| Abstract: | Citing examples of ‘queer’ (gender- and sexually-transgressive) behaviour taken from psychiatric, criminological and forensic literature, the essay explores the formation of Soviet Russian masculinities and femininities during the two decades following 1917. After surveying the legal tradition regarding same-sex eroticism, it discusses expert views of the ‘mannish lesbian’ and the effeminate male homosexual. Compulsory heterosexuality was a central, unproblematized tool used in the construction of a revolutionary socialist respectability during the 1920s. During the Stalinist Five Year Plans of the 1930s, the male ‘homosexual’ was explicitly outlawed while family obligations became more difficult for women to avoid. |
