queer masculinities

116 Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800
the seclusion of elite women in Moscow’s palaces appeared to set up a
rigid gender divide in private life, yet the Domostroi frequently mentions
moments when men and women were required to mix to ensure
the proper functioning of the Muscovite household. 43 Specialists with a
queer eye could no doubt expand what is currently known about samesex
relations in Muscovy by examining these themes in well-known
sources for evidence of the formation and regulation of homosocial
spaces.
Ritual and emotion
The themes dealt with so far have stressed the tracing of mutual male
sexuality in history through representations of, and locations for,
sexual acts. These approaches, while very helpful in uncovering previously
ignored patterns of behavior, do not necessarily reveal much
about the emotions that usually accompany sexual encounters.
Historians of Muscovy are beginning to explore the range of emotion
women and men felt for each other. 44 Mutual male (or mutual female)
relations remain to be examined for the character of friendship, of
loving affection and sustained devotion. For the historian, the most
promising window on these emotions are the religious and popular
institutions of ritual brotherhood and sisterhood (in Russian, pobratimstvo
and posestrimstvo).
In the early twentieth century, homosexual intellectuals began to
scrutinize brotherhood rituals in eastern and southeastern Europe with
a view to recovering pre-modern patterns of homosexual affection. 45
John Boswell noted that during the homophobic wave of the midtwentieth
century, modern social science regarded ritual brotherhood
with extreme discomfort, and distorted its discussions of the phenomena
by refusing to acknowledge any homosexual content in these relationships.
Boswell suggests that the intelligentsia of southeastern
Europe adopted similar attitudes hoping, it appears, to be perceived as
‘civilized’ and modern. 46 It is hardly surprising that Russian scholarship
about pobratimstvo was marked by similar attitudes, and that Stalinist
homophobia intensified intellectuals’ predisposition to see ritual brotherhood
in Russian history through these filters. The myth that Russia
was a sexually chaste nation interposed between a degenerate West
and an East permeated by vice was a cultural trope that enabled tsarist
and Soviet intellectuals to ignore or ascribe to foreign Others any manifestations
of same-sex love they discussed. 47 Russian rituals of pobratimstvo
and posestrimstvo are thus ripe for re-examination by scholars