The Russian Homosexual Subject: Science and Court Witness

Homosexuality has become an issue of global concern and divided states in two conflicting parties: those adopting same-sex marriage legislation and those who legally discriminate against their LGBT-citizens. Russia resides in that part of the world which refers to homosexuality as medical deviance and administrative offence. As researchers argues, Western modernist homosexual subject (and eventually identity) has never been born there. This paper deals with Russian academic articles and court decisions to analyse its blurred and fluid notions of homosexuality. By looking at academic publications and expert witnesses in courts that relate to discussion of homosexuality in Russia, I want to answer the question of how translation of modernist homosexual subjects in local context occurs. This local understanding of homosexuality sees it as not attached to a particular human body, thus the ‘homosexual subject’ – in Foucauldian terms – is formed in the Russian discourse in a different from Western modernity way. Both types of analysed texts discuss homosexuality in relation to the ‘propaganda’ law adopted by the State Duma in 2013.