[csaa-forum] CHED Judith/Jack Halberstam Public Lecture at UQ, Dec 7

[Elizabeth Stephens]

Apologies for cross-postings.
 
The Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland is pleased to announce it will host a public lecture by Judith/Jack Halberstam on December 7, 2pm-4:30pm, in the SS&H Library Conference Room.  A campus map is available at www.uq.edu.au/maps/pdf/StLuciaMap.pdf <https://exchange.uq.edu.au/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.uq.edu.au/maps/pdf/StLuciaMap.pdf> .
 
All interested members of the public are welcome to attend. 

 


Abstract.  "The Killer in Me is the Killer in You: Homosexuality and Fascism."


In Sasha Baron Cohen's most recent camp spoof, Brüno, the very gay and very swish Austrian fashionista compares himself several times to Hitler and jokes that he is "the second most misunderstood Austrian in history." The intersection of Nazi and homosexual that Cohen invokes has a long and vexed history that stretches from the well-known homosexuality of Nazi storm troopers to eroticized images of Nazi soldiers by Tom of Finland. Leo Bersani notes the glorification of Nazism in the work of Jean Genet, and Dagmar Herzog notes in Sex After Fascism that "popular assumptions of Nazism as a homosexual movement have remained remarkably durable." In this talk, I will return to a very important essay by Stuart Marshall from 1991, titled "The Contemporary Political Use of Gay History: The Third Reich" and try to account for both gay Nazis and the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. At stake is a complex understanding of queer history that neither whitewashes the past nor colludes in homophobic renderings of it. 
 


About the Speaker


Judith/Jack Halberstam is Professor of English and Director of The Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California, and the author of Female Masculinity, The Drag King Book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters and In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives.

 

For further information or to rsvp, please contact Elizabeth Stephens at e.stephens at uq.edu.au.

 
Elizabeth Stephens
Research Fellow
Centre for the History of European Discourses
University of Queensland Australia 4072
Phone: 61 7 3346 9493
Fax: 61 7 3346 9495

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