Russia’s Sexual Sovereignty

CBEES Advanced Seminar with Alexander Sasha Kondakov, Assistant Professor at the School of Sociology at the University College Dublin

Speaker: Alexander Sasha Kondakov, Assistant Professor at the School of Sociology at the University College Dublin, Ireland.

Discussant: Dmitrii Dorogov, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CBEES, Södertörn University.

Chair: Ramona Dima, Associate Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies, Södertörn University.

Abstract: The Russian government has recently strategically used both national and international legislation to advance an anti-gender and anti-LGBTQ agenda to strengthen non-democratic power structures. Starting from the mid-2000s, legal initiatives at various legislative levels in Russia targeted gender and sexuality. One of the most notorious examples of this was the “gay propaganda” law first introduced at the provincial level in 2006 and then arriving at the federal legislature in 2013. By the beginning of 2024, Russia developed a fairly sophisticated system of laws and policies officially devised as a defence mechanism from both internal and external challenges to its interpretation of “traditional family values” or in fact heteronormativity. This system includes (apart from the grown “gay propaganda” legislation), UNO’s resolutions on interpreting human rights through “traditional values”, internal policies designating “gender ideology” as a threat to national security, dubbing the LGBTQ movement an extremist organisation, etc. This paper traces the effects and the process of institutional building of this system and analyses its discursive workings by engaging with literature on sexual sovereignty. Originating in feminist and LGBTQ theorising of law, sexual sovereignty delineates personal boundaries when arguing about gender and sexuality in legal terms. Yet, the concept appears to be highjacked by conservative forces to reinterpret it as a national border which establishes political proprietorship over citizens’ sexuality through sovereign power of law. Russian government’s efforts in erecting anti-gender and anti-LGBTQ institution serve as a case in point in this respect.

Alexander Kondakov is an assistant professor at the School of Sociology at the University College Dublin, Ireland. He previously held positions at the University of Helsinki in Finland, the European University at St. Petersburg in Russia, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States. His work is primarily focused on queer criminology. Alexander’s studies were published in numerous academic journals. The research on anti-queer violence concluded with an open-access book, “Violent Affections: Queer Sexuality, Techniques of Power and Law in Russia”. The book is available for free download on the UCL Press website.