Abstract
ABSTRACT In March of 2017, the Russian LGBT Network received their first reports of police violence against individuals in Chechnya because of their perceived sexual orientation. In the following months, news spread of a campaign of forced disappearances and torture specifically targeting suspected homosexual men. Between December, 2018 and February, 2019, police carried out another wave of unlawful detentions of men on the basis of their sexual orientation. The reports of unlawful detentions and extrajudicial killings of queer men may seem surreal in a world that has slowly grown more progressive with regard to LGBT rights issues. And yet, this violence is the reality faced by gay and bisexual men in Chechnya under Ramzan Kadyrov, the hypermasculine Chechen leader. This paper explores the ways in which religious practice, imaginations of nature, and conceptions of gender have influenced Chechnya’s current anti-LGBT climate.
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