is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions postdoctoral fellow at the research platform Transformations and Eastern Europe at the University of Vienna. Her current project MOSELIT documents the history of homophobia and the limits of agency of LGBTQ people in Soviet Lithuania. She is the author of the forthcoming monograph Marija Gimbutas: transnational biography, feminist reception, and the controversy of goddess archaeology (Routledge). Navickaitė has written on marginalized sexualities and gender identities, history of eastern Europe from a postcolonial/postsocialist perspective, and feminist and queer theory.
Despite Lithuania’s Europeanism, its policies on LGBTQ rights are sometimes closer to Russia’s. At the end of 2023, the Lithuanian parliament voted against amending the country’s notorious ‘gay propaganda’ law, in defiance of the European Court of Human Rights.
The war in Ukraine gave Lithuanian anti-gender movements a pretext to postpone debates on civil rights issues, deemed all too divisive in times of geopolitical turmoil. Behind the rhetoric of internal unity, however, is a faithful reproduction of the Kremlin’s crusade against ‘gay propaganda’ and the ‘rotten West’.