Introduction

Summary

ISSUES CONCERNING LGBTQ+ and other traditionally marginalized identities are in the cultural and political mainstream in the Germanspeaking lands and beyond as I write this introduction in the summer of 2017. One reason for this is that Germany has become the twenty-third country to legalize same-sex marriage, a move that Angela Merkel voted against, and which came into force on October 1, 2017. This means that those who enter into gay marriage will have a more normalized status in German law and society, in line with the recent trend in the Western world of granting rights relating to family and finances (adoption, pensions, and suchlike) to same-sex couples. This focus on marriage equality has come under fire from many queer activists, who disagree with both a heteronormitization of queer subjects and the vast resources, both time and finances, that have been poured into a cause that most benefits middle class or above, white, cisgender, samesex pairs while the lives of the most vulnerable LGBTQ+ subjects (trans people, queers of color, queers living in poverty, many of these identities intersect) remain under threat every day.

Indeed Germany's vote for same-sex marriage happened at a time when minorities and other underprivileged groups were being attacked elsewhere. Across the Atlantic, the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, used Twitter to voice his intent to reinstate the ban on trans people serving in the military.1 Less than three weeks later, racial tensions exploded at a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacists, mostly men, carried both the flag of the Confederate States of America and the Swastika and not only chanted National Socialist slogans such as “Blood and Soil” (from the German, Blut und Boden), but also uttered anti-gay slurs about “fags,” demonstrating a hatred for those who are not straight and white.2 Since then, debates about the removal of racist Confederate-era monuments have foregrounded questions relating not only to the discrimination against certain identities in sociopolitical reality, but also to the ways in which these identities are remembered.

This book's three parts, entitled Queer History, Queering the Other, and Queering Normativity, are somewhat inspired by the aforementioned pressing issues, although there have long been questions about how LGBTQ+ people are treated (whether othered or normalized) and how our culture is remembered.