Disavowal and academic activism: Governing and documenting Anti-LGBTIQ+ violence in Russia

This article argues that disavowal, understood as a structured practice of acknowledging harm while suspending its political consequences, is essential but absent from the conceptual vocabulary of anti-queer governance scholarship. Drawing on feminist, queer, and affect literature, I conceptualise disavowal as a technique of governance that operates by managing recognition. The concept is developed sociologically rather than psychoanalytically: what is at stake is not a subject defending itself against a traumatic perception but the routine administration of recognition across media, law, and archival infrastructure. Where existing accounts explain how Russian law neutralises queer harm once a case has entered legal discourse, disavowal names the prior and more general operation through which publicity itself is converted into neutralisation. Comparing how disavowal operates through bureaucratic care in liberal regimes and through overt moral control in authoritarian settings, I argue that it adapts to divergent political economies while retaining its core capacity to sever recognition from consequence. The argument proceeds through a single brief media report that condenses the narrative mechanisms by which violence is rendered reportable without becoming actionable. Academic activism is developed here as the article’s methodological frame, in which documentation, archiving, positioned writing, and the choice of analytical vocabulary function as interventions against epistemic erasure and state silencing.