Queering Polish-Russian Relations: Soviet Tops and Polish Bottoms - Jodi Greig (2.28.19)

This lecture examines Michał Witkowski’s 2005 critically acclaimed novel Lubiewo (Lovetown). Witkowski’s novel builds an ethnography of a lost era, permeated with nostalgia for socialist Poland and for the seemingly plentiful queer sexual encounters in parks and Soviet barracks. In my reading of the novel, I demonstrate how Witkowski interrogates mainstream Polish narratives of moving from oppression to freedom, occupation to autonomy, stagnation to development, as well as narratives of progress tied to capitalism and globalization. Lubiewo challenges these tropes through a mapping of sexual and nostalgic pleasures derived from Polish encounters with Russian imperialism, specifically taking pleasure in the “bad” socialist past, and in a decidedly queer Slavic brotherhood.