Russian-speaking LGBTQ Immigrants’ Responses to Racialised Hierarchies in the U.S. – Negotiating Immigrant Precarity and White Privilege

Abstract

In this article, I analyse opinions on racialisation and racism expressed online by Russianspeaking LGBTQ immigrants in the U.S., in order to investigate their understanding and negotiation of American racialised hierarchies. I argue that racialisation is a two-sided process where the racialised subject can exercise agency by negotiating their place in a racialised hierarchy, and for some it involves adopting either a racist or antiracist position, so as to fit into contemporary American discourse on race. Specifically, Russian-speaking LGBTQ immigrants may take the following positions regarding race and racialisation in the U.S.: 1) identification with whiteness and white supremacy; 2) willful ignorance, or refusal to accept the reality of structural racisms in the U.S.; and 3) multidimensional queer antiracist solidarity. Subsequently, a negotiation of their place within – or against – this hierarchy is a way for immigrants to claim belonging to their new American society. This analysis contrasts with the existing scholarship on post-Soviet diasporas which portrays Russian-speaking immigrants as socially conservative, right-leaning, and prone to racist bias. Specifically, LGBTQ asylum-seekers’ precarious immigrant status and a strong political identification with radical queer activism in the U.S. allows for a production of new forms of political subjectivities and new forms of imagined immigrant belongings, as well as a possibility of new forms of solidarity.