Sex slavery and queer resistance in eastern Europe.

"The new republics are far from welcoming strangers: they fear their purity may be soiled by inclusion of others and excel in entrenching themselves against foreign infections. As it invents new social defenses against contagion, eastern Europe is engaged simultaneously in a master-slave dialectic with the US and the EU: civic sadomasochism, one that inflicts and welcomes social pain, characterizes its bodies politic. Eastern Europe today is filled with growing legions of unemployed and poor, the disposable people, the neo-slaves — Turgenev's lishnye ludi of the nineteenth century. The economics and poetics of sadomasochism persist now as then; the serfdom of eastern Europe continues and its international slavery deepens."

(via)