Kurzbeschreibung

The adoption of primitivist and occultist tropes to create universalizing and historicizing myths has been a present, even dominant, element in the broad and evolving global movements for homosexual emancipation and gay liberation, including parts of those movements often not analyzed together due to spatial or temporal distance. Those tropes have provided labor roles for their adopters by rooting emergent sexualities within socially reproductive roles and rituals in so-called “primitive” societies. Departing from recent historical and theoretical literature on anthropology’s accidental encoding of subaltern lifeworlds into metropolitan modernities and the relationship between sodomy restrictions and the transition to capitalism, I propose to research and write a global history of this method of self-fashioning, which I call “primitivist homopoetics,” beginning with the 1869 coining of the term “Homosexualität” in Germany (concurrent with the founding of the first professional organizations for anthropology in Germany) and then tracking the evolution of these ideas in dialogue between Europe, the United States, and racialized communities in the Americas and the Global South through the mid-1990s. This history connects these practices’ development in the metropolis (and inherent, if incomplete, encoding and transmission of non-state lifeworlds and methods of social reproduction) to the emergence and institutionalization of decolonial queer theory and queer of color critiqueat the end of the 20th century.

Projektdetails

Fachgruppe

Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaften

Einrichtung

Fachbereich/Zentralinstitut

Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften

Institut/Seminar

Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut

Fachgebiet/Arbeitsbereich

Globale Wissenschaftsgeschichte

Projektteam

Leitung

Dr. Ben Miller

Kontakt

E-Mail

ben.miller@fu-berlin.de

Homepage

geschkult.fu-berlin.de

Forschende

• Dr. Ben Miller

  Ehemalig