Reading Queer Media in the German Speaking World

“This excellent book affords fresh transdisciplinary vistas on queer media landscapes, past and present. It discusses various forms of publicity, ranging from print to digital and from the political to the pornographic. The volume addresses key theories and methods, and its case studies show how people actually interacted with texts and images. It is an incredibly helpful resource for media professionals, activists, scholars and students.”

— Benno Gammerl, Professor for the History of Gender and Sexuality, European University Institute, Italy

This book places print media at the centre of studying queer German history. In so doing, it explicitly interrogates the exclusions that certain media forms can engender as well as the possibilities that magazines, novels, poetry, and erotica, among others offered queer and trans* Germans through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It brings together scholars from the separate yet related fields of German history, German literary studies, and media studies, as well as archival and curatorial practices of public history from Austria, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States to provide a collaborative study of these sources. In so doing, it argues that just as we need to take an inclusive approach to defining what queer print media is and could be, we also need to take seriously the textual forms of these sources in order to understand the wealth of queer experiences in the past. 

Christopher Ewing is Assistant Professor at Purdue University, USA.

Sébastien Tremblay is Research Associate and Lecturer at Europa-Universität Flensburg, Germany.