Authors

Olga Doletskaya¹;  ¹ University College London, UK

Discussion

Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s government has tried to further utilise homophobia and then transphobia in a series of new anti-LGBTQ+ laws, which would reinforce an enemy within and distract the attention of Russians from the war. As a result, the anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda law of 2013 was expanded in November 2022, an anti-trans law was enforced in July 2023 and finally, the “international LGBT movement” was labelled as an extremist organisation by the Supreme Court in November 2023. Russia has become inhospitable for its LGBTQ+ citizens, leading to significant waves of queer migration. Parents, particularly vulnerable to Russia’s anti-LGBT+ legislation, have been seeking ways to migrate, often choosing to seek asylum. Although there is no data on the numbers of queer migrants from Russia, it is clear that the question of mobility became paramount for the LGBTQ+ community: queer people feel 'stuck' in an authoritarian regime that demonizes them. However, queer migration overall and queer parents’ experiences remain overlooked in research of the impacts of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Migration as a queer parent comes with a unique set of challenges. While the family is stuck in the temporal limbo of migration bureaucracy, particularly the indefinite waiting of the asylum process, the children’s lives move quickly, adjusting to the new reality outside the desired trajectory of childhood. In my interviews with 25 queer parents who have left Russia, their migration journeys were bound up with their view of the past, Russia's recent history, the dangers of Russia's present and hopeful imagining of the future. I am interested in the temporality of migration, whereby the liminality of waiting is juxtaposed with hope and continuity of familial lives and queer identities. In this paper, I will explore my interlocutors’ decision-making process when choosing to migrate, navigating the asylum system with children, and their imaginings of the future and adapting to the new environment. I will use the concept stuckedness (Hage, 2009) to analyse the experiences of (im)mobility of queer parents. Moreover, I will look at how queer families navigate Russian-ness and their engagement with Russian diaspora following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.