The Politics of In/Visibility: Carving Out Queer Space in Ul'yanovsk

This essay contributes new insights to current debates about the construction and meaning of queer space by considering how city space is appropriated by an informal ‘lesbian’ network in Ul'yanovsk, Russia. The group routinely occupied very public locations, meeting and socialising on the street or in mainstream cafés in central Ul'yanovsk, although claims to these spaces as queer were mostly contingent, precarious or invisible to outsiders. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support received by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies and the Department of Central and East European Studies, University of Glasgow, to conduct fieldwork in Russia. The essay considers how provincial location affects tactics used to carve out communal space, foregrounding the importance of local context and collective agency in shaping specific forms of resistance, and questioning ethnocentric assumptions about the empowering potential of visibility.