ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the visibilities of artists who are alleged to be women-desiring-women within Russian pop and rock from the late 1990s onward. The proliferation of images of lesbian desire and bodies into the Russian mainstream started in 1999, when the rock musician Zemfira Ramazanova released her first album and became immediately a headliner. Lesbian identities seem to arrive in Russia in the middle of 2000s, only to face a harsh headwind of homophobia and state oppression that differs very much from the experiences of women-desiring-women and the few self-identified lesbians of the 1990s. Before and during the 1990s, the public image of lesbians, if it existed, was the one of female prison inmates or psychiatry patients. Sexual values became a critical battleground for national regeneration. Conservatives and nationalists turned their attention to Russia's demographic implosion and prescribed the re-regulation of sexuality.
