Queer Slavic studies “came out” in the 1990s—a moment shaped by the advances of the Gay Liberation movement in the west, on the one hand, and by the increasing openness of the Soviet and later, post-Soviet societies to foreigners caused by perestroika, on the other. Years away from turning into a recognized subfield at the time, Queer Slavic studies puzzled, provoked, sometimes annoyed, and sometimes brought about anger within their home discipline of Slavic studies. In other words, they did exactly what queerness is supposed to do: disrupt the fabric of (hetero- and cis-)normativity within our field.

Following in the footsteps of Simon Karlinsky’s trailblazing publications (such as The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol, 1976), a generation of scholars took the opportunity offered by the 1990s as a unique moment in history to tell stories of diversity and equality within our field. David Tuller’s Cracks in the Iron Closet: Travels in Gay and Lesbian Russia (1996), Dan Healey’s Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (2001), Laurie Essig’s Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other (1999), Igorˊ Kon’s Klubnichka na berezke: Seksualˊnaia kulˊtura v Rossii (1997), or an anthology of literary texts compiled by Kevin Moss, Out of the Blue: Russia’s Hidden Gay Literature (1997), were milestones of this first queer wave that introduced new ways of thinking about our region and defined the subfield for decades to come.

After this high tide of the 1990s, it would not be until Russia’s law on the “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations” in 2013 that the subfield would again be bustling with active discussions (with a few exceptions emerging from the work done in the 2000s, like Brian James Baer’s Other Russias: Homosexuality and the Crisis of Post-Soviet Identity (2009), Stephen Amico’s Roll Over, Tchaikovsky! Russian Popular Music and Post-Soviet Homosexuality (2014), or Francesca Stella’s Lesbian Lives in Soviet and Post‐Soviet Russia: Post/Socialism and Gendered Sexualities (2015). They were followed by publications of the second queer wave firmly grounded in the repercussions of the “gay propaganda” law, like Healey’s Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (2018), Rustam Alexander’s Regulating Homosexuality in Soviet Russia, 1956–91: A Different History (2021) and Red Closet: The Hidden History of Gay Oppression in the USSR (2023), Alexander Sasha Kondakov’s Violent Affections: Queer Sexuality, Techniques of Power, and Law in Russia (2022), and others.

The books that this essay discusses—Julie A. Cassiday’s monograph Russian Style: Performing Gender, Power, and Putinism and the collection of essays Queer(ing) Russian Art: Realism, Revolution, Performance, edited by Baer and Yevgeniy Fiks (both published in 2023)—could be seen as closing texts of the second queer wave in Slavic studies, disrupted by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. While the broader field as well as the sub-field have been re-orienting themselves following this new spin in Russia’s war against Ukraine, these two publications serve as indicators of main trends that defined queer Slavic scholarship in the 2010s and as signals of new developments within the subfield that were on the rise in the early 2020s.

First, the most visible and persistent of these trends has been the focus on Russia, as all titles I mentioned above suggest. Russia-centered research has dominated both Slavic studies and its queer subfield throughout both their respective histories. Histories and cultures of the broader region that Slavic studies explore (the Baltic Sea area, Central Asia, the Caucasus, east central Europe, and the Balkans) had for a long time remained invisible. Oftentimes this happened due to a lack of resources (like the knowledge of languages other than Russian), or the subsequent impossibility of (or disinterest in) accessing the knowledge produced by local scholars in these languages, if such was generated (Poland, for instance, has been a site of queer theorizing since the 1980s and has distinguished itself as a powerhouse of queer research in the Slavic field in the twenty-first century). The rigid structures of Slavic studies that continue to favor expertise in Russia and thereby define exploratory paths that early-career researchers have been taking are also at fault. Nevertheless, the body of queer-focused scholarly work on parts of our region beyond Russia has been steadily increasing, and so has the research that seeks to pluralize our perspectives on allegedly homogenous nation states in our region.

The two books I discuss here emerge from and speak to these developments. Cassiday’s monograph and Baer and Fiks’s edited volume, while continuing the line of Russia-focused research, attend to new debates that have emerged in the field. The authors are well aware of the privileged position of Russian cultural space within the broader region and of the silences it produces. They also thoroughly discuss the caveats of addressing “Russia” as some kind of unified space. For Baer and Fiks, the wording “Russian art” in the title is a consciously chosen term for the study of the art of the Russian empire, the Soviet Union, and independent Russia in the eighteenth through twenty-first centuries. They seek to complicate the “Russian” in “Russian art” by, on the one hand, demonstrating global exchanges and influences on it (such as the role of Greek concepts of “queer beauty” mediated through Italian art, or the references to American pop culture), and on the other the ethnic diversity nourishing it (as in contributions about the Jewish artist Yevgeniy Fiks, Azerbaijani artist Babi Badalov, or Kyrgyz storytelling in the Russian art sphere). Effectively, Baer and Fiks unpack “Russian” as “a part of global” and “Soviet” with “post-Soviet Russian” as “not just Russian,” thereby expanding our notion of “Russian” and giving visibility to the role of states colonized by Russia in the twentieth century as part of the Soviet project.

For Cassiday, whose interest lies in exploring the gendered and sexualized performance of citizenship in Russia under Vladimir Putin’s regime, the question is more about the lack of the visible enriching of this concept with diversity from within the Russian Federation. Cassiday underscores the conflation of “russkii” and “rossiiskii” in the 2000s and 2010s, which has intensified the synonymity of “Russian” with whiteness, cis-, and heteronormativity and has led to the exclusion of performances of ethnicities other than Russian from the hegemonic Russian discourse.

Both Cassiday and Baer/Fiks underscore the need to explore queer Russia and the broader region as a colonial and racialized space with a diversity of cultures obscured by white cisgender and heteronormative Orthodox Russocentric hegemonic discourse. With these limitations and opportunities in mind, both books examined in this review turn to study queerness within the performance of “Russianness” through art (studied in Baer and Fiks) or political, popular, and everyday culture (examined by Cassiday).

Second, both publications engage with a series of questions that have defined the field of Queer Slavic studies since their inception: What is queerness in our region? How do we apply queer lenses to read this space with divergent cultural and political histories? Why do we need to do so? And what can the analysis of cases from our region contribute to Queer Theory? The approaches to answering these questions exemplified in both books I discuss here show how far the subfield has advanced since the early days of Queer Slavic studies.

The edited volume by Baer and Fiks reminds us from the start that this subfield, even if nearly three decades in development, is still searching for its toolkit by opening with a theoretical section (this is particularly true for the discipline of Visual studies within Queer Slavic studies, to which this edited volume contributes the founding milestone). A comprehensive article by Baer introduces and theorizes “queer beauty” (22–80) as a key concept of the volume and Queer Visual studies more broadly. Locating queer beauty in Greek and Roman art, Baer first traces its citations and permutations throughout Russian art history as one mode of performing queerness in Visual Culture. Another mode he examines is queer imagery that goes against hegemonic representations of gender and sexuality by engaging with “semiotic practices of allegory, citation, and differentiation” (24). Baer reads homosexuality as a sign and explores how “it can be and has been deployed to various ends” (34). Finally, he examines the role of the “queer(ing) gaze” which challenges the way of looking at and interpreting art (24). These three axes of queer(ing) art that Baer offers in his introductory chapter guide the structure of the volume and approaches that authors take in their respective chapters, showcasing a variety of themes that animate Queer Visual studies in the Slavic field today.

The matter of the “absent” archive underlies many contributions in the volume. What has been the role of experts—art critics and researchers, above all—in keeping the (visual) archive invisible? What would be pieces of an archive of queer Russian art if we were to institutionalize one? Does an archive have to be authentic to perform its function of mediating historical memories? The goal of this edited volume is not to give definitive answers to these questions but to ask them out loud—for the first time in such concentrated form.

Olga Khoroshilova’s contribution finds elusive traces of cross-dressing practices in Russian oil and graphic painting as well as eighteenth-century jewelry art, while Nikolai Ivanov’s examines how expert readings of Aleksandr Ivanov’s male nudes throughout history have prevented a queer perspective on his work. The translation of an earlier article by Georgy Mamedov and Oksana Shatalova reflects on the question of authenticity by performing a non-existent archive that imagines a history of a queer-minded commune in Kyrgyzstan.

The volume also attempts at delineating milestones in the genealogy of Russian queer art, among which the New Academy of Fine Arts, founded by Timur Novikov in St. Petersburg, emerges most prominently (covered in articles by Maria Engström, Andrei Khlobystin, Helena Goscilo, and Andrey Shental). Alongside this queer movement by design and such cult queer figures as Konstantin Somov, Sergei Eisenstein, Slava Mogutin, or Babi Badalov, the collection also traces the role of the erotic within Moscow conceptualism and during the Stalin era.

While the issue of visibility propels many contributions assembled here, the volume also seeks to register alternative theories of gender and sexual difference that are not grounded in western neoliberal normative teleologies of queerness as being visible in the public space. Thus, Katharina Wiedlack and Masha Godovannaya build on the work of Édouard Glissant to theorize opacity as an important conceptual framework for the post-Soviet space (359–60) and discuss opportunities that thinking of the closet in positive terms can offer (361).

As the first edited volume of its kind that brings Queer Russian Visual studies to the fore, Queer(ing) Russian Art is a robust introduction to thinking Russian queer history as a visual history. As such, it registers the vital role that the arts and culture have played in shaping queerness in Russia—which became particularly prominent in the twenty-first century, under Putin’s regime. This era is the focus of Cassiday’s Russian Style: Performing Gender, Power, and Putinism. In this monograph that offers one of the most compelling readings of gender and sexuality in contemporary Russia that I have been privileged to read, Cassiday shifts the focus to popular culture and examines how the analysis of the heteropatriarchal regime that has emerged under Putin can open up new perspectives on theorizing Russia as well as gender and sexuality. Her book starts with a very simple idea which is nonetheless absolutely critical for our understanding of contemporary Russia—that in the first two decades of Putin’s rule, the performance of an ideal Russian citizen became increasingly gendered and sexualized. In advancing this argument, Cassiday’s work connects to earlier research that examined this question, such as Helena Goscilo’s edited volume Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon (2013, which included contributions from both Cassiday and Baer) and Valerie Sperling’s monograph Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia (2015).

What distinguishes Cassiday’s approach in this research monograph is her focus on style as an epistemological lens to understanding the performance of gender and sexuality in Putin’s Russia. In the performance of ideal Russian citizenship, she argues, style prevails over substance. Unlike Leninism or Stalinism, she posits, Putinism did not “pretend or even aspire to ideology,” instead blocking “ideological content and political substance” with “glossy surfaces and stylistic flair” (8). This argument leads her to explore style as “a mode of performativity” (28) and attend to a range of such modes of performing Russian citizenship that have emerged since the 1990s. Specifically, Cassiday considers seven “overlapping performative modes available to any and all seeking to perform Russian citizenship” (28)—kitsch, poshlostˊ, stiob, glamour, drag (or travesti, in Russian), camp, and charisma. Despite their different origins and conventional places of circulation (Cassiday notes that while drag, kitsch, and camp could be seen as global performative modes, poshlostˊ and stiob seem to be particularly tied to Russian culture), she effortlessly unites them in her analysis by underscoring the device of irony that underlies all of them. Irony, she posits, has the “tendency to draw attention away from depth and substance and toward surface and style” (29), thus making these styles particularly fitting for use by Putin’s regime.

In the first chapter, Cassiday introduces these styles-cum-modes-of-performativity one after another, outlining their “own gendered, temporal, affective, and agentic affinities” (45). The beauty of her text lies in a focused, succinct explanation of these styles to the reader who may not be familiar with them. Cassiday also draws immediate and clear connections to the gender and sexuality dimension and to the role each style plays in contemporary Russian culture, making this particular chapter one of the best teaching aids for students in Russian studies.

The next four chapters engage with these styles more closely as Cassiday explores their functioning by analyzing a selection of case studies coming from across Russian culture. The first of these chapters offers probably one of the most insightful perspectives on the performance of gender and sexuality under Putin by discussing what Cassiday calls “cisgender drag.” As Cassiday argues, “Russians’ tendency to conflate cross-gender cross-dressing with male homosexuality made travesti within one’s own sex and gender especially well-suited for performing the homophobic hypergender required of Russian citizens” (59). Exaggerated masculinity and femininity performed by persons of the same gender—the performance Cassiday calls “cisgender drag”—are deeply rooted in the “Soviet legacy of traumatized bodies” (59). Using film examples that range from Sergei Bondarchuk’s 9th Company (2005) to Aleksei Balabanov’s Cargo 200 (2007), Cassiday shows how cisgender drag inevitably always fails its performers, exacerbating the crisis of masculinity rather than solving it.

The following chapter shifts the focus to cross-gender drag and examines the culture of travesti artists in Russia (men performing as women) as well as the contemporary culture of drag queens (as Cassiday pointedly observes, her research yielded no examples of drag king performance in Russia and this silence speaks volumes). It opens with, perhaps, one of the most important sentences in the book—“When we turn our attention from cisgender drag to its cross-gender variant…” By de-centering the normative understanding of drag as a cross-gender performance practice and presenting it as a “variant” of the thereby centralized “cis-gender” option, Cassiday demonstrates theoretical contributions that Russian Queer studies can offer to the broader field of Performance and Gender studies. In this chapter, Cassiday also underscores the difference between the post-Soviet drag culture and its western counterpart. As she argues, “[r]ather than expose gender as performance, most travesti-artisty working in Russia during this time naturalized the binary Operation between male and female that they parodied” and “managed to create a fiction of femininity so natural that it could only be authored by a man” (87).

Cassiday continues to develop this argument in the chapter on queer performativity, where she relies on the concept of shame to see how queer performance comes into being in post-Soviet Russia—both on the side of the LGBTQ+ community and the Russian state that advances the “gay propaganda” law. If this chapter demonstrates how the moral panic that the law fostered shaped the obsession with homosexual masculinity, in the last chapter of the book, Cassiday shifts the focus back to the role of women in Putin’s Russia. In a series of brilliant examples, she presents the development of a sensibility she defines as “post-Soviet postfeminism”—a type of subservient femininity that in seeking to embrace the dominant styles of the Putin-era ends up re-affirming the hypermasculinity of Russia’s leader. However, as Cassiday concludes at the end of the book, while “[a]ppropriating Otherness through style might have promised to give citizens hoping to craft a fittingly Russian self in the 2000s and 2010s access to gendered norms of Russianness … the ease and speed with which these selves … adopted new styles turned the overabundance of Russian style into its opposite—a stylistic vacuum” (163).

Book reviews rarely speak about covers—in the end, the scholarship is all about the text that comes between the binds. Yet, for Russian Style, I must make an exception. “Don’t judge the book by its cover,” Cassiday keeps repeating throughout the monograph (as on 78) as a metaphor for divorcing style from substance that is characteristic of her case studies from contemporary Russian politics and popular culture. Unlike the subject that Cassiday analyzes, her monograph offers a happy—I would even dare say “gay”—marriage of style and substance. From the captivating portrait of the drag queen Zaza Napoli on the cover until the book’s very last page, Russian Style slays the performance of glamour and camp in the academic drag, without ever sliding into kitsch or poshlostˊ, at times being upfront about stiobing over Putin and Trump (who—the readers must agree with Cassiday—fully deserve it), and serving the fiercest charisma of a beautifully written and compelling scholarly analysis all the way through.

Reading these two exciting publications side by side, a scholar of queer-feminist Cultural studies like me cannot but rejoice at the fact that this disciplinary direction of research within Queer Slavic studies is growing alongside research in History or Political Science in the region we study. As both books under examination show, we need methodological and theoretical tools coming from Visual studies, Performance studies, and beyond to enable us to see and read our region queerly. Only in fostering a richness of interdisciplinary conversation and disciplinary depth across the many disciplines that shape our field will we be able to unveil the gendered and sexualized logics underpinning the fabric of the societies we study.