Intersectionality and Propaganda
Exactly eight years ago – the time when I was living in St Petersburg, Russia and working for ‘Coming Out’ LGBT Group – we were joining a campaign against ‘anti-gay-propaganda’ legislative initiative in Kyrgyzstan. Sometimes, I think about what lenses this gave to me – being an LGBT activist in Russia but also a daughter and grand-daughter of immigrants, those Ukrainian, Belarusian and Romani people coming to / being in Siberia to be able to feed themselves and their families; the girl who noticed that her surname was different from the majority of her classmates; the girl whose parents spoke Ukrainian as children but were not able to pass it to her. By 2014, first regional and then the federal laws prohibiting what they called ‘propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors’ had already been adopted in Russia. By that time, I had already had the experience of organizing street protests against these laws in Siberia, and more hidden (or, if you wis...