Current Events
»We just had to take a stance« Queer of Color activism and white LGBTIQ++ movements in Germany - Tarek Shukrallah
Tuesday 5 May, 2026. 6:15pm. Room C 40.704
The canon of LGBTIQ++ history in Germany is white. In consequence, queer of Color movements in Germany cannot be understood as mere additions to such white-coded historiography. Rather, activism emerged from experiences of racism and exclusion within white gay, lesbian, and eventually LGBTIQ++ structures—and at the same time as responses to social polarization, particularly during the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Examples such as the Black lesbian organization ADEFRA, the TürkGay groups, the Gayhane parties at Berlin’s SO36, GLADT, or the abolitionist group SUSPECT! illustrate how migrant, Black, and of Color queers have created their own networks, cultural spaces, and political platforms. These spaces were places of protection, self-organization, and empowerment – but also sites of resistance against white, elitist and homonormative movement politics.
The absence of these stories in established archives is neither a coincidence nor a “gap.” It points to the mechanisms through which white movements have systematically excluded queers of Color. In response to this erasure, distinct forms of memory, narrative, and archiving have emerged—counter-archives that not only document but are themselves part of the struggles. The lecture invites us to reconsider queer history in Germany: not as a linear success story, but as contentious. Queer BIPoC activists have made the intersectional contradictions of queer politics visible and left lasting marks. What can we learn from such experiences for today’s struggles against exploitation, racism and queerphobia?
Tarek Shukrallah (they/them) is a researcher, author, curator and educator with a background in political science. They are affiliated with the University of Giessen, where they work as a pre-doc researcher and teaching staff at the chair for political science and gender studies. In 2024, they published the edited volume Nicht die Ersten. Bewegungsgeschichten von Queers of Color in Deutschland (Not the First Ones. Queer of Color movement histories in Germany), which will soon be published in its third edition.
Hosted by the Gender and Diversity Research Network.
The event will take place in English.
Contact: gud@leuphana.de
Erotic Worldmaking in Fascistic Times – Alexander Stoffel
Wednesday 06.05.26. 6:15pm. C 40.704.
At a moment when resurgent nationalisms promise order through repression (of borders, bodies, and desire), what would it mean to reclaim erotic life as a site of collective struggle?
From the Cold War to neoliberalism, struggles for sexual freedom have unfolded in the shadow of US empire. Today, as authoritarian movements reassert the primacy of nation, family, and “civilization,” the stakes of those earlier battles come sharply back into view. Drawing on Eros and Empire: The Transnational Struggle for Sexual Freedom in the United States (Stanford University Press, 2025), this lecture will explore how queer radicals imagined and built worlds in which erotic life exceeded property, patriotism, and respectability. It will revisit the transnational history of queer politics and ask what their experiments in ‘erotic worldmaking’ can offer us in our present conjuncture of militarism, border violence, and moral panic.
Dr. Alexander Stoffel is a Lecturer in International Politics in the School of Society and Environment at Queen Mary University of London and an editor of the journal Historical Materialism, where he co-convenes the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Struggles Stream. His research takes up critical questions regarding the intersections of sexuality, race, and desire within capitalist expansion. He is author of Eros and Empire: The Transnational Struggle for Sexual Freedom in the United States, published by Stanford University Press in 2025.
Organised by the Center for Critical Studies and the Gender and Diversity Research Network.
The event will take place in English.
Contact: gud@leuphana.de
Ghost Cousins at Midcentury: Trans Femininity and the Foundations of the Gay Canon – Emma Heaney
Tuesday, 23 June. 6:15pm. C 40.704
This talk traces the literary reflection of the relationship between gay men and trans women in mid-twentieth-century American literature in the period immediately following the vast scaling up of popular notice of the medical narrative of transsexuality via the celebrity of Christine Jorgenson. This spur to a firm distinction between the two groups was a class-bound reality, however, the lumpen and racialized scenes in which queer and trans life was lived broke down around a much more varied taxonomy. This scene’s most settled binary was between the street queen and the youngman hustler who had sex for money but remained ostensibly straight. This talk considers the literary staging of these competing models. It proposes that the literature of this period provides a conceptual reckoning with a conceptual battle of the pre-war period: is masculinism or inversion the accurate and desirable model for same sex desire? Readings of novels by Thomas Savage, John Rechy, and Gore Vidal demonstrate the breakdown of the conceptual distinction between these two models. These novels acquiesce to the challenge to cisness uniquely posed by sex between men. In this literary tradition, the reflection between the gay man and the trans woman dissolves into the generalized non-cisness of the queer and trans scenes, even as the violence of cisness, targets these groups unevenly. The talk arcs toward the shocking centrality of trans femininity to the emergence of the first avowedly gay avant-garde in the work of Andy Warhol, John Waters, Lou Reed. The talk reveals the post war emergence of first a literary and then a fine arts avant-garde as marked by the metabolizing of the relationship of the category gay man to the category trans woman.
Prof. Emma Heaney is a scholar of comparative literature, trans studies, and Marxist feminism. She is the author of The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory (Northwestern University Press 2017), This Watery Place: Four Essays on Gestation (Pluto 2025), and the forthcoming Ghost Cousins: Literature After Cisness (Cambridge University Press 2027). She is the editor of Feminism Against Cisness (Duke University Press 2024), co-editor (with Carlo Sariego) of a forthcoming issue of TSQ on “Trans Reproduction” (Duke University Press 2027), and is currently editing a follow-up volume entitled Provincializing Cisness. She teaches in the XE master’s program at New York University.
Hosted by the Gender and Diversity Research Network and the Center for Critical Studies (CCS).
Contact: gud@leuphana.de
Language: English.