Homosexuality has recently become a matter of international politics. UNO General Secretary announced LGBT rights a global agenda and called for rejection of discriminatory laws in national legislatures. Former president of the USA supported widening of sexual citizenship by inclusion of samesex couples. Similar tendencies have been demonstrated by the European Union countries. Yet, simultaneously, there are attempts to criminalize homosexuality in a somewhat concurrent camp of the global debate: new round of criminalization in India, prison terms for gay men in Uganda, or capital punishment in Zimbabwe. Ban of so called 'propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations' stands in this row. It was enacted in Russia in 2013 to protect children from becoming gay by learning information on LGBT issues. This initiative has been interesting for members of parliament in other post-Soviet republics. It seems like the world is divided in two parts by the question of homosexuality. But this perception is an oversimplification. Both inclusive and exclusive approaches use the same power technics and come from the same source. I use ideas of Michel Foucault and queer theory to show the ways how a complex analysis of the situation might be brought about. In this sense, power does not come from only one source, but is always embedded in relations between forces. Hence, there are intersecting currents of power that make the international discussion of homosexuality possible.
Attitudes towards various manifestations of human sexual behavior remain one of the actual legal and medical problems for both society and specialists. About forty years ago medical and moral understanding of the norm of sexual behavior was universal and unambiguous, but this situation has changed significantly over the past decades. In some societes, the principle of the so-called social homonormativity – the understanding of same-sex sexual behavior and self-identification as a form of medical and moral norms – has been institutionalized. In societies in which the understanding of the norm of sexual behavior is not based on homonormativity, some political movements and organizations actively pursue their goals to such a change in medical, moral and legal principles, which consolidates any forms of social activity based on homonormativity. One of the claims used by these movements is the assertion that "homosexuality is a kind of norm for humans, because it is common among more than 1500 species of animals". The pitfall with this statement is that it is based on the anthropomorphic interpretation of animal behavior, as well as on the selective transfer of the phenomena of the animal world to human life. In this review article, the authors consistently disprove all aspects of the application of the claim that "homosexual behavior is prevalent in the animal kingdom" in a discussion on the topic of same-sex human behavior. Interpretation of the observed cases of same-sex behavior in animals to assess any medical, moral or legal normativity of the same-sex behavior in human beings is biased, it avoids other forms of non-productive behavior of animals, which, within an anthropomorphic interpretation, can be used as phenomena that justify human incest, child abuse or bestiality.
This article provides a comparative analysis of the situation of sexual minorities and their legal rights in Europe, the USA and Russia, as well as their differences, and the attitude of society to people of non-traditional orientation. In addition, the article considered the main problem of modern society is the inability of people to perceive non-traditional relations in military service, in employment at work and much more. Even many liberal countries still do not fully approve of this kind of relationship. Many same-sex couples are prohibited from adopting children, and there are real problems in the field of inheritance law. The article addressed the problem of discrimination of these relations in Russia. This article also examined court practice regarding the underreporting of the rights of sexual minorities.
This article discusses the process of liberalization of sexual morality in the modern world. It is shown that normative beliefs about sexual relationships are significantly different between cultures, which enhance their social sustainability by erecting the boundaries of acceptable sexual behavior. In Western society, sexual morality originally based on Christian teachings, though regularly violated by its members, has remained stable for centuries. Individuals who violated the established norms in terms of sexuality never tried to dismantle the entire regulatory order. However, in the second half of the 20th century, dramatic changes occurred that destroyed many of the fundamental values and normative patterns that define human behavior. First the heterosexual youth revolution of the 1960s, which had a predominantly female face, tore down regulation concerning sexuality, marriage and fertility, and then, at the turn of the 21st century, the homosexual revolution permanently deformed traditional sexual morality.In the West nontraditional sexual relations at the moment are undergoing constitutionalization both in the informal and formal ways. The public opinion has begun to accept certain decisions affecting the interests of the LGBT community, who, in their turn, increasingly impose their culture on individuals, social groups and society as a whole. Those who disagree with the new rules are increasingly often subjected to various sanctions. Homosexuality moves from socio-cultural to the political field, entering the orbit of the geopolitical interests of Western countries.Unlike Europe and the USA, where sexual morality is being liberalized (although not in a uniform manner), in some countries the opposite trend is conspicuous. In this article, special attention is paid to Russia. Having analyzed the results of public opinion polls on the issue of homosexuality conducted in the last decades, we show that Russians' negative attitude to this phenomenon is on the rise. Perceiving homosexuality as a deviation contradicts the global trend of liberalizing sexual morality. ; В статье рассматривается процесс либерализации половой морали в современном мире. Показывается, что нормативные представления о сексуальных отношениях значительно отличаются в различных культурах, которые, выстраивая границы допустимого сексуального поведения, поддерживают тем самым свою социальную устойчивость. В западном обществе половая мораль, опирающаяся на христианское учение, хотя и регулярно нарушаемая его членами, сохранялась стабильной на протяжении веков. Индивиды, нарушая установленные нормы в сексуальной сфере, не пытались разрушить весь нормативный порядок. Однако во второй половине XX в. произошли радикальные изменения, разрушившие многие основополагающие ценностно-нормативные структуры, определяющие поведение человека. Сначала молодежная гетеросексуальная революция 1960-х годов, имеющая преимущественно женское лицо, порвала нормативную связь сексуальности, брака и рождаемости, а в конце XX — начале XXI в. гомосексуальная революция окончательно деформировала традиционную половую мораль.Страны Запада охватывает волна конституирования нетрадиционных сексуальных отношений в качестве не только неформальной, но и формальной нормы. Сформированное общественное мнение стало влиять на приятие определенных решений, затрагивающих интересы ЛГБТ-сообщества, которые начинает все активнее навязывать свою культуру различным индивидам, социальным группам и социуму в целом. Несогласные с новыми правилами все чаще подвергаются различным санкциям. Гомосексуализм переходит из социокультурной области в политическую, входя в орбиту геополитических интересов стран Запада.В отличие от Европы и США, в которых развертывается либерализация половой морали (хотя и в них не наблюдается однородной позиции), в ряде стран остального мира разворачивается противоположная тенденция. В данной статье особое внимание уделяется России. Автор, анализируя результаты опросов общественного мнения по проблеме гомосексуализма, проведенные в течение последних десятилетий, показывает не только сохранение, но и нарастание негативного отношения россиян к этому явлению, которое воспринимается как явная девиация, что противоречит мировой тенденции либерализации половой морали.
In Making Martyrs: The Language of Sacrifice in Russian Culture from Stalin to Putin, Yuliya Minkova examines the language of canonization and vilification in Soviet and post-Soviet media, official literature, and popular culture. She argues that early Soviet narratives constructed stories of national heroes and villains alike as examples of uncovering a person's "true self." The official culture used such stories to encourage heroic self-fashioningamong Soviet youth and as a means of self-policing and censure. Later Soviet narratives maintained this sacrificial imagery in order to assert the continued hold of Soviet ideology on society, while post-Soviet discourses of victimhood appeal to nationalist nostalgia. Sacrificial mythology continues to maintain a persistent hold in contemporary culture, as evidenced most recently by the Russian intelligentsia's fascination with the former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian media coverage of the war in Ukraine, laws against US adoption of Russian children and against the alleged propaganda of homosexuality aimed at minors, renewed national pride in wartime heroes, and the current usage of the words "sacred victim" in public discourse. In examining these various cases, the book traces the trajectory of sacrificial language from individual identity construction to its later function of lending personality and authority to the Soviet and post-Soviet state.
