Queering Images of Russia in Sweden: Discursive hegemony and counter-hegemonic articulations 1991–2019

How do ideas of non-normative sexuality afect the way countries are perceived? How are ideas of non-normative sexuality afected by national images? To answer these questions, the dissertation focuses on discourses on Russian non-normative sexuality in Sweden from 1991 to 2019. The first two chapters draw on texts and images from the five largest Swedish newspapers, as well as examples from popular culture. The second part of the thesis focuses on photographic and video art projects by Axel Karlsson Rixon and Anna Viola Hallberg, as well as a series of Stockholm club events called Baba Bomba Diskoteka. Paying attention to temporality, space, and emotions as three central elements in understanding non-normative sexuality, the analysis moves beyond binary ideas of “LGBTQ-friendly here and homophobic there” making a case for queerly plural images of nations and sexualities. Kirill Polkov is a gender and sexuality scholar at Södertörn University. This study is his doctoral dissertation.