Doletskaya, Olga; (2025) Queer Russian Parents: Building Support Networks, Navigating Risks, “Doing Family”, and Crossing Borders. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The dominant body of research on queer parenthood focuses largely on the experiences of families in the Global North/West. There is little to no literature dedicated to queer families living in authoritarian or hostile contexts, particularly those of Central and Eastern Europe. This work aims to diversify the field of queer family and reproduction studies with experiences from a locality that is often discussed in terms of the politics of homophobia rather than the lived experiences of queer people. Indeed, queer parents in Russia have been increasingly vulnerable to repressions from Vladimir Putin’s regime, which has waged a ‘war on queerness’ in the past fifteen years, culminating in increased crackdown on human rights and freedoms since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. However, queer families still manage to have and raise children in, and beyond, this hostile context. Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis examines how queer Russian parents navigate the risks of living in Russia, balance safety and disclosure, manage familial relationships, find support offline and online, and decide whether to migrate. I employed a combination of ethnographic methods: in-depth interviews with queer parents who had migrated from Russia, a digital ethnography of queer community media, and in-person participant observations of Russian diasporic queer communities in London and Tbilisi. The thesis argues that queer parents do immense emotional work to navigate family display, manage and mend relationships with families of origin and chosen family, and balance risk and disclosure. The parents found safe spaces and were able to express themselves, their families, and their identity online, through queer community media, and social networks. Ultimately, the parents I interviewed chose to leave Russia, subsequently having to grapple with the various difficulties which come with migration. They had to navigate community, belonging, and identity, while dealing with challengers that come with precarious migration journeys.

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