Translating ‘Queer Theory’ into Russian

This paper subjects Leonid Gaidai’s comedies from the 1960s (the peak of his popularity as a director) to a critical re-reading, informed by queer and postcolonial thinking. Most scholarship about cinema of the soviet Thaw (1956~1968) emphasises its break with the rigid political narratives of Socialist Realism and a newly found preoccupation with the internal [read, apolitical] struggles of the ordinary soviet man and – to a lesser degree – woman. While this might be the case, I adopt Louis Althusser’s approach of reading cultural texts as ideological State apparatuses (ISAs) that reflect the fundamental political ideology of their context. Read like this, I believe that Gaidai’s comedies fail to trouble and actively re-construct the gender-colonial matrix that permeates soviet culture, but also precedes it. More specifically, I argue that his films construct soviet-russia as a world segregated along the binary of sex. At the same time, they construct the Orient, both domestic/soviet and foreign/capitalist, as the binary other of soviet russia. Crucially, I suggest that normative soviet-russian womanhood is constructed through the soviet-russian woman’s (no-less constructed) difference from the soviet-russian man, but also from the repressed-licentious Oriental woman. Fundamentally, then, my paper poses two theoretical questions: can ‘queer theory’ and postcolonial approaches open new avenues for reading [soviet-]russian film and culture, more broadly? Precipitating the answer to the previous question, why does existing scholarship shun these approaches?

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