Gender Non-Conformity of Teenagers in the Project “Children 404”

The article examines how non-normative adolescent sexualities and gender identities are articulated — and often constrained — within contemporary Russian LGBTQ+ activism. Focusing on the online project Deti 404, which collects and publishes personal narratives from LGBTQ+ teenagers in Russia, Gorbachov analyzes how the discursive field shaped by these testimonies both exposes and reproduces the regulatory norms of sexuality and gender under Russia’s increasingly conservative regime.

Within the framework of laws prohibiting the so-called “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors,” adolescent sexuality is discursively constructed as inherently heterosexual and cisgender. This legal apparatus renders LGBTQ+ youth both invisible and illegitimate — framing queerness as a cultural threat to public morality and child welfare. Deti 404 intervenes in this silencing by offering a platform for queer youth voices — yet Gorbachov shows that these narratives frequently reproduce normative assumptions about gender and sexuality, even as they seek to resist them.

Through critical discourse analysis of individual stories, the article argues that gender nonconformity is predominantly interpreted as a marker of homosexual, rather than transgender, identity. Masculine girls are typically framed as lesbians, feminine boys as gay, and bisexuality is often positioned as a transitional phase toward homosexuality. Transgender identities, in contrast, are largely absent — a silence that reflects broader cultural erasure, stigma, and a lack of accessible discursive frameworks for self-identification.

Drawing on theoretical insights from Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gorbachov underscores how identity categories simultaneously enable and delimit subject formation. While Deti 404 represents an important counter-public within Russian digital culture, the article demonstrates that even oppositional discourses can become complicit in normativity when they fail to critically interrogate the terms of recognition they inhabit. Expanding the discursive space for diverse, non-normative identities — particularly through sustained engagement with queer theory — is therefore essential to challenging regulatory regimes and enabling more plural, inclusive articulations of adolescent sexual and gendered subjectivities.