Engendering Suspicion: Homosexual Panic in the Post-SovietDetektiv

In: Slavic review: interdisciplinary quarterly of Russian, Eurasian and East European studies, Band 64, Heft 1, S. 24-42

Abstract

This article examines the workings of the sexual closet within the enormously popular genre of the Russiandetektiv, or detective story. Informed by the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and D. A. Miller, the article focuses on the dramatization of homosexual panic among various male characters in Aleksandra Marinina'sStilist(1996) and Boris Akunin'sKoronatsiia(2001) in order to explore the experience of masculine subjectivity in post-Soviet culture. In both novels, a perceived crisis in patriarchal authority unleashes suspicions and anxieties regarding the experience of being and becoming a man, which is defined against the feminine and the homosexual. Figured both as an effect of and as a threat to male-male bonds, homosexual panic testifies to the interiorization of sexual and gender norms, which makes being male a highly self-conscious enterprise and fuels nostalgia for a mythic time before the appearance of homosexuality.