The Theoretical Underpinnings of Russia’s Law Against Gay Propaganda

Public lecture by Kevin Moss

MTA TK SZI Hegedüs terem, 2014. május 8. 16 óra

The Theoretical Underpinnings of Russia’s Law Against Gay Propaganda
Public lecture by Kevin Moss

The event will take place in the Hegedüs Room
(Institute of Sociology, CSS, HAS – Budapest, I. Országház u. 30.)
on May 8, 2014 at 4 p.m.

In the Soviet Union scholarly research on sexuality was virtually non-existent. For the past two decades, the absence of a politicized gay community and of any real scholarly consensus about sexuality have made it possible for new “scholars” to advance theories of sexuality that are very much at odds with those that are accepted in Europe and the US. The talk will examine these theoretical differences and place them in political and sociological context.

Kevin Moss is the Jean Thomson Fulton Professor of Modern Languages and Literature at Middlebury College with a joint position in the Russian Department and the program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. He holds degrees from Amherst College and Cornell University. He has written on Russian and East European film, on Olga Freidenberg, and on Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. For the past 20 years he has studied gay & lesbian culture in Russia and Eastern Europe, and in 1997 he edited the first anthology of gay writing from Russia, Out of the Blue: Russia’s Hidden Gay Literature (Gay Sunshine Press). Recently he has published on films from ex-Yugoslavia with gay protagonists. At Middlebury he has also taught an Introduction to Gay and Lesbian Studies, conducted the Middlebury Russian Choir, and advised the Middlebury Open Queer Alliance.