Recent years have seen a peak in queer, German history. In addition to telling the stories of same-sex desiring and gender non-conforming individuals, this work has sought to deploy “queer” and “trans-” as analytic frames to understand German history. Many have drawn from the insights of US-based scholars, particularly scholars of color, that employ queer and trans as method, though imbued in whiteness, while also holding the potential to disrupt Eurocentric knowledge and bringing the instability of social categories into view. Particularly important to the field have been insights taken from critical race scholarship and queer and trans of color critique, from Kimberlé Crenshaw to Saadiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Jules Gill-Peterson, while scholars, writers, and activists like Audre Lorde, Sylvia Wynter, and Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí have motivated renewed engagement with German pasts situated within a global diaspora. Such an integrated approach is particularly useful for the German context, which often does not accurately reflect critical demographic and intellectual shifts. Already in the 1980s, Afro-German organizations, together with many other minority organizations and antiracist projects, incorporated queer and feminist perspectives into a movement that transformed the politics of race in Germany. More troublingly, activists and politicians across the political spectrum continue to marshal often-superficial investments in LGBTQ rights to position racialized Islam as threatening to an implicitly white German nation. The Holocaust cannot be understood without attention to queerness, nor can the making of gay rights in the early twentieth century be extricated from colonialism.
Literature from other national contexts, including the United States, has been invaluable to making senses of these intersections. However, the reverse is not always true. While early twentieth-century organizing and the Holocaust have been important German reference points for historians working on the United States, they do not fully encapsulate the wide swath of trans* and queer German history in the twentieth-century, let alone prior to 1900. Challenging such geographic siloing is particularly imperative when we consider the spatial dimensions of trans- and queer as method, the ways in which historical actors crossed national borders, and the critical importance of transnational flows in the production of knowledge.
This roundtable will bring together four historians working at the intersections of queer and trans histories and histories of race to rethink the field in transnational context. What insights can German history offer to a study of the United States? How have scholars drawn from scholarship that centers geographic contexts outside of Germany, including and also beyond the United States? What insights have been particularly useful, and, how might we them to our own work? What ideas from other geographic contexts would we like to see applied to or worked through in greater depth in relation to German history? Are there peculiarities to German history of which we should be cognizant? Or, what are the limitations to drawing from other geographic fields? Where should nationally-constrained approaches take precedence? How can a transnational approach yield not only new historical interpretations, but interrogate the fields of trans and queer studies themselves?
