Hasil untuk "q-fin.ST"

Olga Petri

This chapter looks at a dossier preserved in the personal archives of imperial minister Mikhail Ostrovskii to explore the visibility and composition of late imperial St. Petersburg's queer milieu. By the late nineteenth century, St. Petersburg's queer milieu had developed a clear and recognizable footprint. One of its central locations was Anichkov Bridge, part of the city's largest traffic artery, Nevsky Prospect. The chapter addresses the prism of social class, the dossier's emphasis on decadent and exploitative cross-class encounters, and sets out the preliminary position of the dossier vis-à-vis other key historical sources and, most important, the forensic-medical discussion of “homosexuality.” The chapter summarizes certain themes highlighted in the dossier that are repeated in other documents from around this time: the tension on the part of the city's governing authorities between suppression and toleration; the implications of streetlife for the queer milieu; its use of semipublic spaces; and finally, casual queer socialization.

Olga Petri

This book is a ground-level exploration of queer St. Petersburg at the fin-de-siècle. The book takes us through busy shopping arcades, bathhouses, and public urinals to show how queer men routinely met and socialized. It reconstructs the milieu that enabled them to navigate a city full of risk and opportunity. Focusing on a non-Western, unexplored, and fragile form of urban modernity, the book reconstructs a broad picture of queer sociability. In addition to drawing on explicitly recorded incidents that led to prosecution or medical treatment, the book investigates the many encounters that escaped bureaucratic surveillance and suppression. In doing so, it reveals how queer men's lives were conditioned by developing urban infrastructure, weather, light and lighting, and the informal constraints on enforcing law and moral order in the city's public spaces. The book is an ambitious record of the dynamic negotiation of illicit male homosexual sex, friendship, and cruising, uncovering a historically fascinating urban milieu in which efforts to manage the moral landscape often unintentionally facilitated queer encounters.

Olga Petri

This concluding chapter highlights the many factors that had a very practical, immediate, and real impact on the lives of queer men in St. Petersburg. These included precinct-level police protocols, ministerial dossiers, citywide directives, orders for spatial modifications, sanitary regulations, approved designs of urinals, streetlights, tram lines, the landscaping of public gardens, and instruction manuals for police officers. The chapter then considers the importance of recognizing and addressing ambiguity as a hallmark of the historical queer milieu. It looks at Mikhail Kuzmin's only novel, Wings (1906), an early-twentieth-century fictional account of what one might today describe as a coming-out story set in late imperial St. Petersburg. Unabashedly flirtatious in public in his nonliterary life, Kuzmin here preserved the nuanced art of detecting and navigating the urban queer milieu.

Olga Petri

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the late imperial St. Petersburg's queer milieu, which has remained largely obscure, although significant scholarly attention has been paid to past and present efforts to explicitly regulate homosexuality in Russia. The chapter explains that the period covered in this book begins in 1879, two years before the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, whose reforms ushered in an era of unprecedented population growth and modernization, but whose death supported the preservation of substantial leeway in state surveillance and arbitrary administrative repression. The book opens with the introduction of bathhouse reforms in 1879–1881, which targeted one of the city's premier spaces for homosexual sex and socialization. It ends in 1914, when the city became thoroughly militarized before entering its tumultuous revolutionary phase, during which it ceased to be the nation's capital and lost its dominant economic and cultural role, along with much of its population. The chapter explains that the book focuses on the negotiation between queer men and municipal authorities of spatial patterns of movement and encounter in the historical city.

Olga Petri

Olga Petri

Olga Petri

Olga Petri

This chapter explores the ordering, the experience, and the performance of the queer city in the streets by connecting key phenomena symptomatic of urbanization and modernization to reports of queer life. It looks at cruising by drawing on parallels between flaneurs and queer men, both of whom exploit the unique characteristics of modern urban streetlife for opportunities of observation and exhibition. The chapter then focuses on the Liteinaia Borough, which was home to Anichkov Bridge and a critical mass of other sites that played an important role in queer spatial patterns. It traces certain infrastructural themes that penetrated the Liteinaia Borough but also expanded beyond it: public transport, streetlights, and public toilets. All of these were intimately connected to commerce and entertainment as well as to the queer milieu. Finally, the chapter considers a particular public commercial space located a few steps from the Liteinaia Borough: the roofed shopping arcade called the Passazh. Its refurbishment uniquely reveals how municipal authorities and the Passazh's owners attempted to enforce a vision of spatial order that was irreconcilable with what would be described today as cruising.

Olga Petri

Olga Petri

Olga Petri

Olga Petri

This chapter argues that day-to-day policing in St. Petersburg frequently involved the use of nuisance laws and administrative prerogatives but was also instanced in thinly veiled refusals to carry out direct orders to manage the spaces and environments in which queer men acted out their desires. This regime involved the exercise of broad police discretion and can be plausibly reconstructed based on the surviving evidence of police activity—or inactivity—in relation to queer spatial practices in the city. This regime can be referred to as queer sexual policing, which includes the decisions and actions of constables and officers in conducting surveillance of men presumed to be amenable to having sex with other men, curtailing opportunities for sex between men, or targeting behavior understood as a precursor to sex between men. More generally, queer sexual policing encompasses a revealing range of modalities of informal policing. It addresses the liminal space between law and lawlessness in the city, taking into account the obvious difficulty of detecting, let alone preventing, actual breaches of sodomy laws. Understanding and providing plausible interpretive models of queer policing helps reveal how a vision of spatial order held by the city's administrative elites was made operational on the streets.

Olga Petri

This chapter examines the urban adaptations and peculiarities that made communal bathing in St. Petersburg so notably convenient as a context for queer encounters. It discusses how the goalposts in the negotiation over this space shifted in response to government action in the form of the Bathhouse Ordinance of 1879. The chapter then describes how and why this unprecedented and ambitious legislation failed to achieve the intended reforms and instead reinforced queer spatial patterns and the commercial role of sex in the city's bathhouses. The ordinance marked the transition from a bathing tradition in which prostitution was peripheral to one in which it was central to the commercial viability of this singular urban space. Ultimately, the failed reforms provide an important example of an evolving entente and negotiation regarding the city's queer spaces among urban administrative authorities, people who had a pecuniary interest in bathing, queer men, and the general public.

Olga Petri

This chapter begins with a brief description of the Tavricheskii Garden as a physical space and a hub of queer sociability and spatial practices. The rambling paths, glades, and embankments of the garden played an important role as regular meeting places for queer men and for some it served as a relatively safe social setting—an emotional refuge among St. Petersburg's public spaces. The chapter then connects this description to an emotional or allegorical map of cruising that celebrated poet Mikhail Kuzmin and painter Konstantin Somov set out to make. It explores Kuzmin's experience of flirtation, friendship, love, and confrontation as he participated in cruising patterns that often started in the garden. Finally, the chapter looks at the interaction between cruising and friendship, tracing modes of queer socialization that suggest a more diffuse and less instrumental sexuality than that often attributed to queer men in the historical city.

Olga Petri

Alexandre Palmer Plourde, Mladen R. Nedimovic

Alexandre Palmer Plourde, Mladen R. Nedimovic

Juan Carlos Moreno Romo

No es a los sitios arqueológicos a donde debemos ir a contemplar las ruinas de la ciudad; la mayor parte de los seres humanos vivimos el día de hoy exiliados, o encerrados en ellas. Las más de nuestras ciudades son, por toda esa especie de tumor que les crece a todas, por todas partes, feas e inhóspitas: les falla el "arte de la ciudad". Y la propia "lógica de la ciudad" deja a su vez de operar en la disolución, o en la perversión del ágora, y esto se vuelve en nuestros días un mal verdaderamente global: pareciera que estuviésemos asistiendo al fin de la ciudad.

Charles Alexander Webster