History Professor Jennifer Evans has a new book coming out in April: The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship after Fascism.
About the book:
In The Queer Art of History Jennifer V. Evans examines postwar and contemporary German history to broadly argue for a practice of queer history that moves beyond bounded concepts and narratives of identity. Drawing on Black feminism, queer of color critique, and trans studies, Evans points out that although many rights for LGBTQI people have been gained in Germany, those rights have not been enjoyed equally. There remain fundamental struggles around whose bodies, behaviors, and communities belong. Evans uses kinship as an analytic category to identify the fraught and productive ways that Germans have confronted race, gender nonconformity, and sexuality in social movements, art, and everyday life. Evans shows how kinship illuminates the work of solidarity and intersectional organizing across difference and offers an openness to forms of contemporary and historical queerness that may escape the archive’s confines. Through forms of kinship, queer and trans people test out new possibilities for citizenship, love, and public and family life in postwar Germany in ways that question claims about liberal democracy, the social contract, and the place of identity in rights-based discourses.
Praise
“Working with images, biographies, political and legal histories and the sexual geographies of postwar Berlin, Jennifer V. Evans has written a highly original account of queer kinship. The German context demands attention to the uneven political commitments of LGBT communities and forces discussions of complicity as well as transgression. This is an important and timely book.” — Jack Halberstam, author of Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire
“Arguing for queer kinship as a central organizer of queer analysis and politics in the place of identity, Jennifer V. Evans makes a major intervention in queer history, queer theory, and German studies. No one will be able to write queer history without engaging with this book. Required reading.” — Laurie Marhoefer, author of Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Queer Love