Modernization and the Semi-Periphery: Western Influence on Modern-Day LGBTQIA* Rights in Russia, Japan, and Iran

Abstract

This thesis seeks to identify and investigate the reason for the change in sexual values experienced by Russia, Japan, and Iran from the middle of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. I argue that semi-periphery nations exposed to Eurocentric globalization and associated “modernist” pressures around the turn of the nineteenth century, in attempting to conform to dominant Western European Victorian ideals, ultimately adopted the accompanying social conservatism and increased standards of heteronormative expectations. Modern-day policies and norms in these countries still reflect this conservatism and heteronormativity. My analysis of these case studies confirms this argument and shows that mechanisms of Foucauldian notions of governmentality and world-systems theory factored into the transfer of norms from heteronormative homoeros to strictly heteronormative systems.