Dr. Anna Hájková (University of Warwick): Between Love and Coercion: A Methodological Approach to the Queer Desire in the Holocaust

Marietta Blau Saal

Universität Wien

Universitätsring 1, 1010 Wien

This keynote explores the intersection of queer and Holocaust history through the example of an enforced relationship between two women, guard and a prisoner in a small satellite camp of Gross Rosen in the final months of the Second World War. This story brings issues of sexual violence, sexual barter, homophobia, agency, and the limits of the narratable. Based on survivor testimonies, reparation files, trials, as well as a well known sociological study, the talk offers insights into to how to queer Holocaust history is an emancipatory but also an ambivalent past. Moreover, Hájková will offer a peak into the how to, in terms of archival research and granular analysis.

Dr Anna Hájková is associate professor at the University of Warwick. Her first book, The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt, came out in 2020 with Oxford University Press. Her article "Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide" was awarded the Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship in 2013. She is working on two projects: a study of transgressive sexuality in the Holocaust, for which is writing a trade book on the Neuengamme guard Anneliese Kohlmann and queer Holocaust history. Her work on queer history of the Holocaust was published in Czech, German, British, US American, and Israeli newspapers and was recognized with the Orfeo Iris Prize 2020. She guest edited a special issue of German History Holocaust, Sexuality, Stigma. Moreover, she is also working on a generational history of Communists in Central Europe, 1930-1970.

To register for the public lecture, contact: rasa.navickaite@univie.ac.at

This lecture is a part of the workshop "Queering Modernization in Eastern Europe: Deviant Sexualities, Gender Regimes, and the Limits of State Control" (University of Vienna, June 29-30, 2023).
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101025145, and the Research platform "Transformations and Eastern Europe," University of Vienna.

Photo copyright: Václav Jirásek

Łukasz Szulc (University of Manchester): Central and/or Eastern Europe Within, Between and Beyond Borders

 

Location:

Marietta Blau-Saal, Universität Wien,
Universitätsring 1, 1010 Wien

In the opening essay of the 2017 issue of DIK Fagazine, its editor, Karol Radziszewski, contemplates the diverse ways of demarcating Central and/or Eastern Europe, asking: ‘Eastern Europe? Central-Eastern Europe? Central and Eastern Europe? East Central and South-East Europe? Eastern Europe, Northern and Central Asia? The Baltics? The Balkans? Europe?’ Reflections on the geographical, political and cultural borders maintained in research in area studies remain crucial for overcoming the theoretical and methodological limits of our analyses. If it is the existence of a particular area that brings us together as scholars of history, politics, society, media, literature, arts and languages where do we start and where do stop our studies of Central and/or Eastern European contexts? In this talk, I will reflect on several ways in which scholars conceptualise Central/Eastern Europe and I will foreground a transnational approach to the study of culture. I will draw on my research into queer print cultures in Poland in the 1980s and their cross-border links to think about cultures as provisional assemblages of multiple and entangled scales that co-create each other.

Łukasz Szulc (he/him) is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture at the University of Manchester, UK. He specializes in critical and cultural studies of digital media at the intersections of gender, sexuality and transnationalism with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe, especially Poland. His publications include a monograph Transnational Homosexuals in Communist Poland: Cross-Border Flows in Gay and Lesbian Magazines (Palgrave, 2018), an edited collection LGBTQs, Media and Culture in Europe (Routledge, 2016) and articles in such journals as Sociology, Sexualities and New Media & Society. Łukasz sat on the board of directors at the International Communication Association (ICA) and was a co-chair of ICA’s LGBTQ Studies interest group between 2017 and 2021. He is a member of editorial boards at the International Journal of Cultural Studies, International Journal of Communication, and Communication, Culture & Critique.

To register for the public lecture, contact: rasa.navickaite@univie.ac.at

This lecture is a part of the workshop "Queering Modernization in Eastern Europe: Deviant Sexualities, Gender Regimes, and the Limits of State Control" (University of Vienna, June 29-30, 2023).

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101025145, and the Research platform "Transformations and Eastern Europe," University of Vienna.