Rhizomatic LGBTIQ+ Activism in St. Petersburg

Pauliina Lukinmaa’s doctoral thesis, LGBTIQ+ Activists in St Petersburg: Forming Practices, Identifying as Activists and Creating Their Own Places, analyses how lesbians, gays, bisexuals, trans people and those who identify as queer (LGBTIQ+ people) manage to do activism in Russia under increasing state oppression and in an environment that is generally hostile towards sexual and gender diversity. Other current studies analyse growing anti-queer violence in Russia as a consequence of homophobic legislature and culture (see, e.g. Kondakov 2022). Lukinmaa, however, approaches queer people’s lives in this authoritarian context with a different, experimental, optics that portrays the LGBTQ+ movement in a rhizomatic form with the capacity to remain flexible, ever moving, situational and unstable but also productive, diverse and yet targeted. She provides a lively thick description and analysis of the activist network, firmly situated in a specific time and place, in the 2010s, in St Petersburg, a Russian metropole, a cultural city and an LGBTIQ+ hub, in late 2010s, currently experiencing repressive laws but before the Covid pandemic and Russia’s attack on Ukraine, both of which have had a damaging influence on Russian civil society. The book is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork that the author conducted in St Petersburg between the years 2017 and 2019. In addition to participant observation by Lukinmaa at various events and activities, she conducted 45 interviews with activists divided into three overlapping groups: those active in the registered LGBT organisations, those taking part in grassroots groups and those she has chosen to call influencers. Moreover, the fieldwork was not limited to the time she spent in St Petersburg. Lukinmaa stayed in touch with the research participants between her field trips to Russia and conducted online interviews with activists who had emigrated abroad. Therefore, her study also includes a focus on transnational networks of LGBTIQ+ people. The study consists of an introduction, which presents the research problem, an extensive analytical chapter on the century-long history of non-normative sexuality and gender expression in Russia, and chapters on locating