Ira Roldugina

Research Interests

History of Homosexuality in Russia, Intimacy in GULAG, HIV/AIDS in the USSR

Research Topic

Vernacular queer and shifting power in Russia: from the late Imperial era up to the 1940's

In a nutshell, my intention is to write the history of queer subjectivity by shifting from the analysis of hegemonic discourses of experts to the self-expression of homosexuals, placing it at the center of the research narrative. I found a lot of beautiful sources in the archives to frame the research and even published some of them. Most of the sources have previously been overlooked by historians.

My preceding research project was devoted to the sexual subculture of Saint-Petersburg in the middle of the 18th century and its evolution; the research is based on archival sources of the Kalinkinskaya Commission (1750 - 1759) and will be published as a book.

Supervisor: Professor Dan Healey

Publications

Roldugina, I. 'Half-Hidden or Half-Open? Scholarly Research on Soviet Homosexuals in Contemporary Russia', in L. Attwood, E. Schimpfössl, M. Yusupova (Eds.), Gender and Choice after Socialism (Cham, Switzerland, 2018), pp. 3 - 23.

Roldugina, I. '"Why Are We the People We Are?" Early Soviet Homosexuals from the First-Person Perspective: New Sources on the History of Homosexual Identities in Russia', in R. Mole (editor), Soviet and post-Soviet sexualities (London, 2019).