Seminar: “To Stop Means to Become Oneself”: Queer Temporalities in Post-Socialist Russian Culture
We cordially invite you to another in the series of regular seminars organised by the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, which will take place on Wednesday, March 25, 2026, at 4:00 p.m. in the Institute’s reading room (Vlašská 355/9).
This talk explores Russophone queer culture, focusing on the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union — a time when, following the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in 1993, queer culture began to enter the public sphere in new ways. It examines a range of cultural forms, from underground poetry to popular music and visual art, approaching them through the lens of queer temporality. This perspective, which is useful for historians of gender, challenges conventional ideas of political and personal time shaped by heteronormative assumptions about reproduction and linear life paths (“straight time”), which marginalise those whose lives follow different rhythms (“queer time”). The talk will argue that during the period of transformation, Russian queer artists used artistic practices to create alternative ways of understanding time that resisted dominant (post-)Soviet narratives. In doing so, they developed new forms of queer self-expression while also imagining an alternative political future for queer communities and for Russian society as a whole.
Speaker: Ella Rossman (GWZO Praha)
Comments: Galina Miazhevich (Cardiff University) and Jaromír Mrňka (DHI/FHS UK)