Reddit reviews Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies)

This article takes as its basis the Western liberal position on sexuality, so a serious criticism of this article would begin with a discussion of works like Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages: Homo-Nationalism in Queer Times. This work, and others like it, should form the basis of a Marxist-Leninist understanding of the issue.

But besides that, there are no sources to this article. So for instance, when the author says things like:

>In January 1934, homosexuals were arrested en masse in the Soviet Union's main cities. Among those imprisoned were many actors, musicians and artists.

If there were so many people caught up in these laws, why doesn't the author simply name a few of these people?

Or take this for example:

>Historians have noted numerous suicides in the Red Army and a growing mood of panic among Soviet gays at that time.

Which historians? What works did they write? As the article is presented, there simply is no way to follow up on this. I myself had never heard anything about Maxim Gorky's son being 'seduced' by a homosexual until I read this article, and I would be very interested to follow up on this. But the article doesn't give any sources for this claim, and neither does the link it is copied and pasted from.

>In 1936 the Commissar for Justice, Nikolai Krylenko, declared homosexuality a political crime against the Soviet state and the proletariat.

Again, I would be very interested in seeing a source for this, but there is none. As any serious researcher not completely taken in by the anti-communist paradigm knows, you simply can't take anything these people say at their word. For all I know, Krylenko could have said this. It wouldn't be all that surprising. But given the nature of 'scholarship' on the Soviet Union, you simply can not take someone's word for it. People like this will report anything as true, so long as it advances some sort of agenda, no matter how unlikely it may be.

>In the mid-1930s gays flooded into Soviet camps in their thousands, and the influx apparently remained steady throughout the years article 121 was in force.

Given what scholars already know about the Soviet penal system, we should have exact figures on how many people were charged with the criminal offense of homosexuality and sentenced. So where does this vague notion of "thousands" come from? Soviet archival figures? Not likely.

>Alexander Solzhenitsyn called it a 'sordid' bit of legislation. In the Gulag Archipelago, dedicated to 'all those who did not live long enough to tell the story', there isn't a word of sympathy for oppressed homosexuals.

Solzhenitsyn was basically a fascist that sympathized with the Nazis. That's why he was in prison after all. If he made references to that in his book, a source would be good. But the author provides none.

>The fate of homosexuals in Soviet prisons and camps is unprecedented in the scope of its tragedy and brutality. Not only were the numbers vast, homosexual rape took place in every camp and prison without exception. Not only did the Soviet system fail to cure the 'foreign disease', it led to a dramatic growth in the numbers of homosexuals. Huge numbers of people who had not previously been gay became categorised as opushchennye (lit: crestfallen, degraded, downcast; also slang term for one who has been beaten up, raped and urinated upon).

How does the author know this? They don't say. In fact, the whole basis of this nonsense seems to be the next source they cite:

>In his book The Mordovian Marathon (Jerusalem, 1979), Eduard Kuznetsov devotes a chapter called Queer Folk to homosexuals in the camps.

>“According to people in the know,” he writes, “90 per cent of convicts are homosexual. But only passive gays—about 10 per cent—are regarded as such. They are the so-called kozly (lit: billy goats, or customers of prostitutes) and petukhi (lit: cocks, or faggots). Active homosexuals are so commonplace they don't even merit a special name.”

It appears the author is seriously trying to insinuate nearly the entire Soviet penal population was homosexual. This is so outlandish as to warrant complete dismissal of anything the author is saying. It not only makes no sense, it doesn't even conform with what the best scholarship on the nature of prison-sex has to say about the subject. All it is doing is force-fitting modern Western sexual epistemology onto a population where it makes no sense. I suggest people read Fleisher's The Myth of Prison Rape: Sexual Culture in American Prisons to see just how much nonsense the author is spewing. The author not only doesn't understand homosexuality, he doesn't understand anything about prisoners and sex.

>The first convicted homosexual to come out was the Leningrad poet Gennady Trifonov. In December 1977, he sent the following open letter to Literaturnaya Gazeta from Camp No. 398/38 in the western Urals:

Gennady Trifonov was a dissident who spent all of four years in the Soviet penal system, between the years of 1976 and 1980, not exactly the time period people usually associate with the worst periods of the Soviet penal system. Part of the charges against him also included serving alcohol to minors.

How true any of Trifonov's claims are is not demonstrable. No doubt he exaggerated the hardship he claims to have endured, as most prisoners all over the world do. Solzhenitsyn claimed people were arrested for stealing spools of thread and getting sentences twice as long as he got for spreading pro-Nazi propaganda to soldiers in the military. The evidence? Only Solzhenitsyn's word, the word of a fascist who advocated things like America should have nuked Vietnam (cause that would have gone over so well with their flunkies in the South).

Nonetheless, Trifonov does say something very interesting that completely undermines the case the author of this article is trying to make:

>“I know people who have either forgotten the end of their prison term, or who have not managed physically to survive that long. Their bodies were taken off the electric wire; they were found hanging in prison cells, tortured to death by prisoners in bestial mood or beaten by guards, mad. I know their names; I have access to the written evidence of witnesses. In a year and a half of this hell I have carefully studied 22 convictions for homosexuality in the USSR.

If this is the case, it would seem to indicate the number of people arrested for being homosexuals was actually quite low. Surely if there really was some sort of massive campaign to persecute homosexuals by the Soviet government, Trifonov would have been able to come up with more than 22 names after a year and a half.

The rest of the personal testimonies cited are equally unverifiable. Some of the things they report may have happened, they may not have. One of the testimonies (Valery Klimov) comes from someone that is admitted to have had sex with people underage, which is a crime anywhere with age of consent laws. He claims to have watched 10 homosexuals murdered in front of him, which reads on its face like a lie only a committed anti-communist would take at face value.

There's also homonationalism, which is similar, and from this near-incomprehensible book which I keep trying to read. http://www.amazon.com/Terrorist-Assemblages-Homonationalism-Directions-Studies/dp/082234114X

It's cool, and I'm sort of familiar with the kinda jargon it users but Jesus H Christ.

Well, Terrorist Assemblages is her famous work but it's not exactly light reading. I haven't read it myself, just heard a lot about it. It's one of those things I should read but don't really want to.

> I don't care what Engels thinks about homosexuality since it is not a very historical materialist account, and there have been far better accounts since then––particularly in those who struggled against this backwards line in recent history.

I've been looking over Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. She says a lot of rather alarming things about how the Western imperialist nations use gay-rights discourse to further imperialist ends. Care to comment?

>You just have serious problems reading because possiblegoat pointed out your translation of "abominable practice of sodomy" was wrong, and validated what I was initially saying about the quote.

One has to think you're intentionally trying to confuse people with this. First off, it isn't "my" translation at all. It was copied and pasted from marxists.org. Secondly, you try to make an artificial separation of being attracted to young men and homosexuality. Would you make the same distinction for heterosexuality? Is a man with ephebophilia not still primarily heterosexual? Thirdly, it's obvious from the quote I provided Engels links the two explicitly, and does not try to splice them into two different and unrelated phenomena, as you do.

>Your weasel words of "cardinal question" are despicable. Any communist project now must take queer solidarity, but along class lines, into account as well as race and sex.

So, you see upholding homosexuality as a cardinal question, in other words. You wouldn't belong to a party that let people in who thought homosexuality was linked to capitalism and fascism. That is, you would not be in a party with Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao.

> All of the arguments about homosexuality being part of "decaying imperialism", "fascistic", etc. have been critiqued, and very well so, from a variety of communist positions for years by now.

I've not seen a communist critique of Joseph Massad's Desiring Arabs or the previously mentioned work of Jasbir Puar, which IMHO persuasively agrees that the discourse around homosexuality in the Western imperialist nations serves the interests of imperialism. This seems to be the most up to date stuff, which coincidentally or not, justifies the old communist line regarding homosexuality.

Maybe you are interested in making sure everyone respects modern socially-constructed Western identities. I am not. I am interested in ending imperialism. Whatever it takes to end imperialism.