Freshly Printed - allow 7 days lead
Couldn't load pickup availability
Places of Tenderness and Heat
The Queer Milieu of Fin-de-Siècle St. Petersburg
Olga Petri (Author)
9781501763779
Hardback, published 15 June 2022
276 pages, 10 b&w halftones, 2 maps, 1 graph - 1 Graphs - 10 Halftones, black and white - 2 Maps
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm, 0.907 kg
Principally of interest to students of urban studies and queer men's history in Russia. Olga Petri takes a unique approach to the study of queerness in late Imperial Russia by examining the city of St. Petersburg as an important factor in shaping the sexual and romantic lives of queer men. This approach creates a highly nuanced study of the geography of the queer experience and the interaction among city officials, policemen, business owners, and queer men as they negotiated the extent to which homoerotic activity could take place in the public venues of the city. Her methodology offers a new way to approach research on subjects not readily visible in the historical record.
Places of Tenderness and Heat is a ground-level exploration of queer St. Petersburg at the fin-de-siècle. Olga Petri takes us through busy shopping arcades, bathhouses, and public urinals to show how queer men routinely met and socialized. She reconstructs the milieu that enabled them to navigate a city full of risk and opportunity. Focusing on a non-Western, unexplored, and fragile form of urban modernity, Petri reconstructs a broad picture of queer sociability. In addition to drawing on explicitly recorded incidents that led to prosecution or medical treatment, she investigates the many encounters that escaped bureaucratic surveillance and suppression. Her work reveals how queer men's lives were conditioned by developing urban infrastructure, weather, light and lighting, and the informal constraints on enforcing law and moral order in the city's public spaces. Places of Tenderness and Heat is an ambitious record of the dynamic negotiation of illicit male homosexual sex, friendship, and cruising and uncovers a historically fascinating urban milieu in which efforts to manage the moral landscape often unintentionally facilitated queer encounters.