Deepfaking the ‘Acceptable Chechen’: Orientalist form and homonationalist worlding in David France’s Welcome to Chechnya

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article provides an interventionist critique of David France’s documentary Welcome to Chechnya (2020), from a queer decolonial perspective. This film claims to expose the brutal violence against queers, perpetrated by Chechnya’s government under its Kremlin-appointed leader Ramzan Kadyrov. The article argues that this film itself perpetuates insidious epistemic violence against Chechnya’s queers by filtering their story through homonationalist optics. On the one hand, it reduces their complex colonial predicament to the marketable cliché of ‘Muslim sexuality’. On the other, it naturalises Russia’s discursive and material control of Chechnya. This article opens with a critique of this documentary’s Orientalist form, including its use of ‘deepfake’. Then, it critiques its Islamophobic ‘narrative’. Third, it analyses the film’s material conditions of production and distribution.