This article explores the possibility of integrating queer heritage into a permanent museum exhibition at the Maritime Centre Vellamo in Finland through the form of a rainbow trail. Informed by previous work on queering museums, exhibitions, and guided tours, the article evaluates the author’s intervention at Vellamo, beginning with its initiation, outlining the principles deployed to create the trail, analysing in detail the interpretative strategies used to write the leaflet, and examining visitor feedback collected by the museum. It aims to raise awareness of the possibilities offered by such museum activism for making the historical existence of queerness and queer heritage visible as part of national history, while leveraging the legitimacy afforded by the museum context.
Despite a recent interest in Icelandic LGBTQ+ history, the impact of the AIDS crisis remains an underexplored field. This article focuses on the AIDS crisis in Iceland from the early 1980s to the publication of a state report on the status of homosexuals in Iceland in 1994. Taking as its point of departure the concept of intimate citizenship and critical theories of happiness, this article explores the links between HIV and AIDS and legal reform and asks how representations of AIDS influenced the construction of an (ideal) homosexual citizen in Iceland. By analyzing governmental sources such as resolutions, parliamentary discussions, and reports, as well as media representations of the first Icelander to come forward as an HIV-positive gay man, this article argues that the AIDS crisis played a critical role in forcing Icelandic authorities to develop new ways of approaching the homosexual community.
This article explores queer threads in works by Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness, the novel Salka Valka (1931–1932) and its precursor, a film script Halldór wrote for Hollywood in 1928. The protagonist, Salka, renounces female gender roles by wearing pants, cutting her hair short and repeatedly claiming she is ‘no woman’. There are no apparent signs of homosexual desire in Salka, but heterosexual desire and its consequences – marriage and children – terrify her, and she eventually chooses to be single and autonomous. The article outlines how Salka is rural, solitary and ‘typically’ Icelandic, yet at the same time, she represents modernist discourses and transnational connections, combining, for example, Freudian psychoanalytic theory, Marxist feminism, cinematic art and the local cultural history of seawomen in Iceland. Paying particular attention to gender, sexuality and the meaning of place, the article suggests that Salka’s character integrates two figures and their queerness: the cosmopolitan modern woman and the fisherwoman, a local figure deeply rooted in Icelandic culture and history. The novel’s setting, the small fishing village of Óseyri, serves as an intersection and medium between the extremes of transatlantic modernisation – local and global, tradition and transformation.
This article explores the implications and results of A Rainbow Thread, a queer intervention into the narratives and practices of the National Museum of Iceland organised in 2018 by a group of queer academics and activists. A Rainbow Thread is a narrative layer that overlays the museum’s permanent exhibition. It not only adds information to the permanent exhibition but also calls into question its cis-heteronormative assumptions and the absence of overt references to queer genders and sexualities. A Rainbow Thread is thus more than a simple temporary exhibition; it represents a limited commitment to queer inclusion – limited because it does not integrate queer narratives into the permanent exhibition. In this way, the museum reserves a marginal place for queer themes and, by extension, LGBTQ+ people. What is needed is a broad institutional commitment to LGBTQ+ communities in Iceland. Museums need to rethink and restructure their institutional practices and governance in a way that levels the playing field between institutions and marginalised communities.
In theories of queer temporality, queer experiences of time are commonly constructed as the opposite of domesticity. Queer temporality is linked to the abandonment of normative life schedules, which are closely connected to family-making, reproduction, and social respectability. Thus, queer temporality is often equated with queer nightlife, public sex cultures, and nonrespectable urban spaces. This article, which builds on an interview study with ageplay practitioners in Sweden who identify with littleness, discusses how we can rethink queer temporality’s relation to domesticity by considering experiences of ageplay and littleness. Ageplay is a term for practices and dynamics based on performative age and age differences beyond chronological age. Ageplay is discussed here as a method of doing kinship, which neither reproduces nor rejects the symbols of the socially respectable family institution, but rather uses them in queer and perverse ways. In contrast to depictions of queer temporalities as synonymous with abandoning of the socially respectable routines of the bourgeois family, i.e., what Halberstam (2005) defines as “repro-time” and “family time,” the article discusses the interviewees engagement in temporal practices that appear to align with repro- and family time. Thus, the article explores ageplay practices’ potential to challenge the normativity ascribed to domesticity and its implications for queer temporal theory.
This essay explores Queer Culture Year 2022 in Norway – a yearlong celebration of queer history and culture that marked the fiftieth anniversary of the decriminalisation of sex between men in 1972. The article focuses on the effects the year had on the documentation and dissemination of queer history.
This essay addresses the construction of queer memory and queer history in Finnish memory activism in the late 2010s and early 2020s. It describes how the work on making queer pasts visible has started and addresses the organizations and activists behind this work as well as the funding and institutional support the work has received. The essay discusses the terms used in this activism, focusing in particular on sateenkaari, rainbow, a local umbrella term for LGBTIQ+ and the effects of the terminological choice between history and memory.
In Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (2020), Jack Halberstam claims that in the post-natural zombie economy, the pet, as opposed to cattle, for example, occupies a high position in the hierarchy of liveliness. Since the pet is also somatically present in human homes and heavily emotionally invested in by humans, it appears to be potentially productive to focus on this category in a discussion about intimacy and sexuality between human and non-human bodies. The topic is addressed with reference to depictions of eroticized women–dog relationships in Swedish cultural representations from the late nineteenth century onwards, primarily in literature but also with some examples from film and art. Against the historical background of legislation concerning ‘unnatural fornication’, gay rights, and animal rights, the dog–woman relationship comes across as a trope which to a large extent corresponds to the concept of “wildness” presented by Halberstam in Wild Things but with some important differences. These observations suggest that it makes sense to refrain from valuing specific relationships and species and, rather than working with pre-set categories of the domesticated, the tame, and the wild, we should acknowledge their varying potential at different times and in different places to provide insights about the relationship between the human, the non-human, sex, and death.
In this issue’s “We’re Here,” Erika Alm and Ulrika Dahl invited Jack Halberstam to an email-based conversation, where we were particularly interested in hearing their impressions of gender/queer studies in the Nordic region and in how their own thinking has changed given the current political moment.
This article considers the question of world and strategies for unworlding. I argue that there is a multiplicity of orientations vis-à-vis world (e.g. Black, Indigenous, Queer, Animal, wild, feral) that must be properly differentiated in order to understand what is meant by world or unworlding. By disaggregating these through Heidegger’s tripartite thesis on being and world as read through Black nihilism and Afro- and queer pessimisms, I argue that Blackness and queerness are fundamentally distinct existential residues of world; each has its own mode of refusal and role to play in the task of unworlding. To avoid the nothingness that would result in unworlding tout court, I consider Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-imperceptible as a dual form of unworlding – both destructive and creative. It offers at once a total annihilation of world and a vast potentiality for reimagining futures otherwise. I conclude by suggesting that it is only in telling stories from and of the residues of being – those inchoate or outside in relation to world – that we may be pessimistically optimistic that the end of the world is not the end of the story but the story of their beginning.
Making a case for the ethico-political potential of impotence, the seven interludes that make up this text focus on the virtues of small life. They show that passive experiences provide a lens through which to reduce the i, which allows for the other to become augmented. Inspired by the formal promiscuity of Jack Halberstam’s theoretical methodology, this text revisits some of the biggest figures of the Western philosophical and literary canon, which are read in relation to queer and feminist thought in order to intimate a diminutive, pathetic, and impotent subject. Impotence and passivity are fundamental ways in which human being is, but their importance is rarely recognized in the Western philosophical tradition. Western thought has instead been shaped by the projects, projections, and productions of resolute masculine subjects. Its research interests as well as its form has been molded upon the ideas and dreams that pertain to masculine life, which have overwhelmingly centered on activity, productivity, and potency. But in the shadow cast by the potent top who makes big claims about truth and reality, the contours of another masculinity can be intuited, a diminutive self, an impotent bottom who makes small claims, or none at all. From Mr. Big who both enters and exits his interactions intact and proud, these interludes turn to mr. small, who always-already lives in the tender borderlands of ambiguity, negativity, and patheticism. Following these figures through experiences of average everydayness, failure, and impotence, these interludes show that passivity opens up new ways of understanding the subject and its relation to the other.
In 2009, I immersed myself a workshop led by Jack Halberstam, which focused on the realm of queer archives. Together, we delved into the complexities of queer subcultures, contemplating the balance between personal and official archives. As time passed, the landscape of knowledge underwent a fundamental transformation. In this essay, I explore the archive, the ephemeral nature of memory, and the profound impact of our 2009 seminar. Amidst the digital revolution, archives have embraced new dimensions: the digital sphere, inclusivity, ethical dilemmas, and their influence on historical narratives. Queer scholarship, with its focus on inclusivity and community engagement, navigates these complexities, turning challenges into opportunities. Queerness and the archive are not merely destinations; they serve as beacons illuminating our scholarly pursuits, compelling us to venture into the limitless horizons of knowledge with hope and determination.
I examine queer grief in personal, cultural, and historical terms. I explore the secrecy, avoidance, and sudden emotional outbursts found in representations of male queer grief both well before and long after the initial outbreak of the AIDS pandemic. I address these themes through an analysis of complex portrayals of gay grief in two Netflix television series – Tore (2023) and Good Grief (2023) – as well as the character of Larry in W. Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge (1944). What links these three cultural products is the queer (specifically gay male) experience of grappling with the sudden death of a significant person who is somehow deceitful or appears to have secret. The grief does not conform to normative expectations. My analysis suggests that when grief comes suddenly, contains deceit and refuses to follow expectations of normative grief, it could queer our understandings of grieving as non-productive time. The characters of Larry, Tore, and Marc compel the (queer) cultural and political imagination to both pause and move beyond the stagnant present to imagine a brighter grief. Across these three examples, grief is chattered, unmasking the normative theatricality but also the duality of existence: death is ever-present but the expectations surrounding grief are as normative as those of life itself. If grieving is too narrowly defined, it risks bursting out in unanticipated ways, temporarily or permanently severing the mourner from relational connectedness.
Recent anthological research on assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) has destabilised historical notions of biology, family-making, and kinship, drawing science and technology into dialogue with queer theory, and particularly theories of queer kinship. When first introduced in the 1980s, ARTs prompted energetic discussion and debate regarding the ethical, social and legal implications of these technologies. Rich ethnographic research and theoretical critique have followed their introduction and development over the past four decades. However, there remains a palpable absence of studies on the intimacies of queer grief linked to ARTs and reproduction. Through an analysis of reproductive policies and laws in the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Africa, this article explores the impact of navigating predominantly (hetero)normative notions of kinship on the lives of queer individuals. Engaging with Spivak’s notion of juridical co-option, this analysis reveals that in order to access these technologies and spaces, queer-identified people are frequently required to perform the work of translation – bending heteronormative discourses and practices around ARTs into a shape that better fits their bodies and lives. This labour of translation is often unrecognised, yet it generates profound grief: the grief of not seeing one’s body and desires reflected in reproductive praxis. By placing the burden of translation on queer individuals, and by relying on the pain of grief to sustain silence, the article suggests, reproductive policies and institutions continue to maintain and reproduce hegemonic heteronormativity. This dynamic, in turn, sustains the conditions that foster grief among queer people seeking to create kin in these contexts. This grief is peculiarly queer because it occupies a liminal space between the potential loss of self, entailed in navigating normative policies to create new selves, and the inherent risk of loss – and grief – involved in attempting to create new life.
Lützen, Karin Cohr. 2024. Hvad hjertet begærer: Kvinders kærlighed til kvinder i 200 år. København: Gyldendal. (382 s)
