In Eastern Europe and Eurasia, LGBT+ individuals face repression by state forces and non-state actors who attempt to reinforce their vision of traditional social values. Decolonizing Queer Experience moves beyond discourses of oppression and repression to explore the resistance and resilience of LGBT+ communities who are remaking the post-socialist world; they refuse domination from local heteronormative expectations and from global LGBT+ movements that create and suggest limitations on possible LGBT+ futures. The chapters in this collection feature a multiplicity of LGBT+ voices, suggesting that no single narrative of LGBT+ experience in post-socialism is more representative or informative than another. This collection highlights the globally flexible, infinitely malleable notion of LGBT+ that counters Western hegemony in queer activism and communities.

Since the end of state socialism and the unifying efforts of the Soviet Union, questions about LGBT+ have gained increasing attention among scholars of various disciplines. In the region of Eastern Europe and Eurasia, LGBT+ individuals face repression by state forces, as well as by non-state actors attempting to reinforce their vision of traditional social values. Understanding this context, Decolonizing Queer Experience moves beyond discourses of oppression and repression to explore the resistance and resilience of LGBT+ communities that are remaking the post-socialist world in ways that refuse domination from their own, local heteronormative expectations as well as those imposed from global LGBT+ movements that also create and suggest limitations on possible LGBT+ futures. These chapters reflect a multiplicity of voices that fall into a broad community of LGBT+ people, suggesting that no single narrative of LGBT+ experience in post-socialism is more representative or informative than another. These chapters are evidence of a globally flexible, infinitely malleable notion of LGBT+ that counters Western hegemony in queer activism and communities.

Fiction. Eastern European Studies. Translated from the Ukrainian by Vitaly Chernetsky. "The literary dormitory at Moscow University becomes a kind of Russian Grand Hotel, serving the last supper of empire to a host of writers gathered from every corner of the continent, and beyond. Young poets from Vietnam, Mongolia, Yakutia, Uzbekistan, Russia, and Ukraine assemble to study, drink, frolic, and explore each other and the decaying city around them. When the supper turns into a bacchanal, who's surprised? 'The empire betrayed its drunks. And thus doomed itself to disintegration.' Part howl, part literary slapstick, part joyful dirge, charged with the brashness of youth, betraying the vision of the permanent outsider, Andrukhovych's novel suggests that literature really is news that stays news. Funny, buoyant, flamboyant, ground-breaking, and as revelatory today as when it was first published in Ukrainian, THE MOSCOVIAD remains a literary milestone. In spirit and intellectual brio Andrukhovych, whose irreverence makes Borat seem pious, is kin to the great Halldor Laxness and the venerable David Foster Wallace"--Askold Melnyczuk.