Join us on March 26 at 11:00 am for the virtual Sawchen Lecture Series, featuring Philip Gleissner of Ohio State University.
View the recording of this talk here:
Title: “Queer Periodicals in Post-Soviet Russia: From Leningrad Underground to Transnational Publishing”
Abstract: After the decriminalization of homosexuality and the lifting of censorship, a new queer culture began to develop in 1990s Russia. This moment was accompanied by the emergence of new literary voices, publishing enterprises, and periodicals. As we know today, this period of freedom and relative safety was a short-lived one. In this lecture, Dr. Gleissner looks at the unique features of 1990s Russian print media, especially literary and cultural magazines that served a community of queer authors and readers. He analyses layout designs, key content elements, and editorial tactics. The periodicals’ embeddedness in transnational and diasporic cultural practice and in the strategies of late Soviet dissidence, he argues, shaped their unique historical trajectory, their moments of success and their challenges.
Bio: Dr. Philip Gleissner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at the Ohio State University. Dr. Gleissner specializes in the cultures and literatures of socialist Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on print media in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and the GDR. He is particularly interested in the migration of media: mechanisms that facilitate the circulation of texts within and beyond Eastern Europe. His current book project is titled “Through Thick and Thin: The Social Life of Journals under Late Socialism.” It shows how under the umbrella of state socialism a fragmented literary culture was organized by literary magazines. The book traces how these periodicals moderated multidirectional networks that connected the cultures of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the West in a dynamic manner.
Featured image: Images by Slava Mogutin and Pasmur Rachuiko. Typescript courtesy University of Toronto Libraries Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat.
