Dissertation
“What’s next": queer pasts and futures at Stonewall’s fiftieth in Berlin
University of Iowa
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
Summer 2023
DOI: 10.25820/etd.006961
Abstract
How do queer activists in Berlin construct a globally conceived LGBTQ solidarity and movement, despite disagreements over German and American queer history, the future of such a movement, who it serves, and how best to achieve those ends? This dissertation builds on research in queer studies and anthropology which explores the politics of globalization and temporality in queer organizing. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork at LGBTQ organizations in Berlin, Germany, each chapter focuses on different kinds of fierce and deeply held debates present among queer activists working to organize around the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, an event sometimes understood to be the starting point for a global period of midcentury gay liberation. Rather than being necessarily divisive or demotivating, I argue that the transnational and temporal tensions that emerge from organizing a movement around these debates are generative, producing new kinds of identity and solidarity which can galvanize renewed commitment to a globally imagined concept of queer justice. I propose Spannung as a metaphor to encapsulate how anthropological concepts for understanding transnational tensions, like “friction” (Tsing 2005) and “dubbing” (Boellstorff 2003), are also embedded within subjective experiences of time. By attending to the way that transnational tensions become temporal and vice versa, I show how organizing across difference entails fraught debates over global politics, generation, collective memory, and futurity, but in the end can result in a robust coalitional commitment to a broadly conceived transnational solidarity.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- “What’s next": queer pasts and futures at Stonewall’s fiftieth in Berlin
- Creators
- Scott Olson
- Contributors
- Elana Buch (Advisor)Brigittine French (Committee Member)Elizabeth Heineman (Committee Member)Theodore Powers (Committee Member)Emily Wentzell (Committee Member)
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
- Degree in
- Anthropology
- Date degree season
- Summer 2023
- DOI
- 10.25820/etd.006961
- Publisher
- University of Iowa
- Number of pages
- xvi, 216 pages
- Copyright
- Copyright 2023 Scott Olson
- Language
- English
- Date submitted
- 07/11/2023
- Description illustrations
- illustrations
- Description bibliographic
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 205-216).
- Public Abstract (ETD)
- This dissertation focuses on internal debates and conflict among LGBTQ activists in Berlin, Germany in 2019, the fiftieth anniversary of the historic Stonewall Riots in New York City. Ideological differences across the organizations where I worked became the basis for conflicting narratives of not only this history, but also important periods of German history, like National Socialism and the country’s partition throughout a significant part of the twentieth century. Disagreements like these likewise shaped how activists understood what the future of a queer justice movement would be, and how they understood their connection to queer people around the world. I argue that these tensions and debates do more than sow division or undermine the efficacy of a queer movement. Instead, I see them as also having generative potential, reframing the way people understand both their own multi-faceted identity, and their commitments to a broad-minded global queer solidarity. For activists and organizers, reframing internal debates and tensions as potentially generative offers a path forward for building robust LGBTQ coalitions necessary for advocating for queer people.
- Academic Unit
- Anthropology
- Record Identifier
- 9984454319502771
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