Blog
Here, we collect insights into the research of project members. QUEERIT scholars can write updates on their work, highlight selected aspects of their research, review new publications in their field, or report on conferences they attended. We will also provide updates on our project workshops in this space.
March 2025
Thanks to the generosity of the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange, I was able to spend the last six months at the Department of English and American Studies at the Humboldt University. The aim of my project, “Reimagining Asexuality: Theories of Asexuality Beyond Western Paradigms,” was to look into how asexuality is understood in non-Western cultural contexts. I worked with Prof. Elahe Haschemi Yekani on applying frameworks developed in postcolonial and Indigenous queer studies to asexuality studies. Once I got the general lay of the land of global asexuality studies, I decided to focus my attention on challenges I noticed in this developing field. In particular, asexuality studies run the risk of romanticizing non-Western conceptualizations of asexuality as inherently freer and more radical than the limiting Western model. As the long-standing debates in queer studies prove, the effects of such an approach are often exoticization and instrumentalization rather than the inclusivity it is meant to foster. Second, the inequalities in knowledge production and institutional hierarchies in academia are a crucial concern in a developing field such as global asexuality studies. Considering the economic and cultural dominance of Western academic institutions, it is important to undermine the division between the center and margins of global knowledge production. In other words, theories of asexuality produced in non-Western institutions and contexts must be understood as just that—theories that would in turn affect asexuality studies at large, rather than merely sources of case studies or examples to be extracted by the theory-producing West.
I presented my findings in a talk given as part of the W.E.B. Du Bois lecture series. The lecture was well-attended by students, faculty members, and most of the Berlin QUEERIT team. I am now putting finishing touches on an article, which will be greatly improved by the feedback and questions I received.
While my research stay was not officially part of the QUEERIT project, I found a lot of thematic overlap between my own thinking about how asexuality travels between the West and the non-Western contexts, and the work we do in the project on how queer theory travels between the US, Germany, and Poland.
I took this opportunity to take part in Berlin QUEERIT seminars, where we discussed theoretical and methodological challenges of looking for antecedents of contemporary queerness. I also had a chance to present the book project I am currently working on to the team, and to participate in the launch of “Reading Literature and Theory at the Intersections of Queer and Class,” a book created as a result of the long-running cooperation between the University of Warsaw, HU, and the University of Vienna.
October 2024
At the end of September, we were happy to welcome the Warsaw team as well as some adjunct members of the QUEERIT project, and guest speakers at Humboldt-University Berlin for our third project workshop. This time under the heading of “Antecedents and Feminist Reception of Queer Theory”. Happy to see each other again, the workshop kicked off with a stimulating panel on the role of differing archives in a bilateral project like QUEERIT. The discussions within different work packages revealed that the German and the Polish teams are faces with archives of different sizes, formats, and degrees of institutionalization. The panel explored the question of how to engage with these facts in a project aimed at creating joint outputs. Following this engaging discussion, we were very happy to welcome out first guest speaker Benedikt Wolf (Bielefeld). He spoke on the pre-History of Queer Theory in Germany, describing how the reception of US-Queer Theory resulted in a reconfiguration of the (West-)German context of reception, leading to prominent German voices falling out of the usual genealogical narratives of Queer Theory in Germany. Following this, the rest of day one was devoted to various perspectives on Feminist Reception of Queer Theory. Susann Hochreiter (Vienna) gave us fascinating insights into a corpus of Austrian Feminist journals; while Konstantin Helm (Berlin) looked at the Feminist reception of Queer Theory in German academic contexts. Wassan Ali (Berlin) completed this overview with a survey of negotiations of (queer) identities in lesbian archival material from the Berlin-based Spinnboden. This first day ended with the (un)official QUEERIT dinner of hummus, using this opportunity to celebrate not just our coming together but also some of the first outputs from members in relation to QUEERIT. You can get an overview here.
The second day started with a great presentation by our second guest speaker Christa Binswanger (St. Gallen) who offered us a view into the Swiss engagement with Queer Theory, especially Queer Affect Studies. Her reflections on the linguistic differences within Switzerland and how these seem to shape processes of reception made this paper immensely interesting and a valuable for a project like ours. As has become tradition for our workshops, we also had a reading group. This time the very lively discussion of Heather Love’s genealogical work Underdogs (2021) fit very well into the general theme of the workshop. The day continued with more historically oriented papers by Przemysław Górecki (Warsaw) and Janin Afken (Berlin) who went on a search for queer antecedents in Polish fiction of the 1980s and German fictional discourses around sexology in the early 1900s, respectively.
The final day of the workshop was devoted to meetings of the individual work packages. Here, we had the chance to strengthen the cross-border nature of the project as a whole by reflecting on challenges, methodologies, archives, as well as discussing possibilities for joint publication projects. Let me include a little spoiler here: there is a lot of great stuff to come! As a memorable ending to this workshop stood a trip to Schwules Museum, here in Berlin to explore its exhibition on: “LOVE AT FIRST FIGHT! Queer Movements in Germany since Stonewall”. With this, three interesting and hugely stimulating days came to a close, leaving us all excited for the trajectory the project is going to take in the next months leading up to our next workshop in Warsaw.
June 2024
Since it was scheduled on the day following our fabulous second QUEERIT workshop in Warsaw, I simply stayed on in our comfortable hotel named after the omnipresent Chopin and conveniently located right opposite the Chopin museum (as well as within easy walking distance to the university). This little break between the two events allowed me to roam the city and admire both its fabulous old parts but also its quickly gentrifying riverside area. All very fascinating.
I gave a paper on the role of different media in Bornstein’s transgender life narratives, which sparked an interesting discussion about affect and embodiment in concepts of subjectivity, about Bornstein quite literally embodying the history of the concept of trans* in their own gender modifications over time, and about the ongoing relevance of their book Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us (1994) due to its generous inclusivity and relentless pluralization of ways of being that is also reflected in their experimental writing style.
All in all, this was a hugely pleasurable event, not least because it expanded our ongoing cooperation into another framework. And it is in this spirit of continuous networking that I am very much looking forward to Karolina Krasuska’s talk about her new book at HU Berlin, at an event hosted by my American Studies colleagues.
Besides the semi-annual joint project meetings, each team has been holding regular seminars, bi-weekly ones in Berlin and monthly ones in Warsaw (lasting double the time). A little more than a year into the project, as we have been getting to know each other better, the strengths of our teams and of individual team members are becoming apparent. This was made evident by the excellent presentations offered at the recent joint meeting, as well as in our regular seminars, during which the Warsaw team addressed various topical issues, including the way that feminist and queer zines queer citizenship; the way that queer temporality is addressed by Polish scholars writing in English; the way that masculinities are queered in contemporary Polish fiction; the way that Michael Frank elaborates on Edward Said’s concept of travelling theory; the way that metaphors of gender function in Polish literary criticism; and the ways that some Polish literature scholars resist and criticize readings which invoke queer theory, including by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. We also read and reported to one another on a range of Polish-language books of feminist literary criticism and psychoanalytic criticism with an eye for the uses which authors make of queer studies and queer theory. The near absence of queer concepts in psychoanalytic criticism has been especially glaring, and we discussed Sigmund Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality to persuade ourselves of the potential for queering psychoanalytic discourses, evident in the work of Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and others. We also read Chistopher Chitty’s Sexual Hegemony on a team member’s recommendation. The past year has been a fantastic intellectual journey thanks to the dedication, acumen, and general high spirits of my colleagues in the project.