I will trace the effects of Carelian evacuation during the 2WW to Finland for the queer descendants of the refugee families. I will raise initial questions about the connection between queer lives, lost heritage, and nationalist sentiments.
In my wider research project on queer will-writing and inheritance arrangements, I have looked ...
(Show more)I will trace the effects of Carelian evacuation during the 2WW to Finland for the queer descendants of the refugee families. I will raise initial questions about the connection between queer lives, lost heritage, and nationalist sentiments.
In my wider research project on queer will-writing and inheritance arrangements, I have looked at how the family wealth has been collected and/or invested in Finnish families during the past three generations. To my surprise, the Carelian evacuation features rather strongly in the data I have collected so far. In most cases, my respondents have one or two grandparents from Carelia, or of Russian Jewish roots.
In my paper, I will highlight the influence of the interrupted heritage – lost homes, lands and properties – to discuss in which ways Carelia figures in my queer respondents’ family stories. In the postwar regime of the building up a social-democratic and urban Finnish welfare state, Carelian immigrants struggled with lots of issues, and their children inherited a complicated mental legacy but often there was not much to inherit in the material sense.
I will discuss how the history of "interrupted heritage" is related to the way my respondents narrate their family backgrounds. I will furthermore elaborate on how they think about their sexuality and their own “legacies”.
Tentatively, I will argue that the experience of silenced racism that many Carelian refugees experienced in Finland, and the impossibility to return to their own lands in the Soviet Russia, has influenced the identities of their queer children and even grandchildren.
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