Conclusions: From Russian to (Post)Socialist Sexualities

Abstract

In this final chapter, I summarise the key empirical and conceptual contributions of this research monograph, while also engaging with current debates in queer and sexuality studies about theoretical ethno-centrism, the value of situated knowledge and queer geotemporalities. These debates have been particularly prominent in work on non-western sexualities and ‘global queering’, and reflect pressing conceptual, epis-temological and methodological issues that are widely struggled with. A key strand of these debates has focused on critical approaches to regions, understood both as subnational and supranational territorial units (Binnie, 2013). For example, work on South Asian sexualities has pointed out that essentialism, the reproduction of western-centric, hegemonic queer temporalities, and the perpetuation of symbolic violence against the non-western ‘Other’ are potential pitfalls often found in regional approaches to territorially bounded areas (Johnson, Jackson and Herdt, 2000; Boelstorff, 2005; Wilson, 2006; Jackson, 2009a, 2009b). Nonetheless, a critical, post-Orientalist and transnational regionalism has also been invoked as a potentially productive counterweight to hegemonic western-centric theorising, and the widespread assumption that ‘legible queer sexualities derive from US-inflicted Western modes of sexuality or from Western-based systems of modernity, such as capitalism’ (Wilson, 2006).