Lecture: “Like a Nest of Homosexuals”: LGBT Representations in Lithuanian Print Media (1994-2004)

🇬🇧 Wydarzenie w j. angielskim

“Like a Nest of Homosexuals”: LGBT Representations in Lithuanian Print Media (1994-2004)

We invite you to a lecture at QueerMuzeum Warszawa
📆 Wednesday, 29 April 18:00
🆓 Admission free
🇬🇧Event in English only

How did Lithuanian media represent LGBT people in the decade immediately after the decriminalization of male homosexuality and before the accession to the European Union (1994-2004)? In this talk I will discuss the most prevalent damaging rhetorical tropes and narratives associated with homosexual, bisexual and transgender people in the post-Soviet Lithuanian public sphere. I will analyze how the Catholic Church underwent a surprising discursive transformation from a strange bedfellow of homosexuality to its moral opposite. I will talk about how and why the representations of gay men differed from the image of lesbians and bisexual women, with men being framed as a social threat, and address the habitual dehumanization of trans people. My central argument is that the public debate on gender and sexuality in this period should be seen as a metaphorical negotiation of existential anxieties regarding the massive transformation of Lithuania from a Soviet republic into a democratic European state. The talk is based on my research in the archive of the Lithuanian Gay League (LGL), the earliest LGBT organization in the country, as well as my broader historical research.

Dr. Rasa Navickaitė is a researcher and lecturer at Vilnius University, the Institute of International Relations and Political Science, in Vilnius, Lithuania. Currently she is implementing a project “A Genealogy of Political Homophobia in Post-Soviet Lithuania: From Soviet Legacy to the Transnational Anti-Gender Movement”, funded by the Research Council of Lithuania. Previously, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions postdoctoral fellow at the University of Vienna (Austria), where she carried out her project “Modernization of Sexuality and the Construction of Deviance in Soviet Lithuania”. Rasa writes on gender history, history of sexuality, Soviet history and memory, feminist and queer theory, postcolonial theory, Eastern Europe and (post-)socialism.