Queue Time, Animation, and the Queer Childhood of Late Socialism

Abstract

This chapter argues that the Brezhnev-era queue, films, and literature gave rise to and enacted what Jack Halberstam and others have called queer temporality—a mode of time that epitomized the late socialist imagination and continues to haunt the cultural production of the Soviet and post-Soviet diasporas. The first sections of the chapter demonstrate the ways diverse forms of popular culture—specifically, the animated films Goluboi shchenok (1976), the Cheburashka series (1969–83), and Natalia Baranskaya’s novella, A Week Like Any Other (1969)—evoked queer time and space. It then moves on to the queue as portrayed in Vladimir Sorokin’s The Queue (1983). The last part of the chapter suggests that Russian-American novels like Olga Grushin’s The Line (2010) and David Bezmozgis’s The Free World (2011) recapitulate the queer temporality of the queue and invite exaltation in chronology-stopping, non-reproductive spaces.