer utopian futurity by Jose Esteban Munoz (1999; 2009), coloniality by Maria Lugones (2010) and Madina Tlostanova (2012), intersectionality (following Crenshaw, 1989, 1991), decentering sexuality studies from the West (following Kulpa and Miezelinska, 2011) and respectability of the nation built through gender and sexuality regulations by George Mosse (1985). Following my empirical findings, I argue that the intersectionality and decoloniality approaches should be employed when assessing connections between Ukrainian national identity and queerness, in order to avoid an oversimplification of Ukrainian queers’ attachment to their nationhood as assimilationist. |
| Supervisor | Renkin, Hadley Z. |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/seleznova_eugenia.pdf |
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