Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Hungary since 1999, this paper explores stories of queer im/mobilities and border crossings during Hungarian Socialism, the divergent postsocialist paths they have traveled, and the differing borders of time and space they have shaped for queer people and politics.

Paper long abstract:

The nature of and relationships between queerness, borders, and im/mobility in postsocialist spaces are complex and deeply contested, in ways that produce and foreclose possibilities for not just personhood and politics, but anthropological analysis. Under Socialism, Hungarian queer people traveling not only to Berlin, Croatia, and the Black Sea coast, and the West, but within Hungary, as well as Westerners coming to Hungary, created both flows and frictions of identity and politics, and new ideas of connections and boundaries between East and West, East and East, and past and present; postsocialist memories and representations of these travels have shaped still other networks and borders. In my contribution to this roundtable, based on long term ethnographic fieldwork in Hungary since 1999, I explore several stories of queer im/mobilities and border crossings during Hungarian Socialism, the divergent postsocialist paths they have traveled, and the differing borders of time and space they have shaped for queer people and politics. I ask how the structures of Socialist life supported, as well as restricted, the production of queer networks? What were the personal and political implications of these, and for whom? And how has knowledge of these past im/mobilities traveled - or not? How has it been incorporated or erased from postsocialist narratives of queer identity and politics, in order to mark or contest the boundaries of East and West, past and present? Finally, how can grasping these relations more clearly help us to construct a more effective anthropology of queer crossings?