queer masculinities

Dan Healey: Russia 113
erotic bonds could at least be posited from these penitential guidelines,
and the results compared with what we know about Renaissance
England and Italy. Another intriguing set of prohibitions surrounds
cross-dressing and effeminization, and these deserve greater attention
from historians of clothing and manners in comparative perspective.
The best-known historian of women for Russian-language readers,
Natalia Pushkareva, has written about sources for the early history of
Russian heterosexuality, which could perhaps also be productive for
the study of transgressive sexual behaviors. She has proposed that literary
depictions of sexual relations (dating from the late Muscovite era)
and collections of popular sayings and folklore (gathered in the early
nineteenth century but reflecting pre-1700 attitudes) are useful sources
on the sexual culture of Muscovy. 28 The frequency with which anal
imagery occurs in these sources deserves careful scrutiny. Among the
other sources Pushkareva has examined – probably less likely to turn
up anything for queer researchers – are medical writings (for cures for
sexually transmitted diseases) and extremely rare personal letters or
notes from this period. (About 750 birch-bark documents survive from
early Rus’: court rulings and official lists, supplemented by a handful of
letters; but Pushkareva notes that only two of these letters deal with
intimate relations between spouses.) 29 Another source, again tending to
emphasize heterosexuality, consists of advice manuals, the most
famous for our period being the Domostroi. 30 Yet even those documents
which do not directly relate to same-sex relations provide context for
the determined researcher. If such materials could be read in conjunction
with the other kinds of sources discussed here, the queering of
early Russian popular culture could begin.
Space and its regulation
The vast and relatively undifferentiated natural environment of the
northeastern European plain encouraged Russians to think creatively
and perhaps unusually about space. 31 Many historians who have
thought about same-sex relations in Russia have noted the importance
in Russia of homosocial institutions and the space they produced and
maintained for the creation of ‘queer sites.’ 32 More investigation of the
Muscovite antecedents of modern Russia’s homosocial institutions,
and inquiry into their spatial character, would undoubtedly yield new
insights about Russian constructions of masculinities and about
mutual male sexuality.