De:Constructing International Solidarities: Temporalities, Liberal Politics, and the LGBT German Imaginary Since the End of the 1980s

This project shows how focusing on temporalities offers a reinterpretation of international solidarity and social movements. It simultaneously investigates how contestations within the liberal script, especially of progress narratives, unveil the link between conceptions of time, identity construction, and the framing of race inside communities on the margin. The project considers recent research on queer forms of temporalities and examines how gay and lesbian printed media as well as LGBT organizations discussed European integration, migration, and history at the end of the twentieth century. Focusing on groups and magazines in the Federal Republic of Germany, it demonstrates how white LGBT activists historicized their movement and used both the past and possible futures to center their whiteness, excluding or demonizing racialized communities, while campaigning for international solidarity against homophobia. It displays how these exclusions were based on an imagined past of injury and connected to multiple temporal regimes, as well as a racialization of progress.