The punctum as entry point

In 2013, international news coverage started to emerge about a new Russian law that prohibited the positive depiction of non- traditional (meaning nonheteronormative) relations, lifestyles, and ideas. My first encounter with Russian state homophobia1 was a news article that reported the passing of the so- called ‘gay propaganda law’. The article was accompanied by a headline photograph of four individuals huddled together, one with blood streaming down their face, surrounded by police officers. I remember the moment I saw this photograph quite distinctly because it shocked me, left me feeling uncomfortable, and that image has stuck with me ever since.

Figure 4.1 is strikingly similar to the photographs accompanying those news articles. The moment I saw that photograph and read reports about the gay propaganda law, it wasn't immediately clear to me what its passing really boiled down to: arbitrary moralizing about the types of sex, bodily pleasures, and erotic desires one is allowed to have and legitimately pursue. I did not have the vocabulary to articulate what Russia's new law meant in terms of sex. I hadn't really considered that there might be a politics of sex. Nor was I able to put words around international dimensions of Russia's politicization of sex beyond pointing to ‘the international community’s’ obligation to do something. That sex and homophobia might be part of a broader geopolitical strategy— what I have since conceptualized as ‘heteronormative internationalism’ (Cooper- Cunningham, 2021: 11, 46; Gifkins et al, 2022: 11)— was surprising when I first encountered that image and long after.

That is the power that an image holds. Power to inspire thought, exploration, reflection, inquisitiveness, and theoretical play. Seeing that image in 2013, I failed to think through the politics or the power of visual representation, which is ironic given that it was a photograph of homophobic violence that provoked me; or to use Roland Barthes’ terminology, it possessed the amorphous ‘punctum’, that which ‘pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’ (1981: 27). An image can have an immediate affective and vividly experienced effect on an individual, but it can also take time for the political to surface and become clear. In my case, this happened over several years. Those years involved finding the tools, vocabulary, and knowledge of queer and visual politics to enable me to grasp what was going on in a meaningful way.