4 minute read
Queer kinship
In February 2024, Professor Jennifer Evans gave the Jonathan Cooper Memorial Lecture at Mansfield (kindly supported by the Sigrid Rausing Trust), focusing on the concept of kinship to embrace stories from the queer past that are often marginalised within mainstream histories. Here she talks to Elliot Johnston (MPhil Politics: Political Theory, 2022) about her research.
Elliot: Congratulations on your wonderful book, The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism. Could you introduce yourself and tell us how you came to write the book?
Jennifer: My name is Jennifer Evans, and I teach European History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. In a way, it was a long time coming to this book. I’d been writing bits and bobs along the way – about intergenerational sex, photography, space, and sexuality – and it dawned on me at the beginning of the pandemic that there was a narrative thread through all these pieces. That thread is kinship: the idea of how we relate to the past through telling the story of certain historical actors. Duke University loved the idea, especially the auto-ethnographic aspect, showing how my own thinking has changed and evolved over time.
Elliot: As you mention, the concept of queer kinship is central to this text. How does it differ from the concepts of identity or community we often associate with queer politics?
Jennifer: That’s the burning question for me. I’m a historian of German queer history and I felt that because today we often perceive ourselves within these neat and tiny little boxes and identity categories, we fail to appreciate the messiness of history as it was actually lived. Often this means we fail to see and appreciate places and spaces in the past where people came together across their difference, for better and for worse. Sometimes it wasn’t workable, but that part of the story of queer activism has not really been told. And so I wanted to think with the concept of kinship as a kind of solidarity, a way of thinking about affinity across differences that can allow us to bring to light stories from the queer past that don’t fit in such neat boxes and tend to be marginalised within mainstream histories.
Elliot: What practical difficulties did you encounter when using queer kinship and historical terms that might differ from how people described their experiences in the past?
Jennifer: Terminological issues are always significant whether we’re using kinship as the way in, or if we’re using queer as the way in. Certain generations see some of these terms as negative, as terrible descriptors. It’s never going to be neat and tidy, and in my case, we’re talking about people using a language and references that are vastly different to the ones we use today. For example, in the early 1970s, many folk would have thought of themselves as ‘transvestites’, which is a term we’d never use today. Historicising these terms is absolutely key.
Being mindful and self-aware of how you’re using terms is really the best way one can navigate these kinds of issues. If you’re doing something conceptually and mindfully, I think you can deploy these concepts, as long as you’re aware of the very different ways in which people have navigated this in the past for themselves.
Elliot: Alongside your historical work, you also engage with contemporary queer politics in terms of the sanitisation of LGBT rights. What kind of intervention does your text make in present-day political debates?
Jennifer: One of the issues I’m interested in is the institutionalisation and memorialisation of a particular version of queer history that is leveraged by politicians to determine who belongs and who doesn’t. So as an example, while there’s been an effort very recently to include trans experiences in the memory politics of Germany, the kinds of stories that are referred to are also often quite sanitised. We struggle with the stories of sex workers. We struggle with the stories of people who don’t pass. That’s where we need to ask ourselves, how far have we really come if the image we have to refer to is often one that looks like heteronormative white formations. And so it really is an intervention – not to resolve the matter, because, thank God, I’m a historian and not a politician, but to get us to pay more attention to those people in the past whose stories are sacrificed in affirming the queer politics of today. Remembering those folk, I think that’s a radical intervention, recognising that there’s a ton of different people whose lives just don’t seem to fit the formations that we have settled upon today.
