Revolutions: Material Forms, Mobile Futures
Monday Night Lecture Series | Spring 2020

Queer Exile: Archives of Belonging

Roman Utkin • Wesleyan University

February 17 @ 6 P.M.
Daniel Family Commons, Usdan University Center

What is it like to be an exile within exile? To find one’s queer self doubly alienated among fellow refugees? This lecture explores configurations of queer subjectivity in interwar Europe’s Russian diaspora. The story of the sizeable community of Russians who moved abroad after the Bolshevik Revolution is richly documented in art and scholarship. Yet, queer lives and experiences are largely absent from this story. Based on archival research attuned to absences, omissions, and patterns of exclusion, I propose a narrative of exile that reorients assumptions about kinship and shows how gender, sexuality, and nationhood are interconnected in diasporic belonging.

All lectures begin at 6 p.m. and are held in the Daniel Family Commons (located in the Usdan University Center) unless otherwise noted.

Revolutions: Material Forms, Mobile Futures
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