Queer Pasts: What’s Queer in Queer History?

Registration and coffee, Room: KUA3 – 4A.0.69 Auditorium 

Welcome and Opening Remarks

Keynote: Archives of Dissent: Sexuality.Caste.History

Professor Anjali Arondekar (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Suturing histories of caste and sexuality to archives of dissent in South Asia, this talk rearranges the grammar of our ethical engagements with the past and present. At stake here are the historical vernaculars that found the evidentiary regimes of rights and representation for minoritized subjects. What I offer here are intimations of andolan/dissent, meditations that move between the heady inspirations of protest and the stultifying violence of archival practices. Andolan is a movement in Hindustani music, an alankar (combination/ornamentation of notes) that oscillates between one fixed note and its counterpart, touching, suffusing, all that lies in between. Let us imagine such a history together.

Chair: Rikke Andreassen

Parallel session 1

Link to abstracts

A. More than a Thousand Words I: Methodological Perspectives on Media Sources in Queer and Trans History
Room: KUA3 - 4A.0.68. Chair: Riikka Taavetti

1. Noora Kallioniemi (University of Turku): Comedic Cross-Dressing in Finnish Popular Comedy
2. Mio Laine (University of Turku): Discussions of diversity of gender expression in Finnish newspapers (1868-1917)
3. Jean Lukkarinen (University of Turku): Gendersex diversity and activism in the Finnish media (1960-2000)
4. Riikka Taavetti (University of Turku): Queer Community Media and Memories of Queer Cruises
5. Stacey Copeland (University of Groningen): Queer Ears in Dutch media

B. Literature and the Arts I: Queer history in queer literature
Room: KUA3 - 4A.0.56. Chair: Anton Juul

1. Casey-May Reeves (University of Birmingham): Literary lesbian ‘Michael Field’: Sapphic poetry at the fin-de-siecle
2. Anton Juul (University of Copenhagen): “It is the wounds that sing”: On the queer historicity of trauma
3. Magdalena Stoch (University of the National Education Commission, Krakow): Representations of queer identity in the novels of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and Kim de l'Horizon
4. Karolina Lewinska (University of Wrocław): What if the History of Polish Sapphic Literature Is Already Queer?
5. Naoise Murphy (University of Oxford): Complicit histories: queer spaces in Mary Renault’s The Friendly Young Ladies

C. Uncovering I: Silent, absent, secret
Room: KUA3 - 4A.1.46. Chair Thorsteinn Vilhjamsson

1. Karoliina Sjö (University of Turku): "12.7. Selim Comes to Me” – Examining Past Lives from a Queer Perspective
2. Linus Solin (Malmö City Archives): Female- and male impersonators and the formation of queer communities of Malmö 1880-1910
3. Rebecca Jennings (University College London): ‘Male is always attracted to female’: Diana Chapman’s narratives of lesbian selfhood in mid-twentieth-century Britain
4. Robert Stilling (Florida State University): An archive deferred: Alexander Gumby’s Queer Scrapbooks.
5. Thorsteinn Vilhjamsson (University of Iceland): “These papers should be. Burned”: Queering the history of a 19th century suicide and its archive.

D. Queer Genealogies and the Then and Now: Centering the Queer Historical Subject
Room: KUA3 - 4A.1.60. Chair: Mons Bissenbakker

1. Tamara Chaplin (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign): Sapphic Genealogical Geographies: A Case Study from Paris, 1933-1970
2. Giselle Bernard (European University Institute): Veiling, Revealing – Looking for Queer Oriental Pasts in early 20th Century European Women’s Writings
3. Ezgi Sarıtaş (Ankara University): Queer Temporalities, Homoerotic Imagination and Violence in Istanbul Ansiklopedisi
4. Riccardo Bulgarelli (European University Institute): Practices of hegemonic pasts: exploring past directions within the Italian homosexual movement FUORI! (1970s-2020s)
5. Amanda Roswall (University of Copenhagen): What are the French Seventies to Us? How Contemporary Queer Criticism and French Memoir Imagines the Sexual Revolution for the Future.

E. Affect and ‘Violent Archives’: Against the Grain
Room: KUA3 - 4A.1.68. Chair: Marie Lunau

1. Tijmen van Voorthuizen (Utrecht University): What the night makes us feel: Researching the history and heritage of queer bars in the Low Countries (1920s-present)
2. Kate Davison (University of Edinburgh): On Abandoning ‘Melancholy’ Methodologies and Embracing Messy, Queer Abundance, or, Who’s Afraid of Anjali Arondekar
3. Bodie A. Ashton (Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History, Potsdam): ‘Don’t say [I’m] “very pretty”; I’m attractive’: Between the Lines and Against the Grain in a Queer Vice Investigation in London, 1964.
4. Ece Canlı (University of Minho): A Queer History of Queer Punishment
5. Marie Lunau (Roskilde University): Archiving Queer Love Through Letters and Affections 

Conference reception
Room: KUA3 – 4A.0.69 Auditorium 

Welcome by Kirsten Busch Nielsen, the Dean of Humanities at University of Copenhagen

Ballroom performance by Lolo Cocoa and Dancers

Parallel session 2

Link to abstracts

A. More than a thousand words II: Videos, cinema and queer pasts
Room: RUC - 40.1-39. Chair: Camilla Bruun Eriksen

1. Marek Jedlinski and Krzysztof Witczak (Adam Mickiewicz University): Queering movie as a source of history
2. Sarah Ernst (University of Southern California): “Strutting like peacocks”: Perceptions of Queerness in Holocaust Video Testimonies
3. Megan Wilson (University of Manchester): The lesbian period drama: Queering lesbian history on the contemporary screen
4. Maria Emilia Munoz (Campania University): Reimagining queer pasts: Memory, imagination, and self-representation in Duino and All of us strangers
5. Antu Sorainen (University of Helsinki): Nike - A protolesbian life story in the shadows of two wars: building multi-art queer historical museum exhibition and public events based on spiral memory

B.Literature and the Arts II: Inverts and Femmes: Literary Reading (against) Gendered Categories
Room: RUC - 40.1-27. Chair: Amanda Roswall

1. Ave Palm (University of Tartu): Reading the invert in the 21^st century: Conceptual frictions in the modern reception of early 20^th century queer literature
2. Mons Bissenbakker (University of Copenhagen): ”Being a woman has been the curse of my life”: Reading Ernst Ahlgren/Victoria Benedictsson trans
3. Jens Rydström (Lund University): Re-visiting queer history as trans history
4. Angelica Stathopoulous (ICI Berlin): Fem(me) Pasts, at the literal and literary intersections of the flaneuse, the whore, the scribe

C. Uncovering II: Emerging Histories
Room: RUC - 40.2-25. Chair: Tobias de Fønss Wung-Sung

1. Andrew Israel Ross (Loyola University Maryland): Revisiting the Germiny Affair: Queer Sex, Police Reform, and the Vice Squad in Nineteenth-Century Paris
2. António Fernando Cascais (New University of Lisbon): Queering Sexual Dissidence in the Archive. 
3. Jay Collay (Independent Scholar): Sound, Silence, and Syncopation: Absence and Purpose in Queer Historiography, 1860-1968
4. Tom Hulme (Queen’s University Belfast): “Magic, folklore collecting, and queerness in 20th century rural Ireland”

D. Global Perspectives I: Decolonizing and Denationalizing Narratives
Room: RUC - 40.1-25. Chair: Henrique Cintra Santos

1. Henrique Cintra Santos (Freie Universität Berlin): Queer Protagonism in the Global South: Challenging Hegemonic Narratives of the Queer Past
2. Jamey Jesperson (University of Victoria): ReQueering Berdache: A Counter-History of Indigenous Trans Womanhood
3. Barbara Trojanowska (European University Institute): Queering the Heroine: Gender-Crossing, Intimacy, and Class in the Legend of Emilia Plater
4. Jennifer Lundberg Hansen (The Arctic University of Norway): Queer and intersectionel perspective on museum narratives

E. The Politics of Queer Youth Liberation: Sex, Power, Agency, and Ageism
Room: RUC - 40.1-06-08. Chair: Amanda Littauer

1. Amanda Littauer (Northern Illinois University): Whose Liberation, Exactly? Teen Lesbian Analyses of Ageism and the Queerness of Youth
2. Lauren Gutterman (University of Texas at Austin): Queer Innocence: Gay and Lesbian Youth Advocacy and the Politics of Child Protection
3. Tyler Carson (Rutgers University – New Brunswick): Skeletons in the Closet: Queer Debates on Male Intergenerational Sex in the Late Twentieth Century United States
4. Jonas Roelens (Ghent University): Age and agency in sodomy

Room: 41.0-14, Biografen

Keynote panel I: Elspeth Brown (University of Toronto), Julian Isenia (University of Amsterdam) and Tone Hellesund (University of Bergen)

Chair: Rikke Andreassen and Tobias de Fønss Wung-Sung

Room: 41.0-14, Biografen

Parallel session 3

Link to abstracts

A. More than a thousand words III: Visual Sources for Queer History Writing
Room: RUC - 40.1-39.  Chair: Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer

1. Giorgia Ravaioli (University of Turin): Queer (Re)visions in Early 20th-Century Italian Photography
2. Jennifer V. Evans (Carleton University): Unlikely Allies: Middle-Aged Photographers and the Trans Camera
3. Sigríður Jónsdóttir (University Library of Iceland): Queer(ing) Icelandic Performing Arts Photographs (1897-1967)
4. Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer (Royal Danish Library): See It in Their Eyes: Found Photographs and the Gaydar

B. Literature and the Arts III: Biographies, Autobiographies, Memoirs and Diaries
Room: RUC - 40.1-27. Chair: Monica B Pearl

1. Silje Gaupseth (The Arctic University of Norway): A literary debut or pure defense of lesbian love? Borghild Krane and the reception of the novel Følelsers forvirring (1937) in Norwegian print media
2. Cheryl Morgan & Margarita Vaysma (New College, University of Oxford): Unsticking the Cavalry Maiden
3. Monica B. Pearl (University of Manchester): Women’s AIDS Memoirs
4. Kristin Svava Tomasdottir (Independent): A small diary, a lost memoir and an old bookcase: The fragmented archive of life companions Þórunn Á. Björnsdóttir and Guðlaug Guðmundsdóttir
5. Maria Hymna Ramnehill (University of Gothenburg ): Bodily constructs: trans as narrative effect in Swedish literature, 1972 – 2012

C. Uncovering III: Personals and zines as historical sources to queer lives
Room: RUC - 40.2-25. Chair: Sofia Bakhsh

1. Sofia Bakhsh (University of Copenhagen): Public Desires: Queer Women in Personal Ads
2. Colin O'Connel (Rutgers University): Smalltown boys (personals from 1980s)
3. Suus van der Berg (Independent): The Link-trial (1921) and the formation of queer communications networks: a personal history of the personals
4. Charlie Bert a Fischer (Technical University Berlin): Queering Historiography: On the Potential of Zine-Making as Method.

D. Global Perspectives II: Transnationalities, Minorities and Diasporas
Room: RUC - 40.1-25. Chair: Peter Edelberg

1. Esther Lamberts (KU Leuven): Bringing the trans in transnational from the bottom-up. Queering the history healthcare networks (1960-2000, CA., US. BE.).
2. Churnjeet Mahn (University of Strathclyde): Crossing the Kala Pani: LGBTQ+ South Asians and the Black Women’s Movement
3. Samantha K. Knapton (University of Nottingham): Twice Displaced: Queer Experiences of Displacement in Post-1945 Europe ***
4. Peter Edelberg (University of Copenhagen): Modes of methodological nationalism

Chair: Camilla Bruun Eriksen

Conference Dinner in Copenhagen

Spiseloppen, Bådsmandsstræde 43, 1407 København K

Keynote: Entangled Tales: Making Queer History Since the 1960s, Professor Matt Cook (University of Oxford)

This lecture brings Queer Beyond London (2023), which Matt co-authored with Alison Oram, into conversation with his forthcoming Writing Queer History (2026). It stays close to the details of queer lives lived in four English cities since the 1960s and in the process gives an account of the collaborative, cross-cutting historical practice that has developed to account for them. He argues that these lives and these modes of history making are more than a muted echo of each other and that this is part of the power of queer history as we confront attempts by the authoritarian right to eviscerate our complex past.

Chair: Michael Nebeling Petersen

Parallel sessions 4

Link to abstracts

A. More than a thousand words IV: Visual and Textured Sources for Queer History
Room: KUA3 - 4A.0.68. Chair: Tuula Juvonen

1. Tuula Juvonen (Tampere University): Picturing Hilda Käkikoski: Juxtaposing Photography with Archival Texts
2. Christa Vogelius (University of Southern Denmark): Photographic Self-Representation in Autobiography of an Androgyne (1918)
3. Sikha Mohanty (IIT Patna): Rethinking Hijra histories of sex work in India
4. Rachel Hope Cleves (University of Victoria) What's Queer About Food History: Intersection between food and same-sex
5. Luyang Hu (Newcastle University): Archiving Queer Histories: Genderless Fashion and Visual Practices in Japan

B. Literature and the Arts IV: Art History, Stage and Perfomance
Room: KUA3 - 4A.0.56. Chair: Sofia Bakhsh

1. R Benedito Ferrão (College of William & Mary): The Forgotten Black Ocean: Trans(continental) Travel and Decolonial Queer Ecology in Mojisola Adebayo’s Moj of the Antarctic
2. Fleur Renkema (Utrecht University): The Lesbus Tour: Lesbians Unlimited and Street Theater as Solidarity
3. Nancy Bruseker (Independent): French transfeminine performers in the 1950s
4. Kaisa Lassinaro (University of Jyväskylä): Tracing Trans Histories
5. David S. Churchill (University of Manitoba): "Queer Paths and Queer Pasts: Museums, Uranian Afterlives, and Antinous"

C. The Late Twentieth Century: Queer Strategies
Room: KUA3 - 4A.1.46. Chair: Marie Lunau

1. Brell Wilson (Birkbeck College, University of London): Histories of transphobia in the borderlands of ‘transgender’: revisiting ‘gender-fraud’ prosecutions in the 1990s
2. Alex Ketchum (McGill University): Digital Queers and LGBTQ2S+ Archives: How the Information Activism of Queer Cyber Activists in the 1990s Brought the World Wide Web Revolution to the LGBTQ+ Revolution and Preserved Future Histories
3. Danielle Carron (European University Institute): "Da war noch vieles möglich / anderes ist völlig zusammengebrochen": Queer Lives and Illiberal Futures after German 'Re'Unification
4. Jesse van Amelsvoort and Bram Mellink (University of Amsterdam): Queering the Caring Society Paradoxes of Christian Democracy and HIV/AIDS in the Netherlands
5. Jacob Preene (Örebro University): The History of Trans Activism in Scandinavia, 1964-2010

D. A Roundtable Conversation in Three Acts: Quest, Scraps, Meta-Verse

Room: KUA3 - 4A.1.60

Lina Mohageb, Oda-Kange Midtvåge Diallo, Nico Miskow Friborg, Maya Acharya

Keynote panel II: Ulrika Dahl (Uppsala University), Sam Holmqvist (Södertörn University) and Rita Paqvalén (Executive Director)

Chair: Michael Nebeling Petersen and Marie Lunau

Goodbyes and Thank Yous

Professor Rikke Andreassen and Associate Professor Michael Nebeling Petersen