Theorizing Siberian Sex

This article examines discourses on racial mixing in Siberia and its interpretations among the founders of Siberian regionalism. Debates about miscegenation were crucial for the development of racial theories in the late Russian Empire, as well as regionalists’ vision of Siberia and its colonization. Yet the importance of gender and sexuality for their ideas has been largely overlooked. The present article partially remedies this gender-blindness by centering gender, sexuality, and desire in the analysis of several writings by Afanasii Shchapov, Serafim Shashkov, and Nikolai Iadrintsev. The article argues that gender and gendered sexuality were essential for regionalists’ understanding of miscegenation, race, civilization, and the Russian Empire. As the research demonstrates, gender and sexuality not only undergirded, but also produced, figuratively and literally, race and empire.