“Queerness” does not simply signify a non-heterosexual identity, but rather challenges the normalizing mechanisms of gender and interrogates the social processes that produced, normalized and sustained identity in the first place. A “queer memory,” therefore, does not simply imply the remembrance of a particular set of relevant events. It is one that reconsiders the structures, process and methodologies that have dominated the scholarship on time and memory, and questions the heteronormative discourses that have shaped our thinking on history and the archive.
Through readings, discussions and screenings, we will traverse the most common issues that queer historians – in the broadest sense of the term – grapple with, and explore together how a queer approach to time and memory could challenge a normative temporal logic, as well as the teleological schemes of events and strategies of living enforced by the state and perpetuated by mainstream media and even some gay and lesbian activist agendas. In doing so, we will also survey alternative methods of historiography, embracing eclectic, idiosyncratic and transient archives, which include ephemera, gossip, innuendos, emotions, gestures, performative acts, fleeting moments, clandestine languages and methods that unsettle the traditional notions of memory and documentation.
Throughout the process, we will problematize the relationship between “queerness” and the “document” in the broadest sense of the term, with an emphasis on practices emerging outside the racial and sexual mainstream, and how they negotiate with established theoretical frameworks and institutional limitations.
- Kursverantwortliche/r: Mohammad Shawky Hassan