25
Introduction
Describing her preparation for fieldwork, Verdery noted that in the
1970s there was so little anthropological research done on Eastern
Europe that it “was less known to anthropology than was New Guinea”
(1996, p. 5). Eastern Europe was viewed by the discipline of anthropol-
ogy as a mysterious and exotic Other. Te situation started to change
in the 1990s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegra-
tion of Yugoslavia, Western scholars hurried to fill in the gap, so Eastern
and Central Europe saw a spike in research interest about so-called post-
socialist space, as well as gender and sexuality after socialism (for an
overview of the Western work on this subject until the beginning of the
2000s, see Baer 2002). Looking back almost thirty years later, it seems
2
Beyond Western Theories: On the Use
and Abuse of “Homonationalism”
in Eastern Europe
Roman Leksikov and Dafna Rachok
© Te Author(s) 2020
R. Buyantueva and M. Shevtsova (eds.), LGBTQ+ Activism in Central and Eastern
Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20401-3_2
R. Leksikov (*)
University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada
e-mail: leksikov@ualberta.ca
D. Rachok
Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN, USA