“It just isn’t happening”: emotional obstacles in Russo-Georgian queer interactions in post-February 2022 Georgia

Abstract

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, over 100,000 Russian citizens have migrated to Georgia. Among them were a large number of LGBTQ+ people concerned about a rise in legislative homophobia and transphobia. With shared experiences of anti-queer sentiment, one might expect the emergence of a sense of transnational belonging between Georgian and Russian LGBTQ+ people, now encountering one another in Georgia’s cities. Our ethnographic fieldwork with Georgian and Russian queers has shown that this was not the case. While not necessarily hostile to one another, the communities have remained largely siloed, with few instances of overlap. In this article we interrogate why a shared sense of belonging has not emerged. Drawing upon affect theory, we propose that “affectual blockages” resulting from dissonant emotional landscapes have created a barrier between Georgian and Russian queer collectivities, preventing the emergence of a sense of togetherness across the national boundary. Our work contributes insights on emotions as an obstacle to belonging, shifts the focus of queer migration literature to center-to-periphery mobility within the Global East, and adds queer perspectives and experiences to a body of literature on Russian war emigration following the full-scale invasion.