Too Emotional? Or Queering the Genres?: Mixing Family and Straight History

My recent article, drawn from a talk at a workshop on “The Emotions of Restitution” which explored the uses of the emerging “history of emotions” for illuminating aspects of postwar German-Jewish history was rejected by the journal that had solicited it as too emotional—“moving” but “not scholarly.” The journal that did publish the piece felt compelled to add a preface informing readers that given the “personal quality” of the presentation, “the text is only slightly edited to produce more distanced language.” Interesting, I thought, given the theme and the current spate of conferences and panels trying to theorize “emotions.” What line had I crossed; how and why? In fact, I am trying to develop my current research on “Transnational Jewish Refugee Stories: Soviet Central Asia, Iran, and India as Sites of Relief and Refuge for European Jews during World War II” into a “hybrid” text that melds family history with academic research. What happens, I want to ask, when a historian uses a personal archive of letters and other memorabilia such as material objects and photographs, not, as has become more and more common and popular, in a personal or family memoir, but as one kind of source, among an array of others, for scholarly production? Why is this border-crossing so suspect? A straightforward memoir is acceptable but mixing—queering perhaps—genres in history is not scholarly, too “emotional.” How gendered are these categories? Still? How do these questions return us to basic feminist issues of “women’s history” methodology and epistemology, about the historical vs. the personal, and our interrogation of what we used to call the “hierarchy of significance” regulating scholarly research and publication?