The Color of Desire: The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1970
Thursday, April 10 at 5PM in SSPA 1100
In this talk, Christopher Ewing explains how race played a crucial role in shaping the trajectory of queer, German movements after gay liberation. Far from being discrete political trajectories, racist and antiracist politics were closely connected. AIDS workers, gay tourists, white lesbians, queer immigrants, Black feminists, and many others worked with and against each other to form contradictory concerns that comprised the full landscape of queer politics. The emergence of queer of color activism, growing anxieties about Islam, and the ascendance of queer fascism were deeply entangled processes, often exceeding the bounds of the Federal Republic. All unsettled the appeals to national belonging, or "homonationalism," which had become integral to queer, German politics by the early twenty-first century. Thus, the story of the making of homonationalism is also the story of its unmaking.
Christopher Ewing is an assistant professor of history at Purdue University. He is the author of The Color of Desire: The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany (Cornell University Press, 2024). With Sébastien Tremblay, he co-edited Reading Queer Media: New Approaches to Print Sources in the German-Speaking World, forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan. His work has appeared in Central European History, The Journal of the History of Sexuality, and Sexualities.
This event is sponsored by UCI Global and International Studies, History Department, Gender and Sexuality Studies, European Languages and Studies.