Queering Holocaust Studies

This lecture provides a contextual overview of the experiences of gay men and lesbians under National Socialism, examining the ways in which the Nazi regime targeted gay men, and the varying degrees of tolerance and actual persecution directed by the regime toward lesbians. Given that Nazi homophobia must not be reduced to a momentary aberration in history, the lecture will address the ways in which homophobia continued to find expression in the post-war criminalisation of homosexuality in both the former West and East Germany, as well as the failure to recognise more broadly across Europe the crimes perpetrated against gay and lesbian victims of Nazi atrocities. The lecture will, finally, illuminate the ways in which homophobia intersects with other forms of domination and continues to shape contemporary society and culture.

William J. Spurlin is Professor of English and Vice-Dean/Education in the College of Business, Arts & Social Sciences at Brunel University London. His monograph, Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality under National Socialism (2009), uses queer theory as a hermeneutic tool with which to read against the grain of hetero-textual narratives of the Holocaust and as a way for locating sexuality at its intersections with race, gender, and eugenics within the National Socialist imaginary.