Description
Book SynopsisIn The Queer Art of History Jennifer V. Evans examines postwar and contemporary German history to broadly argue for a practice of queer history that moves beyond bounded concepts and narratives of identity. Drawing on Black feminism, queer of color critique, and trans studies, Evans points out that although many rights for LGBTQI people have been gained in Germany, those rights have not been enjoyed equally. There remain fundamental struggles around whose bodies, behaviors, and communities belong. Evans uses kinship as an analytic category to identify the fraught and productive ways that Germans have confronted race, gender nonconformity, and sexuality in social movements, art, and everyday life. Evans shows how kinship illuminates the work of solidarity and intersectional organizing across difference and offers an openness to forms of contemporary and historical queerness that may escape the archive's confines. Through forms of kinship, queer and trans people test out new possibilities for citizenship, love, and public and family life in postwar Germany in ways that question claims about liberal democracy, the social contract, and the place of identity in rights-based discourses.
Trade Review"Asks urgent, uncomfortable questions of both 'queer' and 'history,' and insists that the two can still improve one another. . . . There is a love for queer history running through Evans’s monograph; it is not a cold, calculating deconstruction of our love for our past but instead a proposal for how we can love it better." -- Ben Miller * The Baffler *
"Evans offers a new tour de force, a new methodological intervention and a new way to write queer history. ... Besides her revolutionary analysis of the role of art and the senses for our understanding of the archive and temporalities, this book should be considered essential reading for all historians specializing in German history."
-- Sebastien Tremblay * German History *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1. Entangled Histories 23
2. The Optics of Desire 51
3. Imagining Trans*Gression 85
4. Pathways to Liberation 124
5. The Boundaries of Toleration 155
6. Queer Kinship in Dangerous Times 184
Epilogue 214
Notes 227
Bibliography 255
Index 291
