Disloyalty Ascribed: Russian-Speaking Men Experiencing Same-Sex Desire in Latvia

Objective

Russian-speaking sexual minorities in Latvia remain largely invisible in scholarship, limiting both academic understanding and policy responses. SexNat fills this gap by analysing their lived experiences in the face of dual ascription of disloyalty: their language being often politicised as a sign of alignment with Russia, their sexuality framed as dissenting from sexual nationalism. Since 2004, Latvia’s nation-building has combined EU/NATO integration with an ethnic-democratic regime that ties belonging to language, while Russian has been progressively excluded from the public sphere. In parallel, conscription and a heterocentred policy environment reinforce martial masculinity as a test of belonging. Masculinity becomes a key site where proving loyalty becomes a condition of belonging, a dynamic reinforced by military conscription reintroduction after Russian’s invasion of Ukraine. Across this field, sexual nationalism and homonationalism can operate jointly through linguistic hierarchies (including NGO language practices), producing a regime where loyalty is scrutinised via sexuality and language. Through in-depth life-history interviews conducted in Riga and Daugavpils, SexNat seeks to co-construct a theoretical model of subjectivities that transcends both national (Latvia’s ethnic democracy) and supranational (EU versus “Russian world”) identity frameworks. It will do so by engaging with emic categories and alternative forms of subjectivation, in order to assess the extent to which these may unsettle the binary opposition between “us” and “them” through which disloyalty is ascribed. Conceptually, SexNat will show how linguistic, sexual, and gendered hierarchies underpin the ascription of disloyalty, and how “Europeanness” operates as an ambivalent resource - at once refuge, constraint, and hybrid belonging - at the margins of EU citizenship, thereby advancing scholarly debates and informing strategies for more inclusive European societies.