Postcolonial queer critique in post-communist Europe - Stuck in the Western progress narrative?

This article employs a postcolonial-post-communist lens to analyse the latest theoretical developments in the field of sexuality studies in the Eastern European region. In particular, it focuses on the collection of articles De-centring Western sexualities: Central and Eastern European perspectives (2011), edited by two Polish scholars: Robert Kulpa and Joanna Mizieliñska. This article asks if the critical approach taken up by the authors of this book does justice to the complexity of the Eastern European situation vis-à-vis ‘the West’. Although the book claims to de-centralise Euro-centrism, it actually reiterates the East-West binary and reinforces the progress narrative, only reversing, but not annihilating the hierachy. As the postcolonial queer approach taken up in this article demonstrates, such reversal does not escape orientalist tropes and can be called a scholarly ‘sexual nationalism’.