Queer Imprints. Queer Media in the German Speaking World - New Approaches to Print Sources

Print media serves as especially rich source material for the study of queer history. Historians working across national contexts have examined the world-making possibilities that magazines, travel guides, literature, and erotica have provided queer people. However, previous studies that have focused on journals and magazines have often replicated exclusions against queer women and trans* Germans, for whom there often existed fewer commercial offerings and yet who engaged in different forms of publications. Furthermore, close readings of print media require a decisively interdisciplinary approach, borrowing from media studies and German literary studies. This project places print media at the center 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 20th and 21st centuries. 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.