Materiality and Memorialisation in Queer Heritage
This paper argues that queer memorialisation itself has a past. It is not only a product of contemporary identity-based politics, as in monuments to the people lost to AIDS or transphobic violence, or to ‘gay icons’, but can be sensed as part of a longer history of an often seemingly similar and at other times rather foreign past. Professor Oram shall discuss an under-explored group of memorials, those created to mark a same-sex partnership or sense of queer kinship or family. Such practices have been carried on over generations of queer people. The talk’s examples range from a late medieval church brass to two women, to 17th century memorials to the ‘marriage of souls’ in ‘sworn brotherhood’, to whole historic sites with accretions of queer remembering, some recording polyamorous queer relationships. They raise the question of who had the social power and resources to create such memorials, often in a very public context such as inside a church. This draws attention to the blurring of the boundaries between the ‘normal’ and the queer, a binary increasingly questioned by queer historians and theorists. What is conventionally sanctioned in material form and what is queer have aligned in specific ways in different historical periods. Seeing such queer memorial spaces as ‘heterotopic’ – as reflecting contemporary customs but also reconfiguring them – enables us to unpack their multiple narratives of memory and queer meaning across space and time.
Date: 5 December 2024, 12:30
Venue: St John's College, St Giles OX1 3JP
Venue Details: New Seminar Room
Speaker: Alison Oram (Institute of Historical Research)
Organising department: Faculty of History
Part of: Centre for Women’s, Gender, and Queer History events (WGQ) [formerly known as CGIS].
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Public
Editor: Belinda Clark