This is an urgent and important book about anti-queer violence in Russia and its relation to the infamous 2013 “gay propaganda law” (expanded in 2022). Drawing on Alexander Kondakov’s extensive work on homophobic violence in Russia, it is based on a discoursive analysis of criminal hearings and related court decisions from 314 egregious cases of anti-queer violence, collected from online Russian judicial databases and spanning the period 2010–16. The book features very vivid descriptions of violent crimes (homicides, physical violence, and larceny), which make for a harrowing read; these are “read not as texts, but as manifestations of discourse in which power relations feature prominently” (20).

The book is divided into four parts. The first, “The authority of the law,” gives us nuanced insights into the workings of the Russian legal system and how it deals with cases of anti-queer violence. Russian law recognizes hatred against any social group (including—potentially—the LGBTQ+ community) as an aggravating circumstance. This, however, is rarely applied in the cases of anti-queer violence analyzed in the book. Kondakov convincingly argues that this is not directly related with government-sponsored homophobia, but rather to a very ritualistic approach to the law, which incentivizes a “copy and paste” approach to obtain guilty verdicts “with little regard for justice as a value but producing a version of value as a formality” (45). Russian courts draw little attention to the homophobic and transphobic sentiments that motivate anti-queer violence, even though terms of imprisonment in these cases are in line with or slightly harsher than those handed out for comparable crimes. The deep indifference of the legal system towards anti-queer violence, presented as something motivated by “unpleasant feelings” towards queer individuals rather than hatred towards a social group, individualizes responsibility and perversely perpetuates anti-queer violence. Part 2, “Unruly sexuality,” grounds the book in queer theory’s key tenet to “speak about sexuality without the confinement of identity, instead expressing its phenomenological fluidity, changeability and multiplicity” (80). The author argues that fluidity and diversity are key to theorizing Russian queer sexuality, and shows how the line between queerness and normative heterosexuality is constructed in court hearings. Kondakov also returns to the US-centric character of original queer theory formulations, arguing for the need for a truly global queer theory that brackets questions of sexual identity and a utopian genderless future and is able to account for how sexuality and gender inform power relations beyond specific national contexts. In decentering western theorizing and offering theoretical—as well as empirical—insights from Russia, Kondakov’s book makes a significant contribution to global queer theory.

In Part 3, “Affects, emotions and law,” Kondakov explores articulations of emotions and affects in court rulings, focusing on “violent affections,” which “manifest as mechanisms of power relations that produce hierarchies between subjects and lead to violence” (146). Of particular interest here are perpetrators’ emotions towards their queer victims, which range from disgust, fury, shame, humiliation, and camaraderie (through male bonding with fellow perpetrators). A limitation of the study that Kondakov himself acknowledges is that his sample is very heavily skewed towards crimes with queer men as victims (294 cases out of 314), which reflects methodological choices in identifying relevant court hearings. Thus, the book offers great insights about male-on-male violence and the construction of masculinity, but has less to say about women and transgender persons as victims and perpetrators.

In Part 4, “Techniques of power,” Kondakov continues his analysis of violent affections while also developing an original theoretical argument grounded in his empirical research. He argues that the model of disciplinary power-knowledge theorized by Michel Foucault as the Panopticon, where knowledge originates from state institutions that have authority and a monopoly on the truth, no longer holds sway. Instead, he proposes that under neo-disciplinary power, any information (memes) can acquire the status of knowledge, and does not require particular authority to circulate; thus, neo-disciplinary power techniques are more accurately described by the concept of the Memeticon. Empirically, Kondakov shows how the legal meme “gay propaganda” has circulated in Russian society since the 1980s but powerfully emerged in the early 2010s; he convincingly demonstrates a link between the introduction of the “gay propaganda” law in 2013, the widespread circulation of the “gay propaganda” meme in Russian media and society, and the rise of anti-queer violence.

This is an ambitious, thought-provoking, insightful and rewarding read, which will make a long-lasting contribution to Russian queer studies and to global queer theory.