Eve’s Reviews > Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent > Status Update

So the book is done at this point, now it's a bunch of notes which considering how i don't know much about this topic feels like I should do. However, the lens of hetero vs homo is still problematic & it acts like the liberalization was democratic in the concluding paragraph. The rephrasing would be censorship of these criminalization records is used to further scam Russians under the Washington consensus.

This prison sexuality & rape culture chapter/epilogue is way more interesting than chapter 8 especially since hetero/homo normalizes child abuse as based on attraction instead of assault.

Chapter 8 is pissing me off because it conflates older adults like 40+ with kids & teenage kids based on genitalia... It's 1 thing to say the Soviet legal system did this but it's another to be talking as if CSA is gay or based on attraction instead of desire to abuse

We're now in chapter 6

So let's give some bluntnesses
The Soviet establishment wanted to pathologize LGBT+ people, using hormone theories & other assimilationist bioessentialism promoted by M Hirschfeld. They had no knowledge centers & they were reactive instead of the gathersome kind

To be fair, USSR's infrastructure struggled to get cell samples to use for biological & hormone research.

"The vice, while chiefly blamed on Islamic traditions of ​female seclusion, was in this region also supposedly urban, the result ​of male mobility and the opportunities created by commodified pri​vate spaces"

So that's a lot of racism

But seriously that surveillance of kids is shit k was put under because of how much transphobia there was

Foucault turns out to believe that psychiatry is bourgeois (fair enough)

Then Bekhterev be using M. Hirschfeld's assimilationist mistake of looking for bioessentialist markers of homosexuality... Damn & woah. Also, fuck momism

We're now in euphemisms and forensics vs psychiatry. Also how the Russian Orthodox church understood men who bottom as evidence against their whole ideology

[...] Mikhail Zolotonosov, “Mas​turbanizatsiia: ‘Erogennye zony’ sovetskoi kul’tury, 1920–1930-kh godov,” in Erotika v ​russkoi literature: Ot Barkova do nashikh dnei (Literaturnoe obozrenie. Spetsial’nyi vy​pusk), eds. I. D. Prokhorova, S. Iu. Mazur, and G. V. Zykova (Moscow: Literaturnoe obozrenie, 1992), 97.