Murder on middle beach aftermath archive#

Again, this was not strictly new-the classic Walter Benjamin texts on the inadequacy of disciplinary history are now more than eighty years old-but it was received as new, and as a threat. They began to ask different types of historical questions about different types of people. They proposed––and this is shocking, I know––that academic, activist, and intellectual traditions from outside the euro-American historical academy might help us understand the past in different, even better, ways. Critical historians demanded that contingency enter the study of the past. The more “queer” has drifted away from its referents, the more it has become an essentializing category.Īround the same time, a minor revolution broke out in the discipline of history and was quickly crushed. It turned this analysis into a method, and the term into a collective noun, then an adjective, and most recently a verb. It deployed literary analyses of concepts, and reading techniques, to analyze the ways in which power both shaped and was shaped by the ways sexual difference was constructed. “Queer” mocked the naive faith that something like an “us” had always been “here.” Why, it asked, would we assume that even our own categories of self-identification had been stable over time? It built from (Marxist and antiracist) gay liberation activist-intellectuals’ insight that categories of sexuality and even the concept of a coherent “sexuality” itself were social constructs.

When “queer” first happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s, literary studies began to displace history as the defining intellectual project of the broader social movement. Emerging from a political and analytic project that specifically sought to deconstruct (and ideally to defuse) the power relations produced by categorization, “queer” endeavored to understand how different kinds of people are made, and how they fit neatly or otherwise into the sex-gender system, in order to understand how power works. “Queer” hates categories and pat narratives, or at least it’s supposed to.

In every place where a homosexual emancipation or a homophile movement popped up in the early- to mid-twentieth century, amateur activist-historians published (often self-published) volumes of history that made two competing claims: that the historical record demonstrated there had always been gay and lesbian and trans people, and that this historical “proof” was evidence we were a natural minority, a minority like any other, rather than representations of illness, sin, or cultural decline. The defining academic and intellectual project of the gay and lesbian (and trans) liberation years was history: the search for historical examples of gay and lesbian (and sometimes trans) lives––in ethnography and anthropology, in literature, in the margins of the historical record––to advance a political claim that gays and lesbians (and sometimes trans people) had always been here. History taxonomizes, superimposing categories and narratives on the unruly past.

Murder on middle beach aftermath archive#

History tells the story of change over time in nation-states it resolutely clings to the archive of written documents and the journeyman’s task of discovering and writing those documents up. Queer history has often been a contradiction in terms.

The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism by Jennifer V.