What happened to queer love in our memories of genocides? In this talk, Dr. Anna Hájková and Dr. Damir Arsenijević answer this question in the contexts of the Holocaust and the Bosnian war.
Looking at the heart-breaking stories, methodologies and processes of their researches, together they shed light on subjects whose experiences have been excluded from normative historiography. The result is an exploration of the ‘stigma and fascination’ of the topic of queer desire. As Hájková observes: these are two interconnected aspects, ‘each engendering the other’s power and pull’.*
Dr Anna Hájková is associate professor of modern European history at the University of Warwick. Her book The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt is coming out in November. She is an expert on sexuality and the Holocaust. She has edited a special issue of German History on “Sexuality, Holocaust, Stigma.” Over the last few years, she has established queer Holocaust history as a field of inquiry.
Damir Arsenijević, is an international cultural worker, critic, theorist, scholar and activist in the fields of cultural, gender, and literary studies. His research and art-theory political interventions examine and impact on the terror of inequality, knowledge production and material memories of war and genocide. He is co-founder of the international platform Yugoslav Studies—a production space for the interaction of art, theory, education, and politics. His latest publications include ‘Forgotten Future: The Politics of Poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina’.
*Hájková, Anna, ‘Introduction: Sexuality, Holocaust, Stigma,’ German History, 2020, p. 1
This event is part of our new series ‘Sexuality, Desire and the Holocaust’. It will take place at 7.00pm GMT – if joining us from a different country, please check the timezone appropriate to where you are.