Conservative scholarship and emergent communities: how academics talk about sexual identities

In the past four years, Russia has made a very decisive turn to “traditional values” claiming that they a) exist and b) they include heterosexual intercourse within official sanctioned marital union. It further resulted in ban on promotion (or propaganda) of same-sex relationships in public among minors (2013). Russian LGBT community ended up fighting for their very right to be themselves. However, these initiatives were supported by the population because the majority believed that LGBTQI community is a very recent invention of Western liberal movements. Therefore, LGBT community ended up in the situation when they could not prove they had history and same-sex relationships were as traditional as heterosexual. Russia does not have a developed historiography of sexuality, including same-sex relationships. However, this turn to traditional values was a part of a global conservative movement, a part of a gender backlash, including anti-feminist turn. In this paper, I would like to focus on how academia and scholarship contributed to this turn in Russia and other (European) countries. As a case study, I would like to talk about archives and methodologies of study and reconstruction of the early histories of LGBTQI comunities to highlight common problems of LGBTQI movements for Europe as well as the role of academic contributions to promotion of the histories of 'emergent publics'.