With a Shade of Disgust

Affective Politics of Sexuality and Class in Memoirs of the Stalinist Gulag

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4205697
AutoresA Kuntsman (0000-0002-9970-9866, Hiroshima Cosmopolitan University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2009
Volumen68
Número2
Páginas308-328
Fecha de publicación2009-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSlavic Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0037-6779 • E-ISSN: 2325-7784
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/27697960
OpenAlexW2323163770
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas11
Referencias citadas21

This article addresses a topic seldom discussed in gulag studies: same-sex relations in the camps. In particular, it deals with affective politics of sexuality and class in gulag memoirs and the role of disgust in the formation of sexual and class boundaries. It approaches disgust as existing between the individual and the social, the subjective and the historical, the internal and the external, and traces the ways the gulag memoirs constitute the disgusting, the disgusted, and the boundary between them. At the center of the article are descriptions of same-sex relations in the Kolyma camps of the 1930s-1950s by Evgenia Ginzburg and Varlam Shalamov. Based on a critical reading of these and other memoirs, Adi Kuntsman reveals how same-sex relations among the common criminals are constructed by the memoirists as disgusting because they go against gender norms and against class perceptions of sexual morality. Kuntsman shows how these perceptions of the appropriate, embedded within the habitus of the intelligentsia, are transformed in the memoirs into the universal category of humanness, locating the common criminals, and, by association, anyone who engages in same-sex relations, beyond the bounds of humanity

Anger · Art history · Disgust · Gulag · Human sexuality · Memoir · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · Gender Studies · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology