Once Upon a Time, There Was Sex in Georgia

, 2010

Interview with philosopher Lela Gaprindashvili. Published in ME Magazine #3(9)2008. pp.16-21 One of the most prevalent stereotypes about homosexuals in our society is that gays represent an inversion, of sorts, of gender roles. The myth of gay men’s femininity and lesbians’ masculinity, like many gender stereotypes, is based more on preconceived notions rather than scientific knowledge. Numerous anthropological and ethnographic studies have confirmed that notions of “typical woman” and “typical man” are quite relative and subject to change according to both culture and a given society’s level of development. The only thing that can be called a general characteristic of these diverse stereotypes is the gender asymmetry that is manifested both in the status of men and women in society and its institutions that reflects a given culture’s assessments and expectations in relation to gender.

2021

Drawing on a three-hour interview conducted in 2016, this case study sheds light on how the professional identity and career path of a Georgian man born at the beginning of the 1950s, who negotiated the challenges associated with expressing his homosexual desire as an adult in the 1970s-1980s, was informed by his perception of the risk associated with stigmatization and repression. This case study reconstructs a process of subjectification from the tactics of avoidance and survival strategies which were internalized in response to the milieu of repression shaped by antisodomy laws and the medicalization of male homosexuality. It also illustrates how the interviewee’s social identity as a medical doctor and therefore as a member of the intelligentsia protected him, while at the same time precluding the possibility of solidarity with men outside his own social class. Ever suspicious of the possibility that they might be informers, the interviewee internalized social stratification, a dynamic which on a larger scale, we may infer, facilitated the regulation of sexual dissidents by the Soviet regime. We thus chart the landscape wrought by the repression of homosexuality and the disappearance of homosexual social identities and visible communities after 1934, from Stalinism to Perestroika. “For the totalitarian mindset, the person who loves differently is a dissident,” claimed Igor´ Kon, a prominent academic figure who, during Perestroika, fought for the annulment of the antisodomy legislation as a product of the Stalinist legacy. Indeed, the antisodomy articles, introduced in the Soviet Russian and Georgian penal codes in 1934, remained in force until 1993 for Russia, and until 2000 for Georgia. (...)"

Caucasus Survey, 2016

Anthropology of East Europe Review, 2010

This paper examines how lesbianism is portrayed in Georgian media. Media representation of lesbianism is presented here as a constructive process. Using qualitative and quantitative analysis of articles from Georgian print media from 2008 to 2009, we highlight such issues as: the invisibility of women's sexuality and homosexuality, and the social construction of lesbianism in Georgian print media as immoral and dangerous. We find that homophobia in patriarchal Georgia often links lesbians to social problems, including drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution, and crime. Georgian homosexual women are doubly marginalized because of their gender (female) and sexual (lesbian) identity. Homosexual issues and relationships are viewed as threatening the interests of patriarchal society.

Anthropological linguistics, 2000

Georgian Christian Thought and Its Cultural Context, 2014